Graduates join legal case to force universities to tackle millions
Did you attend university between 2018 and November 2022? Maddy Griffiths has been examining what compensation you could be in for.
Why? The system may have tricked you. Covid restrictions being eased in the summer of 2021 led you to believe you would be able to go to university after all.
Moving to a new city, country, fresher's nights out, the girl's nights in, and the society fairs are all you’ve be thinking about since A Levels. For a moment, it’s all you could hope for...December 2020 brings us back to start of the boardgame.
Locked in accommodations watching PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide and you did it all again the next day. No hope that you’ll be allowed to go home for Christmas unless you ‘broke the law’. Primary to secondary schools are getting hourly restriction updates when not even your lecturers know how you’re going to pass the year.
In response to the Covid chaos storm, 20,000 students are standing up with a multi-million-pound legal action. Their voices are finally being heard.
University students striking in 2020 (CREDIT: Sky News)
Solicitors are hearing them. They are teaming up to help students on a no win, no fee basis to claim compensation. The fear for UK universities is that it will trigger a torrent of claims from anybody who attended university after 2018, seeking an average of £5,000 per person in compensation. This will be several multiples of this figure for international students who paid much higher fees, such as £20,000 for just tuition!
Some, who graduated before these students were even born, will be reading in their heated homes thinking ‘this is an alarming amount’. We all suffered some loss to our lives during the pandemic, right? Imagine paying £140 to see a West End show and being told that it was cancelled due to an actors' strike, but you could have a DVD of the show instead - wouldn't you expect a refund of the price difference? I would.
What if work tried to increase your hours for a lower salary. Students across these four chaotic years paid an annual fee between £9,250 and £40,000 a year, despite spending months on Zoom calls and learning from textbooks rather than in face-to-face seminars.
(CREDIT: Tia O’Donnell)
Tia, a Fine Art graduate from Central St. Martin’s University, says: “The whole concept of university was to come out a much more confident and assertive person in who you are, and what your practice is. I’ve walked away feeling like I’ve got hold of a fraudulent degree.”
“I don’t really feel like I have something that students had a few years ago. I don’t know what I was meant to be upset about, but it just felt like I didn’t learn anything. There was nothing physical, practical, or encouraging from this,” she adds.
Tia’s ‘I wanted a refund campaign’ at her graduation ventured across TikTok, striking conversation with other students in the comments section.
Olivia says: “Both my first and second year were affected, and because of the remote learning I don’t feel I’ve learnt as much as I should have. I’m expected to walk into a job in less than a year,”
Joshua says: “So I can go to clubs, festivals, football games with 67,000 folk & schools back to full capacity but I can’t sit in a lecture hall with over 50 people. Make it make sense.”
The firms behind www.StudentGroupClaim.co.uk are Harcus Parker and Asserson. They are claiming that by "failing to deliver in-person tuition and access to facilities that students had paid for," universities violated their contract with students.
The simplest necessities of school life, libraries, study rooms, and labs, were inaccessible to students. Covid and the strike experience have practically been the same. Why shouldn't they be fairly compensated financially?
18 institutions have already received letters of claim for damage from StudentGroupClaim.co.uk solicitors. The following universities have so far received letters of claim:
1. University of Birmingham
2. University of Bristol
3. Cardiff University
4. City, University of London
5. Coventry University
6. Imperial College London
7. King’s College London
8. University of Leeds
9. University of Liverpool
10. London School of Economics and Political Science
11. University of Manchester
12. Newcastle University
13. University of Nottingham
14. Queen Mary University of London
15. University of Sheffield
16. University College London
17. University of the Arts London
18. University of Warwick
Letters of Claim following similar claims were sent to an additional 17 universities on October 19, 2022. It is expected that additional universities will be contacted in due course, and as Student Group Claim continues to develop the claims, the number of participants will significantly increase.
Universities' are attempting to change the narrative. They are claiming that students actually want online education to continue and that there are good reasons why it is preferable to in-person teaching. It appears we now have a different university system where students have been sold the lie that online lectures are easier. Who can blame them for preferring to stay in bed?
(CREDIT: Twitter @StudentGrpClaim)
Since these students are officially adults, and mainly hidden from view, all their comments appear to have been ignored. Being forced to walk to campus proved to be my saviour as a student who fortunately missed the significant impact this all had.
Although I was terribly homesick during my first term, university allowed me to meet new people and thoroughly immerse myself in campus life. The structure of it all also helped me. If I had been left on my own, I probably would have dropped out.
A spokesman for Universities UK, representing 140 universities, said: ‘The pandemic threw two years of unprecedented challenge at the higher education sector and our students, and we are proud of how universities adapted. We are not able to comment on individual institutions or cases.’
The legal team will approach the High Court to impose a Group Litigation Order against University College London in February. This is when the judge will determine whether to permit the 3,500 University College London claims.
If the lawsuit against University College London is successful, similar court orders will be requested for the other student groups suing their individual universities. A group claim's benefits include cost savings, the avoidance of numerous unrelated proceedings and the possibility of inconsistent results.
Solicitor Shimon Goldwater, a partner at one of the firms organising the case, said: “It’s legally wrong,”
“The students do have a claim in our view for breach of contract and they should be able to have their day in court and have their claim heard like anyone else who pays for something and receives a worse version of what they paid for,” Mr Goldwater adds.
He goes on to say having serious mental health issues from being stuck in a bedroom and not being around other people for some many months on end is not what some expected from university. He’s heard exam preparations were widely affected because students who wanted to sit in a quiet library to study had to settle for their shared accommodations.
“What universities got wrong was not necessarily their reaction to the strikes or Covid, but when that happened, they should have compensated students for the fact they didn’t get what they paid for.”
“We’re not saying they should refund 100 per cent of the tuition feed it’s just the difference in value between what people paid for and what they received. It’s that you paid for X and you got Y. It’s that simple,” he added.
The perfect analogy is that if you book a holiday at a five-star hotel and they give you a room in a two-star hotel, you’d be very surprised if they said you’d still be charged the same for the original room.
(CREDIT: The Independent)
Ryan Dunleavy, partner at Harcus Parker, commented: “These universities are often huge, wealthy institutions that pushed the financial impact and burden of Covid and of their own staff striking onto their customers, the students. Unlike the universities, a significant number of which increased their income over the pandemic period, those students largely survived on limited financial means and loans.”
This leaves us with the mess we face and the existence of unanswered questions. Where has the responsibility of care gone? These 18 universities can’t hide from the massive profit they’ve made while their students were struggling. You’re not going to believe this- profits of more than £1 billion during the 2020–21 financial year and more than £16.3 billion in net assets.
They definitely have the necessary funds to fulfill their legal duties and compensate their students for their losses. There is absolutely no reason why every single one of the universities shouldn’t have their students’ poor experience readdressed.
Students keep at least 65% of the money they earn, and participation in the group claim is free. Be one of the thousands: https://studentgroupclaim.co.uk
Author: @journomaddy
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