The student group claim gets a court date

In February we heard that following a breakdown of talks aimed at finding an alternative resolution to the dispute, the UCL claim (the idea is to start with UCL and then work from there) is to proceed to the High Court.

Now the judge has fixed a four week trial of the students’ claims at the beginning of 2026 – at some point during the January to April period.

UCL said last year that the proceedings should not be allowed to go ahead “unless and until” students first completed UCL’s own internal complaints procedures, and if that failed, the OIA ombuds process.

But this time last year, the High Court rejected UCL’s attempt to mandate such an approach, noting:

some of the Claimants’ concerns about the OIA [ombudsman] scheme are valid …

… raising concern as to…

whether UCL and the OIA have sufficient resources to deal with this volume of complaints.

At the case management hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice last month, the law firm leading the claim argued for a group litigation order – which would have allowed all the claims against UCL to be processed as one single claim.

That request has now been dismissed – instead, a handful of students representing a variety of experiences and scenarios will be selected as “test cases” for the trial, to help determine how everyone else’s claims are settled.

The firm leading the claim – Harcus Parker and Asserson – reckon that about 155,000 students have now instructed them to seek compensation from their university – and are still suggesting that thousands more students are expected to join the claim as it progresses.

As such, this UCL portion – which HPA say involves 5,000 current and former UCL students – is very much a precursor to “similar claims being prepared against more than 100 other UK universities”, of which we’re told that more than 50 have had letters.

If successful, HPA think that students could be entitled to compensation in the region of £5,000 each – with significantly higher sums expected to be awarded to PG and international students, who tend to pay higher fees.

Central to the case is a long running question – the extent to which a university can rely on “force majeure” clauses in student contracts that relieve a university of a contractual obligation (or at least limit liability) in the event of something uncontrollable or unpredictable.

What will be fascinating is the extent to which something that was very much uncontrollable or unpredictable in March 2020 became, in a court’s view, more controllable and more predictable as time went on.

It will also put to the test the Competition Markets Authority’s assertion that force majeure clauses involving industrial action of a university’s own staff are defacto unlawful. CMA says they are – but pretty much every university retains one anyway. It would help everyone if that row was settled and clarified.

Some universities may be insured for any losses here, some not so much – but if the case does go students’ way, the government will also need to consider any role it played in encouraging universities to do what they did. Ditto the Office for Students.

One other interesting thing in the judgement today is that the firm supporting the claim will have to explain whether or not students have taken part in the UCL “Learning Opportunities Fund” and if so whether any money was paid, and in respect of which instance(s) of industrial action.

We’ve long known that the OIA’s view is that it’s lost learning opportunities that really matter – and the scheme that UCL operates is clearly an attempt to head off claims aimed at such lost opportunities.

Not all universities have operated such a scheme – and might instead argue either that there were no lost learning opportunities, or that in the rare cases there were, students could complain.

Is a lost year abroad to France not lost if students get to watch some YouTube videos about France instead? We may be about to find out.

Of course, plenty argue that it’s not just formal learning opportunities that students lost over Covid or strikes – plenty of aspects of teaching and learning don’t fit the description (supervision, for example) and there’s plenty of other aspects of the “service” that were hit during Covid.

Harcus Parker and Asserson will be hoping that as many of these issues get a formal resolution as possible – and ideally for them in students’ favour. The sector will doubtless be less enthusiastic.

Kathy Armour, vice provost at UCL, said the university had offered an alternative dispute resolution process which was “flatly rejected by the claimants’ lawyers”:

“Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we prioritised the health and safety of our whole community and followed UK government guidance, working tirelessly to make our campus and all UCL premises as safe as possible so that a high-quality academic experience could continue to be provided.