On the evening of Sunday 26 August 1928, during the Glasgow Trades Holiday, May Donoghue jumped on a train to Paisley – where she visited the Wellmeadow Café to meet up with an old pal.
On arrival she ordered a Scotsman ice cream float, a delicious mix of ice cream and ginger beer. The café owner served the float, but when her friend poured the remaining ginger beer into a tumbler, a decomposed snail emerged from the bottle. Donoghue claimed she felt ill upon seeing the snail and soon experienced crippling abdominal pain.
She sought medical advice three days later, and was admitted to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency treatment on 16 September. She was diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock – and once she was out of hospital took the manufacturer to court on the basis that it had failed to implement an effective cleaning system for its bottles.
The defence asserted that her health issues were pre-existing, argued the claimed damages were excessive, and that liability required a direct financial relationship which did not exist between her and them. Eventually the House of Lords found in her favour and established an important legal principle – you have to avoid acts or omissions likely to harm those affected by you.
Stuck in the middle with you
I was thinking about the Paisley Snail when I was idly flicking through yet another education reform document that has the temerity to headline the “learner/student at the centre” mantra while doing little of the sort.
This time it was the Scottish Government’s legislative proposals on post-school education and skills reform – covered elsewhere on the site by DK – which amusingly says that it is “particularly interested” in hearing what learners have to say, only to then admit that “a lot of the proposals affect the way things operate behind the scenes from a learner’s perspective”.
God forbid that we would assume that “learners” might actually be interested in or capable of contributing to said “behind the scenes” machinations. “Tell us what you want in crayons, kids, and us grown ups will deliver a system that delivers it” is the message.
For me the Paisley Snail is fascinating partly because it’s about harm. We hardly ever talk about the possibility that higher education – through acts or omissions – might cause it. But the right to not be harmed is important, as is the right to complain if you think an institution is culpable.
The threat – that you’ll lose in court, have to pay out in compensation, or lose your reputation as a result – is just as important as other systems that are designed to quality assure whatever goods you supply or services you provide. Nobody wants the blame.
It’s even more important when you’re not personally paying for something, or when you’ll never pay for something again. If your local chippy pops a snail in your bag of scraps, you can switch chippy. But if the government has gallantly agreed to supply 4 years’ worth of chips for free via one chippy, with the opportunity to pay for an additional year of cod and chips, there’s not a lot of power in the switch threat – and much less of a sense that you have the right to redress.
That’s not to say, of course, that any chip shop owner is sat about thinking “how can I poison my punters”. But if the duty to supply those chips remains and the funding gets cut, you’re going to cut corners. Maybe there will be less chips in the bag. Maybe they’ll be made from mouldy old spuds. Maybe the care you once took over ensuring that snails weren’t roaming around your wrapping paper has gone a bit lax – after all, you still believe in chips for people. You don’t want them to lose out on their opportunity to get chips. And nor do you want to lay anyone off.
When, now and again, folk do rock up and accuse you of supplying cold, mouldy or dead snail slime chips, you know that some of them are trying it on. So to weed out the chancers, you adopt a two stage complaints process that takes a year – when most of your big spending customers who prop up the place (plaice) given those funding cuts are only around for 11 months before leaving the country. If they don’t pay, you take on the duty of telling the authorities who allow them in – so they daren’t cause a fuss.
If anyone is still not happy after all of that, they can approach the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO), which at the time of typing is proudly displaying a banner on its website front page that tells potential users that “due to an increase in the volume of cases we are currently receiving there is a delay of 14-16 weeks in allocating complaints to a reviewer.”
And anyway, in my day we ate dead rats, and we had a toilet outside, and it never did me any harm.
Here we go again on my own
In many ways, speed reading the proposals triggers familiarity – a single tertiary funding system that can make smart decisions about all post-compulsory education. Articulation routes, IAG and even funding levels all designed with “the learner journey” in mind is what is being delivered in Wales, and what will surely be floated soon in England.
But there are three important things that are missing – from the proposals, and from the series of reviews that preceded them.
Ellen Hazelkorn’s “have one system” review in Wales might have been more academic than James Withers’ Scottish version, but neither were especially strong on protecting students. The difference is that by the time ministers picked them up and ran with them, at least in Wales there was a sense that learners sometimes need protection – and the ability to raise complaints. For a system wide-review to not use the word once is astonishing.
Maybe the fact that the SPSO reached a decision on just one complaint about a university in Scotland last year is a sign of a healthy system where students’ issues are consistently resolved speedily and effectively internally. Come on now.
The second is that for all the careful avoidance of calling everything a provider, and for all of the sector-leading work that sparqs has been up to over the years, students are just not viewed in the Scottish version as partners.
Employers get engagement – “putting employer views at the heart of our education and skills system, particularly in skills planning, national strategy, qualifications, careers, and development of the post-school learning system”. Unlike in Wales, students don’t even get a token seat on the SFC’s reformed board.
Withers had at least called for a post-school learning system that “enables universal access to the information or support needed for any individual to make informed choices”. That’s sort of in there as “making changes to the quality of information on financial health, performance and outcomes” which might “bring benefits for learners who would have access to more comprehensive and robust data and information on outcomes for each learning journey.”
It may well do. But what learners always also want is comprehensive and robust data and information on the experience they’ll have while enrolled. Even England’s TEF recognises that – despite the surreal medalistic implementation.
We might imagine that all of the things we expect universities to do for students – provide a safe environment, adjust to enable access for Disabled students, grow them as rounded citizens, reduce rates of Gonorrhoea or deliver the programme that was advertised could become important duties of the new mega-body.
Wales was slow to catch on to what pretty much the rest of Europe and Australia would call “the learning environment” but it got there in the end. There’s nothing in Scotland’s proposals – despite the SFC’s tertiary review having several pages on everything from pastoral care to extracurriculars.
You might assume that “providing assurance that money has been spent effectively” and addressing that “there are currently no system-wide measures of success” would include, oh I don’t know, a national survey of students’ views, or a plan to tackle perceptions of poor value for money, or a single mention of the hundreds of thousands of international students whose money props the system up.
Some students in Scotland don’t pay fees. Many do, including many Scottish students, and all invest their own money and time – but while it is “vital that the Scottish Government gets the possible best value from its significant public investment’, no such commitment is there for students.
Snail’s pacing
But as well as all that, it’s about snails. What both Hazelkorn and even DfE got when designing CTER/MEDR and OfS – at least in principle – was that institutional behaviour in a mass system needs to be regulated, and that institutional interests are not always the same as student interests.
Funding and coordination help – but you have to feel a bit of fear too. And you need a sense that universities should, in part, be accountable to students, not just to ministers and their purse strings.
Do I think it’s OK to recruit an international student to a city without giving them accurate information on costs of that city or thinking that there’s a decent chance they’ll have somewhere safe, affordable, and nearby to live? I don’t. Universities need duties as well as funding agreements – because without them what they should do becomes what they could do – luxuries of the past as the funding gets squeezed.
Sometimes, universities don’t deliver what they said they would with impunity, sometimes they fail in what should be basic duties with impunity, and sometimes – by act or omission – they harm people too. Students’ rights to what they’ve been promised, rights to have a set of basics delivered and rights to not be harmed matter – and when they’re rights that are easy to enforce, it increases the chances of getting what was promised, having those basic duties performed, and not being harmed. It also helps bolster institutions’ case for funding.
Even if the SPSO didn’t have that backlog and students had a clearer sense of what they could expect, the idea that Scotland isn’t even thinking about a dedicated post-16 ombudsperson when most of the rest of Europe has is as baffling as it is inadequate.
Above all else, as I always say, education is only education when it’s a partnership – two to tango and all that. That has to be about more than a line in the quality code or a phrase in an impact framework or a class rep system that soaks up grumbles. It has to be about students being able to exercise genuine power whenever and wherever a decision is made about them. The review is ultimately about power, and in the system as proposed, they simply don’t have any.
There are eleven questions in the consultation, plus a tacked on “what, if any, additional powers should SFC have in order to help ensure the post-school education and skills system operates effectively”.
Students and their associations should take the opportunity of Q12 to fill in the yawning gaps – and ensure that May Donoghue’s great granddaughter won’t have to go to the High Court to have her interests met.
