National Union of Students
NUS is like the union of students’ unions. Just like individual students’ unions, it has a services arm (through which is organised a lot of the collective buying that provides cheap beer) and a representative role.
Every year there are huge NUS conferences which students from universities all over the country are elected to attend and where they vote on future campaigns.
Like students’ unions, NUS is also run by sabbatical students and they also get to go to a lot of dull committee meetings — only theirs tend to be with Government ministers rather than university bureaucrats.
NUS also organises many of the student demonstrations that march through the streets waving placards, chanting slogans and being ignored by almost everyone. Which is why they don’t do that so often any more.
Individual students don’t join NUS — in fact, most of the time, they don’t even have to join their own university’s students’ union, because they’re automatically members. Instead, it’s the students’ unions that join (or affiliate to) NUS.
Not every SU is affiliated and that can either mean poorer services for students or, quite often, it means theirs were so good in the first place that there was no further benefit in being a member of the national organisation. (Better check which, though.)
Last updated on: 30 April 2008