Parliament likely to consider refunding tuition fees as student petition gains traction

By Ellie Brown, Investigations Correspondent

The petition has 323,332 signatures at the time of writing and was shared widely on social media

A petition demanding that students be reimbursed for this year's tuition fees could soon be debated in Parliament, after it gained triple the 100,000 signatures needed for the issue to be debated.

According to the parliamentary website, petitions which gain over 100,00 signatures are 'almost always' debated by MPs.  

Students argue that they deserve refunds on their £9,250 as 'university quality is poor this year', due to both the current Covid-19 pandemic and staff industrial action earlier this year.  

It details the impact these events have had on students, such as cancelled field trips, redundant accommodation and disrupted staff-student interactions.

The petition was created last month by Sophie Quinn, a third year Geography student at the University of Liverpool.

She said: 'I feel like being a final year student it's affected me the most. Obviously there was lots of industrial action, which disrupted our studies. Now with this coronavirus, I just feel like everyone has been completely disrupted.'

'Obviously it's not any university’s fault, but we’ve missed out on quite a lot of things. We don’t have a graduation date to look forward to any more. A lot of people are demotivated to do the work. The tuition fees pay for libraries and upkeep of buildings. We are not allowed to use any of that. We are not getting what we paid for.'

A link to the petition can be found here.

Featured image: Epigram / Ellie Brown

Do you agree that tuition fees should be refunded this year?