{"id":2628,"date":"2025-09-07T07:55:30","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T06:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=2628"},"modified":"2025-09-07T13:23:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T12:23:05","slug":"oscca-101-the-students-guide-to-complaints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=2628","title":{"rendered":"OSCCA 101: Student Complaints"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Over the past five years, the culture of Cambridge University has deteriorated substantially, as judged by the numbers of Data Subject Access Requests<\/a>. These are often used by individuals in dispute with the University. They are a rough proxy for the number of staff grievances. The same pattern is seen in the steady increase of staff referrals to Occupational Health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The workforce has become increasingly stressed and unhappy. What about the students? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

OSCCA<\/a> is the Office for Student Conduct, Complaints and Appeals at Cambridge University. It remains far less known than it should be. Yet the volume of student complaints it receives underlines its significance. These figures, set out in OSCCA\u2019s Annual Reports from the past five years here<\/a>, reveal how student grievances are investigated and resolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OSCCA deserves praise for openness and transparency. The Annual Reports provide comprehensive data on numbers of investigations, average investigation length, outcome, as well as breakdown of complainants according to gender, race, disability and status. None of this is available for staff grievances. Why not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting statistics off an HR department is like trying to get meat off a hammerhead shark. Freedom of Information requests are rebuffed by co-conspirators with claims that the data are too hard or too expensive to gather. Clearly, they are not. If they can be gathered for student complaints, then they can gathered for staff complaints<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, let’s look at the data. The total number of complaints is not given much prominence in the Reports. What is stated is the number of investigated grievances. Many complaints are ruled out for reasons such as “out of time\u201d<\/em> or \u201cout of scope\u201d<\/em>. This is troubling, since every grievance deserves proper consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Reasons for not investigating complaints included students withdrawing their complaint, referring the complaint to local resolution or the complaint being referred to an alternative procedure, such as the individual College complaint procedure. It is noted that complaints are often complex and raise multiple issues. Therefore, the main issue identified has been counted in the data. For example, there are a number of complaints that may raise matters relating to College provision, alongside a substantive University complaint issue, but these elements are deemed ineligible for consideration under the Student Complaint Procedure. As a result, these cases are not taken forward [OSCCA Report, 2023-2024]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In 2023\u201324, OSCCA investigated 78 cases, down slightly from 84 the previous year. But 30 of the 2022\u201323 cases arose from the Marking and Assessment Boycott. Excluding these, the underlying picture is one of continuous growth: the number of complaints has doubled compared with 2020\u201321 and 2021\u201322. The most common categories were supervision or course issues and staff behaviour. The COVID peak at 2019-202 is clearly visible in the data, as students complained about the degraded university experience during the pandemic. However, complaints are now higher than at peak COVID.
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There has been an increase in the overall number of cases compared to previous years, demonstrating a continuous upward trend. Cases continue to increase in complexity. The OSCCA team also continues to spend significant time providing procedural advice to Departments and Colleges, and in particular to Faculties and Departments in relation to investigating academic misconduct …. The OSCCA team increased from 6.8 FTE at the start of the 2022-23 academic year to 10.1 FTE by 30 September 2024, in recognition of increasing numbers and complexity of discipline cases. This includes two new Investigators (1.5 FTE) who joined the team in Easter Term 2023, increasing the team’s capacity for disciplinary investigations. [OSCCA Report 2023-2024]
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Interestingly, most complaints concerning staff behaviour and course supervision come from postgraduate students. In 2023-2024, there were 24 investigated complaints from undergraduates and 54 from postgraduate. This pattern reflects the brutal power dynamics within Departments, where PhD students are heavily dependent on a small number of individuals \u2014 particularly their supervisors \u2014 for academic progress and career prospects. Undergraduates, by contrast, can rely more on the broader support structures of their Colleges, which reduces the risk of any single staff member wielding disproportionate influence. The data also show that females (59%), ethnic minorities (43%) and students with disabilities (32%) are all over-represented amongst those raising complaints — the latter figures being especially alarming given their low representation rates at the University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the most striking trend is that the number of (investigated) grievances that are upheld has not risen. On the contrary, the success rate for complaints has collapsed from 50 % in 2016-2017 to 13 % in 2023-2024. Such a dramatic change cannot be ignored.<\/strong><\/strong> This raises serious questions about whether OSCCA\u2019s thresholds for upholding grievances are fair, or whether some students\u2019 concerns are being wrongly dismissed<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the very least, the figures suggest a widening gap between the number of students who are unhappy and feel compelled to raise issues and the proportion whose voices are formally acknowledged, a gap that risks undermining trust in the entire process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Over the past five years, the culture of Cambridge University has deteriorated substantially, as judged by the numbers of Data Subject Access Requests. These are often used by individuals in dispute with the University. They are a rough proxy for the number of staff grievances. The same pattern is seen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2644,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions\/2644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}