The large-scale arrival of ambulance chasers to higher education seems to have come as quite a shock to parts of the sector.
And reaction to the news that UCL has paid out £21 million to settle its portion of the student group claim has been accompanied by an oddly dim view of students – bemoaning that they have become selfish consumers.
Quite apart from how students were treated during the pandemic, it is perfectly possible and abundantly common for students to hold multiple concepts in their head at once.
As I’ve often reflected on here, it’s true that if you join a gym, you don’t automatically get fit. You have to put some effort in, in partnership with the firm and its staff, to achieve health goals.
But if the toilet paper runs out or the heating goes off, you’re no longer a partner. Nobody expects gym members to nip down to Nisa to get a pack of six bog rolls or to pop a pound in the meter to keep the lights on. And for all the access to the world’s best Yoga teachers on YouTube, it turns out that people still like to gather to do it.
See also buying books or watching films. You’re not entitled to a refund just because the Minecraft Movie wasn’t to your taste. But if the book you just bought from Waterstones has pages missing or the Cinema runs out of seats, you’re unlikely to be into paying full price.
That students enter into a contract (whether they pay fees or not) has been a very-long standing feature of the relationship between students and their universities, just as contracts govern the nature of the relationship between universities and their staff.
When those contracts are honoured, it enables the academic partnership between students and staff that generates educational outcomes. Agitation over the features, cost and terms of those contracts is natural. And when the contract is broken, it’s fair for staff and students to take action to have it honoured.
I won’t rehearse here the extent to which the physical campus experience was sold to students pre-pandemic as “better”, only to have it framed as academically equivalent during Covid, only to have what has amounted to an essential adjustment for disabled, international and otherwise time-burdened students withdrawn again over attendance compliance (often cosplaying as “belonging”).
The point is that when students choose a course at a university, promises are made in contract that deserve to be honoured. And it’s clear that right now, those promises are frequently not honoured.
The Student Academic Experience Survey has been recording rising levels of regret for some time – up at 56 per cent in 2025 for “would have chosen a different course or university” – and The Benefits of Hindsight shows us that it rises further still post-graduation.
The report highlights concerns about how courses are presented and the system’s limited capacity to accommodate changing expectations once students enrol. Students reported relying on prospectuses, open days, and institutional information that did not fully reflect their later experience, and many found it difficult or impractical to transfer or change direction once enrolled, and point to widespread expectation mismatch.
Drivers included insufficient practical preparation or course content that differed from what they believed they had signed up for, and concerns that their degree did not translate into employment opportunities or relevant skills.
That’s all getting worse too. As the sector has been implementing its “right-sizing” efforts, OfS polling shows 83 per cent of students noticing a gap between what they believed had been promised and what was delivered – larger class sizes, reduced support, or fewer academic resources.
Many also perceived negative impacts on teaching quality, extracurricular provision, and access to academic and pastoral support. Students like this have met George “ed tech” Jetson, and they’re not going to be bezzies:
When I enrolled, I was promised access to regular in-person lectures and state-of-the-art facilities. However, due to the budget cuts, many of my lectures were moved online.
It’s easy to view the pandemic as one long Zoom call – but one distinction that I suspect would have mattered in the court case that never was was the initial period, and the resultant period.
During the first lockdown, the working assumption was that forcing through emergency changes to the student experience – even where students objected – was legally justifiable if a provider had a Force Majeure clause in the student contract. FM clauses are designed for temporary, extraordinary events – floods, lightning strikes, that sort of thing – and there was a reasonable case that a sudden pandemic qualified.
But it was clear at the time that as of September 2020, the justification would last. By the summer, both OfS and the OIA were warning that it wouldn't – that providers had now had time to prepare and plan for the longer-term effects of the pandemic, and so those effects could no longer reasonably be considered an extraordinary event outside of their control. From September onwards, if universities wanted to change what they'd promised, they needed express consent from each student.
That created a trap – and many universities knew it. Accepting the OfS/OIA interpretation meant that if you sought consent and didn't get it, you were in breach of contract, triggering statutory rights to price reductions, repeat performance and damages under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
So a significant number did the opposite – stressing that the emergency was ongoing, that FM still applied, and forcing changes onto students whether they accepted them or not. The plan, in effect, was to settle quietly with individual complainants before they ever reached the OIA, and to treat collective student consultation as a courtesy rather than a constraint. It was a calculated bet – and the student group claim has been a direct consequence of it.
The problem now is that the problem is not in the past. Now that the ambulance chasers know the nature of the market, it would be daft not to assume that they’ll be looking to the next big claim.
And given the scale of the changes that have been made to programmes, facilities and courses over the past two years – often via hopelessly imbalanced variation clauses in contracts – they’ll almost certainly have a case.
The clauses that would have been at stake in the Student Group Claim are still widespread. Variation clauses giving universities broad discretion to change the method of delivery, timetable, staffing and module availability. Force majeure clauses that explicitly list strikes by the university's own staff alongside pandemics and natural disasters – despite CMA guidance saying they shouldn't.
Fee characterisation provisions that link tuition fees to "enabling learning outcomes" rather than the provision of specific teaching or contact time – narrowing the scope for breach claims by defining down what fees actually buy. Liability caps limiting what students can recover – in UCL's case to twice the total fees paid, elsewhere commonly just 1x.
And exit rights that look meaningful on paper but are functionally useless for a student two years into a degree with accumulated debt, signed accommodation contracts and – for international students – visa constraints.
Every one of those clauses exists in some form in contracts across the sector. And in looking to the future, the ambulance chasers will doubtless be looking again at the recent past.
None of this is new. Before the pandemic even hit, OfS concluded that information available to support student choice was inadequate, that the legal relationship between students and providers was unequal, and that it was not easy for students to identify instances where they had not received what they were promised and to seek redress. None of that got better during the pandemic, and none of it has got better since.
A lack of regulation over these issues – from OfS, the CMA and almost total silence in the devolved nations – has not served students well. But insofar as it has led to a false sense of security, it hasn’t served universities well either.
But the lesson from the group claim isn't so much that the sector failed to fix a known regulatory problem – it's that treating the problem as primarily one of communication has never been the answer.
Explaining better the complexity of HE and what the fee buys you doesn't rebuild trust when the underlying promises were never clear or kept in the first place. Especially when the argument is that the fee buys you graduate outcomes when challenged on service inputs, only for the argument to switch to service inputs when challenged on graduate outcomes.
What rebuilds trust is making better promises – and then keeping them. That means more granularity upfront on what will and won't be delivered, how it will be delivered, the equipment and settings available, and the depth and breadth of choice students are likely to experience.
It means publishing the policies and services that current students say matter – on dissertation supervision, on assessment and feedback turnaround, on wellbeing support, on what happens when things go wrong – so that students can see them, compare them, and hold providers to them.
It means spending more time ensuring that what gets agreed at committee level is actually deliverable, scalable, properly resourced and monitored – rather than quietly downgraded to an "ambition" when the budget gets tight once it hits a beleaguered department.
It means dialling down the garish marketing claims, rolling sleeves up to secure consent when ongoing promises can't be met, and budgeting for consumer redress in the same way that everyone from airlines to nursery providers now know they have to.
The sector will say that clearer promises create more legal risk – and it’s right. But vague promises haven't protected anyone. They've just meant that when things go wrong, students can't identify what they've lost, can't enforce what they were told, and end up with a generalised sense of betrayal that's catnip for litigation firms.
Higher education is a long-term relationship, and the stronger the promises made at the start, the stronger the trust that sustains it – and the harder it becomes for staff, students and universities to be badly treated when the savings are suddenly needed.
It isn’t impossible to achieve a fair balance of rights and responsibilities between students and universities. Nobody is saying that flexibility or innovation has to collapse. It might mean complaints handling hitting the standards set by the OIA. It may well make making changes to courses and provision, or achieving UKVI compliance, or extracting fee installments, or putting fees up, or delivering on reasonable adjustments, or coping with a strike or pandemic harder.
In some cases, it may make doing so so hard that the sector has to say so to those that fund and regulate it, rather than reassuring up and gaslighting down.
Because even if you don’t buy that students have consumer rights, the Student Group Claim is a rude reminder that they do. And if they can’t be delivered on, those making laws and writing regulation need to know.
I’m more optimistic. I think that students can be partners, consumers and clients all at once. And anyway – once it becomes clear that rapid contraction and expansion of places, provision or promises leads regularly to students’ rights being breached, it might just cause a realisation among policymakers that the way the sector is set up to compete for funding is destroying it.