This decade started with the student chronicle recording events of a very successful Art festival where Calder College, which would form into LJMU, attended. Merseyside students organised this festival and it was a success. This is a great example of colleges and students working together in order to achieve great things. The combined efforts gave art students a chance to be seen and for a vibrant city that has art engrained in its fibres, this was a great moment for them. 
Art shaped LJMU more than any subject and coming from the turbulent 1940s, entering a new era with this is a real success and lays the foundations for the future. This event shows that students were using unions to arrange events and using the format set down from the NUS to encourage students to do more.

The first mention of any of the colleges that formed LJMU appeared in the NUS yearbook of 1951-52. In 1947, technical colleges were allowed to join the NUS and within 5 years Liverpool colleges were aligned with the NUS and they still are today. Calder College and IM Marsh, a campus that is still used today are first mentioned in the NUS year book of 1953 and they are continually mentioned until they formed into Liverpool Polytechnic after 1970. These colleges were only small colleges at the time and this is why their attachment to the NUS could be overlooked but it is still really important to the student unions we have today. A small student union needs support and a platform to make a difference and this is what the NUS did for these colleges. They in the 1950s are preparing and getting into the mind-set of being active and fighting for student issues. 
Their issues may have been small but they supported much grander issues that the NUS discussed. The challenges facing a small college are made much more realistic with the NUS’s support.

It is really important that the colleges and the student unions understood this as being left behind in student politics and student welfare could have been dangerous considering the challenges that faced Liverpool Students many years in the future. 
Determining how to help students is not that simple but the NUS helped these colleges and helped their students. Liverpool University at this time did have an established central SU and in 1956 when they held a NUS conference at the Reilly building, they had a trophy stolen from their union. This is clearly quite shocking but all I can say is that all the colleges that formed LJMU were not involved. That’s all you really need to know, maybe the lighter side of student union life? Or maybe just theft, either way all antics not involving the future polytechnic.

By the NUS yearbook that was published a year later in 1957, the college of commerce that was based on Tithebarn Street made an appearance. This union making an appearance may just seem like all the other unions but the college of commerce had a really strong student union going into the formation of the polytechnic and really helped the poly find its feet so it’s hard to argue against the influence of being involved at NUS conferences for that student union. That yearbook also included information about how technical colleges needed student unions 10 years after it was decided that technical colleges were to be allowed to join the NUS. This encourages student unions and gives even the ones that had formed in the late 1940s direction and a persistent reminder that the NUS can help. This also brought about issues from the technical colleges about how they could be displayed unfairly as simply an access route to education for the working classes. In the yearbook they are reminded and the NUS and the whole student family of Great Britain was reminded that they are not a simple route to education for the poorer classes they are ensuring that there is greater access to education for all. That is how the decade for students in Liverpool ended, reminding all the colleges of their importance and why they need strong unions in order to deliver the level of education needed to make them not only worthwhile, but essential to the country and its youth.