- Students should be refunded at least 50 per cent of their tuition fees for lost teaching time by universities that failed to minimise the disruption caused by last year’s lecturer strikes, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator has said.
Students should be refunded at least 50 per cent of their tuition fees for lost teaching time by universities that failed to minimise the disruption caused by last year’s lecturer strikes, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator has said.
The independent body which looks at complaints across higher education, said that was the “starting point” for those affected.
Fourteen days of teaching were lost when staff, including lecturers and academics, from 65 universities across the UK walked out early last year in a dispute over pensions.
The Independent reports that the University and College Union estimated that the action, which was called off in April affected more than 1 million students and a total of 575,000 teaching hours were lost.
Case summaries, published on the Office of the Independent Adjudicator website, show that some universities have been better at making up lost learning by providing lecture recordings and podcasts.
“Others have done nothing and we don’t think that’s fair,” said Felicity Mitchell, the independent adjudicator said. “We have made recommendations in a number of cases for partial refunds of tuition fees and payments for distress and inconvenience where we have decided the student has not been treated fairly.”
A batch of reports from the watchdog earlier this year showed that individual universities had been told to refund students hundreds of pounds each.
