Ruth Deech is demob happy. Waltzing around with a glass of Perrier and scoffing crisps, she’s looking forward to a few weeks hence when she will no longer be the woman at whose door the nation’s students lay their woes.

Since the day four years ago when she walked into an empty office in Reading, Baroness Deech, a straight-talking law professor, has dealt with thousands of stand-offs between students and their universities.

As the first independent adjudicator for Britain’s 147 universities Deech, the former head of an Oxford college, was the port of call for complaints that could be about anything from overcrowded classrooms and broken computers, to lazy lecturers, inadequate teaching and unfair marking.

Last year her Reading-based team handled 1,400 inquiries and 600 grievances and found for the student in a quarter of the cases. In serious situations she could order that compensation be paid. What’s the highest that has been awarded, I ask.

“Quarter of a million pounds,” she says. “That was a group of students complaining about a degree course at Oxford Brookes.” The university said the students would be qualified osteopaths at the end of their degree: it turned out that they weren’t because it was an incomplete course.

In two weeks’ time Deech will retire from the job – but not before warning that universities are facing a surge of complaints next year: an estimated 20% more than this year, and that’s on top of a 30% rise the year before.

“Complaints are going up . . . because students have different expectations,” she says. “Thirty years ago if a lecture was cancelled the reaction would have been joy. Today students feel if a lecture is cancelled and they have paid for the course, they are missing something worthwhile that would have helped them get a good degree.”

The background to the discontent, she goes on, warming to her theme, is the massive expansion of higher education coupled with the end of free degree courses. People who now pay thousands of pounds for study need a good degree to get a well-paid job and clear their debts – and so they will not put up with a shoddy service.

“When I was a student [at Oxford in the 1960s], 5% of the population went to university,” she says. “You got a grant, it was free. I was taught largely by women and they were always there to help. Now there are many more students but the funding per student has not risen to keep pace. The pressure on tutors is to do research and to publish books, not to teach more.”

Her office is expanding to deal with the expected rise in complaints but Deech also wants universities to play a more active role in dealing with students who feel short-changed. “Universities need to take a positive attitude to complaints,” she says. “We are in favour of bringing in a US-style system of campus ombudsmen. Just like you have a college doctor we want a college ombudsman in every university.”

The outlook needs to change, she warns. If it doesn’t, universities could face costly legal battles. In one case, six students won damages of £10,000 each when they sued a college over the shortcomings of a course to restore historic cars. The judge found that the teaching was often poor and there were too few cars to practise on.

Her office has probably diverted dozens of cases from the courts – though students also still have the option to sue their universities: half a dozen cases are currently in front of judges.

Deech says that while most problems emerge from the new universities, she handled one or two complaints from Oxford and Cambridge students, though she prefers to keep details anonymous.

For students she has a clear and simple message: “I would tell them – don’t go to the courts, it’s a waste of time and money. Come to us, we are free. We will try to get them back into the position they would have been in if things had not gone wrong. Maybe we can give them a year of free education – that is much more helpful than going to court.”

Six out of 10 complaints last year were brought by British students; the rest by overseas students, who pay much higher fees. Deech says that sometimes the problem is just one of academic restraint. “Probably universities should be franker with students who are not going to make the grade,” she says. “Sometimes they end up doing a thesis for years – their teachers need to say after one year, ‘This is no good, go home’. There is a kind of academic language which I know means ‘this is no good’ but overseas students don’t understand. There is a failure of communication.”

Is it my imagination, or is she almost relishing the prospect of no longer being our student complaints czar?

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