Victory for attendance policy campaign at UEL

Kyle Williamson, UEL Socialist Students

On Wednesday 6 March, Socialist Students and members of the Scrap the Unfair Attendance Policy campaign at the University of East London (UEL) met with management to challenge them over the draconian attendance policy.

We managed to win a partial victory on the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule that meant students were being automatically de-registered from a module if they were late or absent three times.

Management agreed to look at having students meet with their personal tutor instead of being de-registered automatically.

This means that students and staff will be able to discuss progress before any action is taken. As lecturers are already overworked, we argued that management must cut lecturers’ workload for this to happen and they said they are considering it.

Campaign continues

There are other demands that the campaign must continue fighting for, including an end to the 15 minute cut-off time.

They said that this shouldn’t be an issue as students should simply leave earlier. This is an unacceptable statement to make, especially when a lot of students have to commute into university because of sky-high rent prices of university accommodation.

We are still hopeful we can make management agree to all of our demands. We will be holding meetings of the Scrap the Unfair Attendance Policy campaign and organising protests starting on Tuesday 19 March which will send a message to the vice-chancellor that he cannot continue to impose this unpopular policy.