A UNIVERSITY whistleblower has secretly filmed meetings with senior academics at which she was put under pressure to pass first-year students whom she believed should have been thrown off their degree courses.

Lecturers at Southampton Solent University, unaware of a hidden camera, told the whistleblower that on occasions they found the marking policy “absolutely rubbish”.

The film, to be broadcast by BBC1’s Inside Out programme in southern England tomorrow, raises fears that “new” universities are filling places by lowering standards.

Southampton Solent, which denies that it passes substandard work, became a university earlier this year. About 17% of its students drop out each year.

The whistleblower, a junior lecturer in film studies whose identity is not revealed, tells the programme: “As a new lecturer I was under huge pressure to pass the students. The college was financially driven. It was a pure bums-on-seats policy. It wasn’t about education at all.”

Universities lose £4,500 in central government subsidy for every student who drops out after his or her first year.

The filming, which took place in June, shows two meetings at which the end-of-year pass marks for film students were discussed.

The whistleblower told her superiors that a significant minority of her 20 first-year students should fail. If they also failed their retakes, they would not be allowed on to the second year of their degree.

However, only one of her students — who was suspected of plagiarism — was failed, but was later reprieved.

At the first meeting Southampton Solent’s “positive pass policy” is explained by Karen Randell, the tutor in charge of the course in film studies.

“We are kind of remedial teachers at some level. These people have been failures all their lives . . . we don’t automatically say it’s failed. Even though you can see this is absolutely rubbish, you have to look at the wider picture.”

Randell adds: “We don’t have a no-fail policy, but we do have a positive pass policy if you see what I mean. It just means you have to look at the whole thing. Are the entire learning aims and objectives of the course passed?

“You have to have integrity, but it does get challenged from the top all the time. Why are these students failing? You end up writing a whole remit, rationale to explain why they have failed. The fact that the students are not good enough is not good enough.”

At the second meeting, Jennifer Toynbee-Holmes, a senior tutor, is filmed explaining how difficult it is to fail students: “The thing is it comes from above here and we just can’t do that, we can’t do it and you don’t have the clout to kind of mark them down like that.

“Essentially, in the end you have to fit with the system. It’s as simple as that.”

When the junior lecturer insists that she will fail one student, Toynbee-Holmes tells her: “I think I would probably end up failing him. It p***** me off because it’s going to be work for someone.”

Ten of the essays discussed at the meetings were later assessed as poor by Chris Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools. “These are students who can neither punctuate nor, for the most part, spell any but the simplest words. They have no understanding of English grammar. They are incapable of structuring an argument,” Woodhead said.

Lecturers at Southampton Solent are not alone in pushing students’ marks up over the borderline to prevent them failing, but this is the first time that academics have been filmed making such admissions. Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said that universities were not helping weak students by allowing them to continue.

“The newer universities are always trying to attract students with courses that the less academic can cope with, but it is a waste of the students’ time,” he said.

Southampton Solent this weekend denied that it allowed inadequate work to pass. Professor Roger Brown, the vice-chancellor, said: “We have investigated the allegations made in the programme and there is no basis for them. We remain confident about our standards.”

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