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Consumer rights and complaints in English higher education: a new form of student agency?

by Rille Raaper

A year ago I wrote a blog post inviting the SRHE community to reflect on what it means to be political for today’s students. That piece was a thought experiment exploring political agency beyond traditional notions of student activism or protest. I now want to extend this thinking by considering whether student-as-consumer complaints can also be understood as a form of political agency.

Consumerism has increasingly invaded new sectors of society, including higher education. In the UK, consumer rights and relationships are actively promoted through higher education policy, which frames students as consumers and universities as providers. The Office for Students, the main regulator in England, encourages students to understand their consumer rights with statements such as: ‘Knowing your consumer rights should help you to be protected if things go wrong on your course’. Although the phrase “things going wrong” remains ambiguous, universities must comply with consumer protection law by providing accurate, up-to-date information about their offerings and maintaining internal complaints and appeals processes for students who wish to raise concerns about their experience. These processes are broadly similar across institutions, typically moving from informal resolution to formal complaints, and, if unresolved, escalation to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) – the body responsible for reviewing unsettled student complaints in England and Wales.

While it may be a ‘chicken and egg’ question as to whether the rise in complaints or the introduction of formal procedures came first, what is clear is that student complaints have grown significantly. Although university-level complaint data is confidential, we know that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) received 3,613 complaints in 2024 – an increase of over 130% compared to 2016. The financial implications are notable: £677,785 was awarded to students following a “Justified” decision, and an additional £1,809,805 was offered as part of settlements in 2024. It is reasonable to assume that university-managed complaints have experienced a similar surge.

This peak in complaints and related institutional procedures raises an important question: should we view complaints not merely as an inconvenience or evidence of institutional shortcomings, but as a process that activates certain forms of agency within the student experience? Specifically, could this agency represent a new form of political agency in a context where students may be reluctant to engage in traditional activism for fear of jeopardising their academic success and financial investment?

In my broader work, I adopt a wide lens on political agency, drawing on works from Michel Foucault, Sara Ahmed, and Jouni Häkli & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. From this perspective, political agency encompasses ‘a variety of individual and collective, official and mundane, rational and affective, and human and non-human ways of acting, affecting and impacting politically’. Complaints, while largely individual, can be both rational and affective, making them a compelling example for expanding our understanding of political agency. When considering complaints as political agency, I propose we start by reflecting on the following:

Institutional inequalities

Most student complaints originate – at least from the perspective of those making them – in response to perceived institutional failure or wrongdoing. Complaints are therefore generally directed against some form of injustice. While students can raise concerns about a wide range of issues, the OIA statistics indicate that service-related complaints, eg poor teaching quality, undelivered services, or misleading marketing, account for roughly one third of all cases handled by the OIA.

Courage

Like any form of political action, making a complaint requires considerable courage and perseverance. Sara Ahmed’s work highlights how raising a complaint can make the complainant vulnerable, positioning them as the locus of an institutional problem. Similar ideas resonate with Foucault’s notion of parrhesia – truth-telling as a courageous act that is both risky and potentially transformative for the individual.

Social spillovers

Although a student complaint is typically an individual act, it carries an element of publicness. Complaints can create opportunities for students to engage with their broader social context and advocate for fairness in higher education. This ethical stance may ripple outward, influencing others and contributing to wider institutional change; for example, when a single complaint leads to policy or practice reforms.

While we may debate whether student complaints are a ‘necessary evil’ in market-driven higher education, I invite readers to consider whether raising a complaint might also be a courageous and transformative experience for our students. If we allow ourselves to think this way, complaints could become an important lens for understanding how today’s students exercise their political agency.

For more details, please see my book published as part of the SRHE and Routledge book series Research into Higher Education:

Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge

Professor Rille Raaper is in the School of Education at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism. rille.raaper@durham.ac.uk


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Students in quality assurance – representatives, partners, or even experts?

by Jens Jungblut & Bjørn Stensaker

Throughout Europe, students are often regular members of external quality assurance mandated to perform evaluations and accreditations in higher education. While this role has been secured through the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), we have little knowledge about how students participate in such panels and which roles they take up. In a paper presented at the SRHE conference in Nottingham in December 2025, we addressed this issue – both conceptually and empirically.

One could imagine that there are several roles that students could play as part in an external quality assurance panel. Students are most often seen as representatives of their fellow students. This has implications as to how students are appointed to such panels, as various student interest organizations usually have the power to nominate specific students to the task. More recently, the idea of students being partners has also gained interest, where a key assumption is that students should be involved and participate in all aspect and processes related to their own education – including quality assurance. The initiative “student partnerships in quality Scotland (sparqs)” is a well-known example of this inclusive approach (Varwell, 2021). However, one could argue that students may even take on an expertise-based role in quality assurance. This type of role is not based on experience per se but rather the ability to reflect upon the knowledge possessed and the ability to engage in systematic efforts to learn more – based on these reflections (Ericsson, 2017).

In our paper presented at the SRHE conference we argue that the role of students participating in quality assurance panels (or any other related processes in higher education) may not be static, restricting students to merely one role at a time (see also Stensaker & Matear, 2024). We rather argue – in line with Holen et al (2021) – that the roles students may take on are highly dynamic. A consequence of this would be that students may shift rapidly from one role to another, depending on, for example, the evaluation context, committee setting, or the issue that is being discussed.

To test our assumptions, we conducted a survey targeting students taking part in European quality assurance processes; to be more specific, we targeted the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` within the European Students’ Union. This group was established in 2009 with the aim to improve the contribution of students in quality assurance in Europe. When included in the pool, students undergo training sessions providing them with relevant background knowledge about quality assurance processes and the ESG. The members of the pool are then called upon by quality assurance agencies throughout Europe to act as student representatives on their quality assurance panels at program, institutional, or national level, performing evaluations, accreditations and other forms of assessments. The `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` therefore represents a unique entity in Europe, as it is the only European structure that collects and trains students for these roles. 35 students (of a total of 90) responded to our survey.

The students responding have on average been involved in quality assurance for more than four years, and over 60 percent have participated in four or more evaluation or accreditation processes. In line with our expectations, the students indeed report that they are taking on several roles during the evaluation processes, they are representatives of students, they feel they are equal partners within the evaluation panel they are part of, and they also see themselves as experts. In our data, we could not identify a clear hierarchy between the different roles. However, our data suggest that students are often perceived as a partner, while less often as experts. A possible interpretation here is that temporality and experience matter: students may be initially viewed as a representative and as a partner when starting their work within the panel, and through the process of participating in multiple panels over time they might demonstrate expertise which is in turn recognized by their peers in the panels. An interesting feature coming out of the data is also that the students in the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` regularly share knowledge among the members of the pool, and in that way contribute to continuously build the expertise of all members. Expertise is in this way not taken for granted or expected as a prerequisite for being a member, but rather nurtured, systematised and made available to newer and future members.

We want to thank all the students that bothered to respond to our small questionnaire. While our study is exploratory, we do think it provides new insights regarding student involvement and influence in a setting characterized by a high level of expertise and professionalism, and we hope that the findings can help future research to further unpack the dynamic nature of students’ roles in quality assurance panels.

Jens Jungblut is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His main research interests include party politics, policy-making, and public governance in the knowledge policy domain (education & research), organizational change in higher education, agenda-setting research, and the role of (academic) expertise in policy advice.

Bjørn Stensaker is a Professor at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. He has a special research interest in governance, leadership, and organizational change in higher education – including quality assurance. He has published widely on these topics in a range of journals and book series.


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What does it mean to be political for today’s students?

by Rille Raaper

When we think about student politics, it is inevitable that the images of student protest and rebellion come to mind. These views of what counts as student politics have been shaped by rather romantic ideals of what it meant to be a student and do politics in 1960s, or perhaps even in 2010-2011 when we witnessed the last large scale student rebellion in England, but also more globally. When we stretch our imagination, perhaps we can also see students engaging with electoral politics, and them being stereotypically more left leaning compared to the general population – or ‘woke’ as portrayed by many right-wing media outlets today. In cases where students do not meet these expectations of political activity, they are often derogatively called ‘snowflakes’: a fragile generation of apolitical students. While there may be some truth in students becoming less politically active, it is important to question why this might be the case, but also to consider the extent to which our own understandings of student politics are perhaps outdated and need changing.

The cost of student protest

In contexts where higher education is marketed as an investment into one’s future, the student-as-consumer positioning becomes unavoidable. Consumerism in our universities may be brutally explicit as in the UK where students are protected by the Consumer Rights Act 2015, or more subtle in systems where laws and regulations do not treat students as consumers, but the transactional idea of higher education and human capital development still imply similar understandings. As students are constantly reminded to prioritise ‘value for money’ and question their investment into successful graduate employment, deviating from such a mindset and standing out as a disruptive or disobedient student cannot be a preferred or safe option. This was evident with the recent pro-Palestinian encampments which on British campuses were rather short-lived, often adopted around the exam periods and ending with the closure of the academic year 2023/2024. The cost of non-compliance is very high for our students: how could a student who has accumulated an average of £45k student debt with already insecure graduate employment trajectory drop everything and revolt? My recent book Student Identity and Political Agency: Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights deals with these dilemmas and argues that the modes of student politics have had to change alongside the generational pressures that contemporary students face. In other words, the form that student politics takes is intertwined with what it means to be a student today.

Alternative forms of political agency

To counteract the view that students have become apolitical or snowflakes, we need to imagine student politics as more fluid and situational: something that gets embedded within the everyday practices of being a student.

First, this revisioning invites us to be more open-minded about what counts as student protest. For example, it is evident that when today’s students do protest, their actions tend to be more short-lived while triggered by identity-based issues that matter to them personally. We should also look at the new and alternative spaces that activism takes place within, eg digital platforms. The latter could of course relate to generational shifts and students being more digitally adept, but also to the fact that the university campuses have become heavily regulated by timetabling pressures and health and safety rules, making it difficult for students to socialise, let alone organise on campus.

Second, our universities have never emphasised student voice as much as they do today. In addition to students’ unions, there is a wide range of new representative roles on university committees and working groups. While there are questions about tokenism and the effectiveness of these roles – and perhaps fairly so – one cannot deny that there is an incredible infrastructure emerging for students to (peacefully) exercise their interest. This could also be politically motivated, and we should not underestimate the power that students as collectives hold through such representative roles.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, I invite us to consider the power that the student-as-consumer holds. In the age of marketised universities, we need to ask some uncomfortable questions related to the extent to which student-as-consumer positioning itself empowers students with new types of political agency. We know that an increasing number of students are exercising their right to complain, and they often do this to call out universities for their wrongdoings. These wrongdoings may relate to consumer rights and personal grievances, but often they also reflect wider structural inequalities. It could therefore be argued that consumer rights have granted students new tools to exercise their interest. There is a tendency for the sector to view student complaints as something negative and unreasonable, and none of us would want to be the subject of one. However, it is likely that if students are increasingly treated as consumers, it is also this consumer positioning that offers new opportunities for political agency to be exercised. In today’s highly pressurised university environments, consumer complaints might be a more effective way to make oneself heard: making complaints is a legal right for our students, and the potential reputational damage to universities makes complaints high stakes.

In summary, I argue that the market forces and consumerist discourses that brutally shape students are also what trigger, enable and disable certain new and altered forms of political agency. Such understanding invites us to shift away from the prevailing assumption that contemporary students are becoming apolitical and instead to rethink our normative understanding of what counts as political agency.

For more details, please see my book published as part of the SRHE and Routledge book series Research into Higher Education:

Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge

Rille Raaper is Associate Professor at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism.