University Strikes - 61 universities

[LittleLow]

More - What on earth is going on? - than AIBU

The planned strikes seem massive with four weeks of teaching time lost. Students in their final year or those writing dissertations could end up with lower marks potentially impacting on job offers.

What will happen with regard to tuition fees? How about special consideration for exams? There seems to be no help or advice for students & parents. Anyone have any information?

Yes I paid two separate bank transfers - one for the university fees and one for the rent at the halls so you are right; although in law if you cannot use your accommodation because you only need it for the course and both are provided by the same entity (as here - not student halls) then if there were a case you might get a refund of both eg if the university were shut for 6 months.

So if we took the fees separately and said 30% of one of 3 terms i.e. 10% of annual contact hours and then look at what amount of the fees paid is for the contact hours which will depend on the degree - for some I would say contact hours are about 50% of what you get as it were so may be a 5% refund of the 9250 might be justified. let me see if I can read the contract terms students have with the universities if I can find them on my children's university's website.

"We will not be liable to you for events outside our control
that we could not have foreseen or prevented even if we had taken reasonable care , such as....staff illness or industrial action"

Those pesky lawyers have covered everything as ever. So the only route then other than public pressure for refunds would be to argue that that exclusion of liability is unfair and invalid under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 provisions on unfair terms in contracts with consumers. I don't hold out much hope.

It doesn't surprise me!

The front page of one of my newspapers today says 2000 students have petitioned for a £300 refund. My quick calculation above was 5% of 9250 = £462. £300 is probably more about right so as I have 2 sons let us hope the university sends me the £600. I am not holding my breath but if they are not having to pay all those wages they will be saving something surely so at least they could put the wages into a fund to help very badly off students get scholarships or something.

So if we took the fees separately and said 30% of one of 3 terms i.e. 10% of annual contact hours and then look at what amount of the fees paid is for the contact hours which will depend on the degree - for some I would say contact hours are about 50% of what you get as it were so may be a 5% refund of the 9250 might be justified

Just to point out that it's typically 50% or less of the so-called "tuition fee" that goes towards paying academic staff. But I hope students and parents do pursue this nonetheless. It was arguably "within the control" of the employers to come to the negotiating table prepared to entertain having a discussion at least.

I learn best in lectures, better than anything else by a long way. Because of when classes fall in my wek I'll be missing out on about 1/4 of the teaching I was expecting for my MA if the strike goes full length. That's a fairly catastrophic amount.

(I support my striking lecturers, and hope that things are resolved quickly).

You have lectures at MA level, RadicalFern?

RadicalFem may be at a Scottish Uni where an MA is a 4 year undergraduate programme.

I am really glad to read of the support and encourage everyone to hassle the VCs about this - the employers are being completely intransigent at the moment.

Remember, it isn't just lecturers striking but other academics too. The research into neuro degenerative conditions that will one day find cures for Motor Neurone, MS, Alzheimers is being conducted by these people, the advances in gene therapy and large scale population research that will improve all our health is being undertaken in these Universities by staff that have made the sector a massive international success, but have had their pension fund woefully mismanaged. UUK needs to be prepared to come to the table to find a reasonable way forward.

Some 1 year masters programmes include taught units. It depends on the subject.

My £460 or whatever would then move closer to £240 so perhaps the £300 students are claiming is about right although the terms of at least one university as I say above seem to preclude there being much possibility of a claim unless the exclusion clause were held to be unfair. It is something we negotiate all the time in business contracts - whether a strike of your own workers should be beyond your control with no liablity or not. Buyers always strike that part out of contracts and suppliers always want it in.

I have no strong opinion on whether students should be refunded or not but I do hope plenty of them ask their university management.

The point I was trying to make is that contact time is quite a small proportion of what university fees cover.

Say somebody misses 20 hours of lectures and seminars over the 4 weeks of the strike (a typical rate for a course with 10 hours a week contact time). An undergraduate academic year is 120 credits which at the standard 10 hours per credit amounts to 1200 hours of study per year. A university could easily argue that students have everything they need to do the other 1180 hours of study per year and refuse to compensate on that basis.

Any students asking for compensation need to have a good counter argument to that, but I haven't heard one yet.

Thanks for the explanation, Slightlyperturbedowlagain

I'm fully in support of the striking staff. Students should be able to find out what was due to be included in the lectures that will be missed and read up on it as much as possible themselves. I very much doubt they will get any sort of refund.

I do believe that this kind of pension change will make it's way across the public sector and maybe even further than that. It's an awful prospect.

bramble I totally agree, once this ‘pseudo-public sector’ change to pensions gets through it will be open season on the rest

The suggestion that this is all down to UUK coming back to the table is wrong. The USS valuation has to be finalised by June 2018 - same rules for all DB schemes. Time for necessary member consultation has to be factored in too. There’s no time for any more negotiation.

That 30 June deadline is already going to be missed, by USS’s own admission, at least according to the well-informed Mike Otsuka. He also notes that the independent chair of USS asked UUK to bring forward proposals to maintain some form of the DB scheme, and they refused. He also noted that 58% of UUK members indicated they were happy with the current level of risk in the USS scheme - there’s a 42% minority who are driving this excessively conservative valuation. Among them are Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, Heriot-Watt, St Andrews.

Otsuka also says , for what it’s worth, that the strike will make no difference to the process.

He has published an addendum to that post, noting the significane of UCU’s position on the mandate they received.

Both UCU and UUK have significant mandates. The views are polarised and the statutory timeframe exhausted, so veryhard to see what can change.

I’m not sure that 42% of UUK members driving this hardline stance is a valid mandate, actually.

The VC at Glasgow University has stated he thinks an element of DB should be retained - others may yet break ranks with UUK's hardline stance.

... and Anton Muscatelli (Glasgow) is an economist by background....

I feel sorry for the support staff who will no doubt bear the brunt of frustrating from students and parents. They are on the whole very underpaid.

Support staff are just as much affected by these proposed changes as academic members of staff. I am a non-academic member of staff and I will be striking.

Well not if they’re not enrolled on the USS, like many aren’t.

But many will be in USS. It's the main pension scheme for all university staff in the pre-1992 sector. Yes there won't as many in UCU as there are in USS, but they will all be negatively affected by the proposed changes.