On Tuesday 6th December, I spoke at a demonstration at a comprehensive school in North London. A student at the school’s sixth-form and his family are facing deportation to Iran where they face torture and potentially execution. The sixth-formers have mounted an impressive campaign against this, and several dozen of them gave up their lunch break to demonstrate in the school’s car-park.

Their campaign has cut through the media lies about asylum and immigration. It not only rejects the notion that Britain can’t accommodate or sustain asylum seekers, but rejects the entire framework of the debate that affords capital and commodities the right to move freely but demands that the workers who produced the commodities be subjected to a draconian and labyrinthine application system that will see 50% of them fail.

And to me, none of that is surprising. It’s not surprising that sixth-formers in schools are active on such issues. Anyone who remembers the heroic and inspiring schools student strikes during the anti-war movement will know the scale of the activism that sixth-form students are capable of. Other campaigns, like the ‘Band the Brands’ campaign against corporate influence in schools that Scottish students ran, are further proof.

These campaigns have existed only because of the ingenuity, innovation and political will of the students themselves, occasionally helped along by sympathetic staff members. They have had no national union to back them up, to provide resources, to give their campaign a national focus.

Sixth-formers in schools are not allowed to join the NUS. Even sixth-forms that have active and functioning JCRs or Student Councils cannot affiliate these bodies to NUS.

In 1990, the left in NUS fought for and won the right for sixth-formers in schools to affiliate their union (or equivalent body) to the National Union of Students. The Tory Education Act of 1994 – designed to totally restrict effective campaigning by students’ unions and the NUS nationally – forbade students’ unions from existing in any institution not funded by a funding council, which excludes sixth-forms in schools (which are funded by Local Education Authorities).

Setting aside the obvious point that NUS should still be fighting for further reforms to those laws, there must be a way around it; the Act prevents sixth-formers from forming students’ unions, but it doesn’t stop them from setting up equivalent bodies. The NUS decides what criteria its affiliates must fulfil – why can’t we simply say that any democratically constituted representative body of students in post-16 education is allowed to affiliate, regardless of whether the Tory law views it as a “union”?

After all, it’s not as if sixth-formers don’t face any of the same issues as NUS members in FE. Sixth-formers also receive the hyper-means tested, pitifully low EMA. Sixth-formers also face their courses being closed or shuffled or modified to give them a more “vocational” slant that suits the needs of employers. Problems with transport that affect FE students affect sixth-formers too. Cafeterias in schools (just like cafeterias in FE colleges) face privatisation, leading to a drop in both the quality of service and the quality of the working conditions of those who provide it.

Many of the issues are the same, and yet hundreds of thousands of students (who’ve proved themselves time and time again to be amongst the most active and radical in Britain) are deprived of official political representation.

The government’s Education White Paper threatens to smash up the state education system and inflict damage on an unprecedented scale. Sixth-form students in schools will feel these attacks as sharply as anyone. How much more effectively would they be able to resist and fight back if they had official union representation?

The NUS must, as a matter of urgency, investigate ways of extending representation to sixth-formers in schools and allowing their union equivalents – councils or JCRs – to affiliate to NUS. Aside from anything else, having the input of a group of students who, over the last three years, have been at the forefront of some of the most impressive and radical student activism for decades wouldn’t do the rest of us any harm whatsoever. The students who’ve run the “Justice for Benham” campaign in North London could teach some of the apolitical, bureaucratic sabbatical officers in HE unions a thing or two about how to fight, and for that reason alone, their membership of NUS would be a breath of fresh air.

I’m not a solicitor; maybe the Tories’ law is solid and impossible to get round. But maybe it’s not. When’s the last time we tried?

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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