Tagged with Universities

Student “debt-in” in protest at loanbook privatisation

Debt-in 1Students and staff at the University of Cambridge this week (Tuesday 5th November) staged a “debt-in” on King’s Parade, in opposition to the government’s plan to privatise student loans, which could see interest on such loans being retrospectively doubled. This comes after a number of actions taking place in London last month, including the targeting of a number of Lib Dem MPs’ offices.

To symbolise the burden of student debt, activists performed a game of “Stuck in the Debt” from 12pm, a spin on popular playground game Stuck in the Mud, this time involving students being captured by debt-wielding bankers. Cambridge Defend Education, the activist group organising the protest, handed out a briefing on the student loan privatisation to passers by, who stopped in surprise at the spectacle of scores of red boxes symbolising student debt. Continue reading →

Dispatches from the Halloween higher education strike

Ostudent protest by Andrew Moss Photography, file at by Andrew Moss Photographyn Thursday, a nationwide higher education strike saw lecturers, librarians, cleaners and other support staff down tools for a day, as students joined them on the picket lines.

The one day strike, called jointly by the UCU, Unite and Unison trade unions, followed yet another year of a pay increase offer below inflation. Coupled with previous below-inflation pay rises, the measly one per cent increase means that since 2008 university staff have been forced to take a real-terms pay cut of 13 per cent.

In London today, a conference will assess how to bring together students and workers in opposition to austerity, after what seems to be a resurgence in activism on British campuses. Continue reading →

Asylum seekers: forgotten in our universities

While the Coalition government wages war on students and pushes through an market-driven agenda bent on the commodification of education, many young people in Britain today fear that with £9000 fees, university is no longer a right, but a luxury they can ill-afford.

In the midst of this degradation of the belief that education is a universal right, there is an often-unheard voice amongst those young people who know all too well how it feels to have the chance of a university education made totally unachievable by the punitive economic structures in place. These people are Britain’s asylum seekers.

Continue reading →

Labour can afford to be radical on higher education

More than three quarters of higher education experts do not believe the current loans system to be sustainable, according to research published in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Within five or ten years there will be yet another significant change in the HE funding model and it is very important that we plan now to ensure that Labour is on the right side of that debate and has the correct policies in a future Labour government. Continue reading →

University access: Les Ebdon will make no difference

The Daily Telegraph is aghast at yesterday’s appointment of Les Ebdon as head of the Office for Fair Access, openly voicing its fear that he will force ‘our’ best universities to take ‘less well-qualified candidates’.

I’m not quite sure just who the personal pronoun applies to in this context, but if the writer of those words is not talking in class terms, he or she might as well be. Continue reading →