Students can’t be forced to boycott classes, lecturers told

Camilla Turner

Ewan Somerville

LECTURERS have been warned not to put pressure on students to boycott classes in the run-up to the latest round of university strikes.

Students at the University of Sheffield told The Daily Telegraph they had been physically blocked from attending scheduled classes.

Julia Coulson, a first year student at Sheffield, said she was forced to use a back entrance to a faculty building after lecturers blocked the main one.

“The lecturers were stood ... in a line, about 15 of them. They were asking me not to go [to my seminar], not to cross the picket line,” she said. “I tried to go [but] two of them moved and stopped me. I felt awful ... like a criminal for going to something that was on.”

Meanwhile, a department head at Sussex University urged students to be “respectful” towards one another during the strikes.

Prof Andrew Cornwall, head of the School of Global Studies, said he had received a complaint from one student who had been heckled by lecturers and peers as she crossed a picket line to attend an appointment with a therapist she was seeing about a sexual assault.

This week the University and College Union threatened to strike for another 14 days during the summer exam term in a dispute with Universities UK, the vice-chancellor membership body, over pension reforms they claim would make them £10,000 worse off each year in retirement.

A spokesman at the University of Sheffield said lecturers had been told that it was not acceptable to harangue students who wished to attend their classes and seminars during the strike action.