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You're a third year undergraduate. Your degree - which has a series of practical components - has been plagued with disruption, first by industrial action, and latterly by the pandemic.
For the past year or so those practical components have been increasingly postponed. They matter to you - for your employment path, your confidence and for your learning outcomes.
It's not just practical teaching and practical assessment. It's the stuff you produce for summative assessment and the time hanging out in the studio/lab/oxbow lake etc.
QAA is now advising universities on steps they could take like these:
For a start, why are providers only developing some of the answers here now? Has the 2nd wave and this lockdown come as a massive surprise?
I guess the argument is that nobody could have predicted how badly the pandemic would be handled last summer but I'm afraid I disagree.
In any event what happens now matters. The problem here is that any of the solutions on offer are almost certainly breach of contract if imposed.
Students are unlikely to know their rights to demand better than these solutions and or to obtain compensation.
Folks would do well to look up the Rycotewood case and consider some of the implications. Damages were awarded on fees and disappointment.
I'm particularly worried that students will be offered some of this shoddiness and feel massive pressure to agree.
The versions that suggest someone comes back. Who is funding that? Will there be maintenance support?
The reality is that if every student being offered one of these solutions said "no" and demanded proper, funded extensions to the academic year, the sector would have to say out loud the truth - that hundreds of thousands of students can't graduate meaningfully or fairly...
... without a major cash injection. That would focus government minds. My fear is that instead solutions like this will be imposed and people will muddle through, and the students it affects are those that don't have the sharpest elbows in the first place.
I've been saying for months that this is the looming catastrophe coming in HE and I've not changed my view.
And this is also a good example of where student consumer rights is not a bad fit and would be handy if students understood them and could get them enforced.
