A group of 400 students was awarded compensation totalling £640,000 as a rising number of grievances from medics and international students pushed complaints to record levels in England and Wales yet again.
The Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA) has released data detailing the cases it dealt with in 2022, when 2,850 complaints were received by the ombudsman – a 3 per cent increase on 2021.
Among the complaints settled – but excluded from the overall figures because of its volume – was a case related to a group of more than 400 students at a provider who complained about disruption to their arts-based courses caused by the pandemic. Although the institution in question is not named in the report, a group complaint from students at the Royal College of Art was already in the public domain.
It was decided that these complaints were “partly justified because the provider had not properly addressed some of the issues the students had raised about the disruption to their courses and had not provided sufficient information to show that it took reasonable steps to deliver the learning opportunities that it had promised”, the OIA’s report says. “We also thought that it took the provider too long to consider the complaints.”
