Passed: November 2024 (18th)

What is the current problem, and how does it affect students?

Following feedback from student unions across the country, National Union of Students (NUS) has decided to have a year of structural change to reflect the changes its stakeholders want to see. After a review in 2024, a series of reforms and recommendations were made. 

Specific reforms that affect LUU are the introduction of an annual England Conference (separate from the UK conference), and the ability to “Create flexible membership structures with more engagement opportunities for both students’ unions and students directly”.

In previous years, NUS held an annual conference in which elected delegates from each member union were able to workshop ideas for policy, feedback on current policies as well as work on other related matters. This year, an annual conference will not happen, and so elected delegates will not be able to attend. Instead, representatives from each member union will attend various events and workshops throughout the year to progress the work of NUS.

The bye-laws as they currently are catered to the old structure of NUS, before it's reform, and we want to bring them in line with the current and new representative structures. 

Link to bye-laws: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2NxHc0TkCOuseY260NJaj8Fsbb5ZK_h/edit  

Link to NUS reform and recommendations: Changes to NUS: https://www.nus.org.uk/reform-to-nus-democracy-and-organising  

What is your proposed change? How will it benefit students?

The proposed change of the bye-laws would be to include a section of the Student Executive Officers role and responsibilities to include acting as an LUU representative for NUS any other changes as following this period of reform would also warrant. 

In section 4 of the bye-laws, regarding elections, the following positions are elected by cross-campus ballot: 

In section 4, regarding elections, the following positions are elected by cross-campus: 

• Student Executive Officer

• NUS Representatives

• Any other role as set out by the board of trustees.

To ensure this bye-law is met, the following amendment should be made as it allows the forgoing of an election for NUS delegates in extraordinary cases such as this internal year to instead have the student exec officers implicitly be our NUS reps at various events. 

The immediate change to Section 7 of the bye-laws would be to include the following:

• The collective duties of the Student Executive are:

xi. To act as NUS representatives 

Following the internal year of NUS, this idea and the bye-laws should be reviewed and amended to reflect the updated representative structure of NUS. 

The implementation of this idea as policy would also introduce the opportunity to continue the involvement and direct engagement of students with workshops for NUS, as well as continuing greater cross collaboration with other student unions such as the National Lobby Day that occurred on the 23rd October 2024.

Have you considered the impact of the proposed change for traditionally underrepresented student groups?

This idea would affect all students equally as access to NUS, and subsequent policy work will fundamentally be different following its reform. To further this, this reform would also affect how the Union would feed into the Liberation Collective - which is the UK-wide structure for student-led liberation groups (Trans, Women, Racialised, Disabled and LGBTQ) and any self-identifying students and apprentices wanting to organise for liberation campaigning.