NUS Extraordinary Conference Passes Sweeping Reforms To Our National Union

[Ben Towse]

As some of you may have heard, the NUS Extraordinary Conference on Tuesday finally gave the controversial reforms being pushed by the leadership the second approval they need to come into force. I've previously discussed the reforms here and my report on our election of delegates to this conference is here. The NUS's own summary of the reforms can be found here (fairly biased in favour!), and by contrast here's the Education Not For Sale leaflet distributed at the first Extraordinary Conference this year.

NUS Reform was certainly necessary. Financial problems for the organisation are mounting and its structures were not nearly as good at representing and engaging its members as they should or could have been. But it is worth noting that these proposals - described by the President Wes Streeting as "the biggest shake up of NUS's democracy and status in its history" - have had both their approvals from Extraordinary Conferences, with delegates mostly elected by bodies like CUSU Council rather than by the full membership (and similar reforms actually failed to pass at Annual Conference last year when delegates were elected by the full membership). At this second conference - called at fairly short notice (CUSU only managed to elect its delegates the night before the deadline) at a time when many students have exams - many universities, including ours, could not turn out a sufficient number of delegates and were underrepresented. But whatever concerns some of us may have about this process, the reforms have succeeded and we appear to have little choice but to accept the new-look NUS as a reality and move forward (although some of the more forceful opponents are already talking about getting more radical student unions like Sussex to disaffiliate from the NUS with a view to creating a new organisation - we'll see how true their concerns about the new system turn out to be, and how far any breakaway attempt like that gets.)

Here's CUSU President Mark Fletcher's report on the Conference
From the NUS - "NUS members vote for historic change "
From Education Not For Sale - "NUS Democracy Abolished"(!!)
P.2 of this week's TCS has a report (not yet on the web), and Varsity gives it a couple of inches on P.3.
The Guardian reports here.