By Jessica Pretorius
Students across the UK have long been unhappy about paying full university fees despite disruptions to teaching in the face of Covid lockdowns and frequent strike action. Now, more than 20,000 UK students are taking legal action against universities, seeking thousands of pounds of compensation through group legal action.
Student Group Claim is the organisation coordinating these claims and claimants are supported by a legal team from Asserson Law Offices and Harcus Parker Limited. In an upbeat animated video, the organisation’s website encourages students to fill out a simple form to join the group claim, estimating that some students will claim up to £5000. There is no upfront cost, but if the claim is won, the lawyers will get 35 percent of the compensation paid.
The group believes that the contract between every student and a university, which is responsible for providing in-person tuition, access to facilities and various other services , has been repeatedly breached since 2018. Because of COVID-19 and strike action, many classes were moved online, access to facilities was restricted, and many students barely set foot on campus.
UCL was one of the first universities to receive a letter of claim in April of last year, and in October around 3,500 UCL students had joined the claim. The High Court is to decide whether to issue a group litigation order against UCL on 2 February 2023. Other universities to have received letters are LSE, King’s College London and the universities of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Warwick, and Cardiff.
LSE’s website states that the national nature of the strikes which occurred in November has been a big challenge. On how students can manage their studies during this time, the website refers to Moodle to look at readings and lecture notes, as well as LSE LIFE for guidance on how to succeed in studies. Furthermore, they suggest reaching out to other classmates to ‘catch up’ and contacting your academic mentor if they are available. It also states that compensation cannot be ‘adequately’ considered as they cannot assess the full impact of the strikes. It further states compensation for the 2021-2022 academic year cannot be guaranteed.
The Beaver reached out to LSE in December regarding the lawsuit, but they said they were unable to comment on ongoing court cases. When contacted again in January, LSE stated that they are still unable to do so.
An LSE student, Victoria*, commented on her reasons for signing the claim, ‘‘I signed up to the claim because I think my first two years at university weren’t value for money. Especially since the experience I’ve had this year is drastically different from the experience in first year, and to a lesser degree second year, it doesn’t make sense to me that I am paying the same amount for all three years. Also, whilst I’m a home student so my fees are much lower than for international students, 9k per year is a lot of money for me – I even debated even applying to university because the idea of getting into a lot of debt wasn’t very appealing…one thing that the student group claim mentioned was that if you receive any bursaries from your university (I do) this might affect your claim, so I am slightly worried to see how that will pan out.’’
Victoria* added that, ‘‘There haven’t been many updates to the claim so far because I think they are working on the UCL case at the moment so I’m not sure what is going on with the LSE case. LSE also hasn’t contacted me personally about the case either. So I’m expecting it will take a long time, especially since LSE is a smaller university in comparison to other universities (the more people per university who have signed up, the stronger the case against the university).’’
This is a developing story. The Beaver is further investigating the nature of the letter of claim submitted to LSE.
*Names in this article were changed to preserve anonymity.
