Attendance Policy campaign launched at UEL


Ian Pattison

On 31 October 33 students came to the University of East London (UEL) Socialist Students meeting – Scrap the Unfair Attendance Policy.

On the initiative of UEL Socialist Students a campaign has been launched to stop this attack by university management.

If you are more than ten minutes late three times, you are kicked off your module, no excuses.

Some students with children can’t get in on time after they drop their children off at school. Many of the card readers are faulty, marking students as absent who have arrived on time.

Many students are worried about how the university’s mistakes may affect their student loans and finance.

The first meeting of the campaign voted to change the attendance policy rather than scrap it. Socialist Students will build the campaign, including any democratic decisions made.

But we think the attendance policy should be scrapped altogether. It’s our education, we should decide how we spend our time studying. We don’t need to be policed by university management.

Tactics

Whether we want to change the attendance policy or scrap it, we need to get organised. The campaign will meet every week. UEL student union is discussing how to support us.

The student union is holding an Emergency General Meeting and a Student Council on the attendance policy and the campaign against it.

Everyone should sign the petition, but we need protests and boycotts to make the card reader system unworkable.

Socialist Students demands that anybody who has so far been kicked off their modules should be immediately re-instated, and there should be no repercussions for any student who is late or misses a lecture.

The unfair attendance policy is part of a wider agenda of attacks by UEL management and the Con-Dem government. Working class students are paying £9,000 a year in fees – paying more, but getting less.

Management at UEL claims we need a draconian attendance policy to prevent a repeat of what is happening at London Met.

There 2,600 international students could face deportation. London Met university management has embarked on a massive process of privatisation, to the point where it is in partnership with dodgy private colleges.

If UEL management genuinely want to prevent a repeat of London Met, they should reverse their privatisation programme (which includes clauses to ban trade unions), and kick private vultures off campus.