Nearly 1,000 students at University College London have brought a legal group claim against the university to the high court. They are demanding compensation for disruption to teaching on the campus owing to the Covid pandemic and ongoing university strike action. Alongside fighting for tuition fee refunds, students should channel our anger into a mass struggle for fully funded free education, writes Theo Sharieff, Socialist Students national organiser.
Students are angry at the state of further education with crammed lecture theatres, and overworked and underpaid staff – and at the end of it all, thousands of pounds of debt. A small expression of that anger is the 100,000 students reported to have registered their interest to make similar claims at other universities. The organisation making the challenge, Student Group Claim, estimates students could get as much as £5,000 compensation. If the claim is successful, demand will grow for all students to be compensated, and across institutions.
Socialist Students backs the calls for students’ tuition fees to be refunded in full, and fights for free education and a cancellation of student debt. We fight for publicly funded university education for all those who want to access it.
Students have faced disruption to their education over the last period owing to university workers taking industrial action. This disruption is not the responsibility of striking workers, but of university managements and the Tories who have carried through vicious attacks to the pay and conditions of university workers, and therefore to to the quality of education students receive.
Faced with paying out large sums in compensation, university bosses – some paid as much as £714,000 a year – will say it is unaffordable. To those bosses who threaten course closures, pay cuts, pension attacks or administration, we say: Open the books! Let us see the real state of our universities’ finances by opening them up to inspection by trade unions and democratically elected worker and student representatives.
A collective fight of university workers and students is needed to win full funding from the weak and divided Tory government. Demands must also be put on an incoming Labour government to return to its 2019 manifesto pledge promising free education.
The tuition fee funding model has spelt disaster for students and university staff alike. Socialist Students calls for mass struggle to win free education – the scrapping of fees, introduction of living grants available for all students, and the cancellation of all student debt. We also call for the democratic running of our universities and campuses by elected bodies of campus trade unions, students and wider society. Then we would be able to collectively make decisions about how the higher education system could be run for the benefit of students, staff and us all, not in the interests of the Tories and the bosses.
Socialist Students says:
- Fight for fully funded free education – scrap and refund tuition fees, cancel student debt, replace student loans with living grants tied to the rate of inflation. Make the super-rich pay!
- Demand universities stop attacks on staff pay and conditions to end strike disruption. If university bosses say they can’t afford it, we say: open the books and prove it!
- Take universities under the democratic control of elected bodies of campus trade unions, students and wider society
- Build democratic student organisations to link up with the campus trade unions and fight for what our universities need
- Fight for socialist change – for democratic public ownership of the banks, monopolies and major industry to provide us with a future
Socialist Students 