STUDENT leaders were slammed yesterday for prioritising “going to gala dinners” over supporting striking lecturers.

Opening the National Union of Students (NUS) conference yesterday, the organisation’s president Shakira Martin vowed to “make student poverty history.”

But leftwingers said Ms Martin had failed to offer “meaningful support” to university staff on their strike over pension cuts.

They have pointed to the connection between the precarious employment conditions of postgraduate students — many of whom work in junior teaching and research posts — and poverty.

The NUS issued a statement saying it supports the strikes following a motion passed at its executive council. But the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts has said the union’s national leadership “didn’t even bother to produce their own material to distribute to student unions: instead, they lazily uploaded UCU’s [University and College Union] leaflets to NUS Connect and said goodbye.”

In a question-and-answer session yesterday, Ms Martin defended her description of students occupying university buildings in solidarity with the strike as “privileged.” She suggested occupations were not “accessible” to students from marginalised groups.

Hope Worsdale, a student activist at Warwick University, told the Star that students had “played an essential role in pushing  [universities’ representative organisation] UUK to back down on their damaging pensions reforms” — but that this had been achieved “without a shred of meaningful support from our national union.”

She added: “That the NUS leadership has been so strikingly absent during this campaign is a damning indictment of the state of our union.

“NUS should be working with radical grassroots campaigns on the ground, yet the leadership is more concerned with going to gala dinners with MPs than building a movement that can win.”