Student contracts: should we sign on the dotted line?

In this new top-up fees marketplace, students are increasingly being viewed as customers. And, as any customer knows, the buying of goods and services comes with terms and conditions - a contract, writes Gemma Tumelty

On a basic level, it is understandable that higher education institutions are seeking to ensure that students understand their obligations to attend lectures and keep to basic norms of good behaviour.

But by the same token, universities have a responsibility to provide a service too - after all, they exist for the benefit of the student. If a contract is to bind students to attending lectures and tutorials, surely it should also bind the university to specifying levels of teaching provision.

Further education learning contracts, or college charters, have been evident for some time, and although some are better than others, generally, contracts detail the rights and responsibilities for both the college and the student.

Contracts are a potential minefield for the sector and unless there is a process by which they routinely recognise student rights as well as their responsibilities we believe they will always be more punitive to students rather than a guarantee of the education and teaching they can expect.

If we're forced into being the customer, then we want to know what we're buying. The contracts that we have seen so far have come about with little or no consultation with students, and seem to have produced something resembling a legal waiver - a sort of guarantee ensuring that students won't litigate. They have also been exceptionally one-sided. They do not set out what students should expect while at university and seem to protect the institution more from being sued than about improving the learning and experience of students.

That's why we're opposing contracts written in this way and pushing hard for students' welfare rights. This autumn the welfare and student rights campaign team in the NUS is launching a student rights charter detailing what we and our membership believe are students' essential rights and requirements on health, housing and all aspects of welfare.

So we are calling for all educational institutions to recognise the rights of students in all aspects of their lives. Why should students sign on the dotted line for anything less?