New National Union of Students (NUS) President Liam Burns has told The Student that his top priority for the year ahead is student support, rather than a focus on how universities themselves are funded.

Burns claimed students have to move on from the row over the raise in tuition fees, given there are now “very few political levers we can pull now to reverse the decision.”

However he said that he intends to keep the issue a priority for the next election, asserting that the NUS will make sure the campaign “gains momentum” and have the maximum impact on voters and politicians.

He said, “The focus has been on institution funding, but I think we need to look at funding the students themselves, for example through fee waivers and access agreements.” Burns is a supporter of funding higher education through a graduate tax, which is the current policy of the NUS.

He recently spoke out against the “marketisation” of higher education in The Times, stating the need to reject “the idea of students as consumers”, an outlook he feels has been influenced by his Scottish upbringing.

His predecessor Aaron Porter announced in February that he would not be standing for re-election, amid fierce criticism from within the student movement that he had not done enough to block the hike in tuition fees.

However Burns told The Student he supported Porter, saying that he had done “everything humanly possible.”

He said, “What people don’t realise is how much worse it would have been if he hadn’t done as much as he did.”

He called the NUS’s opposition to tuition fees “the most powerful campaign in the last ten years,” before adding that he and Porter “do differ in opinion in certain ways”.

Speaking about moving on from focusing on Scotland to the whole of the UK, he said that he was entering “a different political context”, but would be aided by his previous experiences.

Before assuming his role as NUS President, Burns pointed out that there were still priorities to be attended to in Scotland, primarily the upcoming elections.

The three core commitments of NUS Scotland’s Reclaim Your Voice campaign are to prevent tuition fees in Scotland, protect the numbers of graduate and college places, and improve student support.

He said it was “essential that promises become a reality,” but acknowledged that the Scottish Parliament is “at the mercy of whatever budget we get from Westminster” in terms of its ability to match the three commitments.