A year of complaining

The Office of the Independent Adjudicator publishes its annual report

Students have had plenty to complain about recently—from industrial action by lecturers to a pandemic, with increasing awareness of sexual harassment and racial discrimination thrown into the mix. So the annual report for 2020 from the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, published today, is a particularly interesting one.

Complaints to the OIA rose from 2,371 in 2019 to 2,604 in 2020, the highest number received in a year. But this was only a 10 per cent rise, compared with 20 per cent between 2018 and 2019 and an overall rise of 70 per cent since 2016. Students in Wales actually made fewer complaints in 2020 than in 2019.