'We feel for lecturers - but we want our fees back'

University staff are set to strike for 17 days this term - so how do students feel about it and is Generation Covid right in asking for compensation? Katie Strick reports

- Katie Strick

LIV FACEY feels like she has been robbed. After two years of Covid disruption, "prison-like" living conditions and Zoom lecture misery, she and fellow students were relieved to finally return to in-person teaching last term - only for staff to start cancelling lectures to go on strike over pay, pensions and working conditions. Little did Facey, 21, and her peers know then, but that was to be just the beginning of yet another academic year of campus chaos. Starting with a mass strike on "walkout Wednesday" last week, staff are set to walkout for an "unprecedented" further 17 days across this month and March alone. "I've paid £9,000 a year for three years and don't feel like I'll have had a single term of proper teaching," says Facey, a third-year English undergraduate at King's College London. Zoom seminars, vaccine rows and angry picket lines of staff were hardly the university experience she had in mind. "Yes, Covid was outside of the university's control, but since then there should have been extra efforts to make up for the lack of in-person teaching, not the opposite. Students are paying for an experience we're simply not receiving. It's like buying a T-shirt then it falling apart thread-bythread... It feels like the universities don't care about us at all."

Facey isn't alone. Across the country, more than 2.5 million students are facing as much as 70 per cent of this month's teaching hours being cancelled as staff from 150 universities rally for the 18 days of strike action across two months the biggest in the history of UK higher education.

Lecturers, librarians, caterers, cleaners and administrators are among the 70,000 members of the University and College Union (UCU) set to join the walkouts, with its general secretary Jo Grady warning that staff are at "breaking point" after failing to receive an above-inflation pay rise in 13 years.