The new president of the National Union of Students (NUS) has not yet met the universities minister, but it would be fun to be a fly on the wall when they finally come face to face.

Shakira Martin and Jo Johnson could not come from more contrasting backgrounds: Johnson went to Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Martin studied at a comprehensive in Catford and Lewisham Southwark College, a further education (FE) college. And although much of what Martin says will be familiar to the minister – on tuition fees, student debt and mental health – she clearly has her own priorities and her own way of articulating them.

A single mother of two who left home at 16, Martin finished school with one GCSE in Religious Studies. After several false starts, she returned to college where she became active in student politics and is now determined to represent the working-class community she grew up in; she is the first woman from an African-Caribbean background to become NUS president and only the second not to have studied at university.

When she talks about the barriers facing poorer students and overcoming adversity, she quotes the Canadian rapper Drake (“Started from the bottom, now we’re here”). When you ask her about government claims of record-breaking numbers of disadvantaged students at university, she retorts: “I find that very disrespectful. God save the minister that comes to me and says: ‘Shakira, widening participation has gone up in university.’ Um, excuse me? How many of those [students] are staying in university, how many are getting firsts at university, how many of those are going into quality jobs?” Not enough, is the implication.

And she has some advice for the UK’s two most elite universities, which recently topped the Times Higher Education World University Rankings: “Oxbridge, get a proper strategy to get more BME [black and minority ethnic] students in your institutions. It’s just not good enough. People like me, I would never think I could get to those type of universities.”

Martin agrees that sexual harassment and violence against women is a major issue in higher education and commends the work done by her NUS colleagues. But her concern extends beyond university campuses. “I have spoken to FE students who have been victims of sexual harassment, but they have not even identified it as that.” She describes the case of a young college student who has been thrown out by her mother and is staying at the house of a friend who is pressurising her for sex. “She’s feeling like she has to sleep with a boy to keep a roof over her head. This young girl is being sexually harassed and doesn’t even know that’s what it is.”

Asked about her views on feminism, Martin says: “I call myself a feminist. I believe in equality. I will stand up for women all day every day.” But she says the language of feminism belongs to the middle class. Go to Brockley and Peckham in south London, she says, and the young women in her community are more likely to be talking about Femfresh than feminism.

“The terminology of feminism is a very middle-class terminology. What we need to do is start breaking down the terminologies that represent people, but they don’t even know that it represents them.” She jokes about muddling up intersectionality and intersexuality, and says she only understands all this stuff because of her work in the sector. “There are a lot of things we shouldn’t assume that people already know. We are very elitist.”

Martin is especially concerned about student mental health and she quotes recent research by the Association of Colleges that found that 100% of FE colleges had reported students diagnosed with depression. “One hundred per cent,” she says with emphasis, “Not even a condom is 100%. That is an epidemic.”

Martin represents a genuinely fresh voice in the NUS. While she is vehemently opposed to tuition fees and spiralling vice-chancellor pay, her mission is to highlight the economic, cultural and social barriers that deter poorer students from going to university, and the poverty and adversity they face if they do.

“This goes way beyond tuition fees,” she says. “We are talking about class. The government does not talk about class, it talks about poverty. Working-class people and those from marginalised backgrounds, even if they go on to education, it doesn’t mean they have made it – they still have to struggle every single day.

“I am NUS president now,” she says. “If I don’t use this opportunity and try to make the most of it – when I leave here, I will be Shakira Nobody, and nobody will care about me. This job brings a certain social capital that I will never have when I am back in my community.”

It seems unlikely she will ever be Shakira Nobody. It is still early in her term in office at the NUS but the mother of two nurtures ambitions to become principal of an FE college and she would like, at some point, to go to university to study. “Forget Mrs,” she says. “The only title I want is PhD or MA. No man can take that away from me.”