How Covid student fiasco could have been avoided – Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP

The SNP failed to plan ahead for return of students and should now take action to fix the resulting mess, writes Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP.

Students at Glasgow University's Murano Street residences make a point about their treatment (Picture: John Devlin)

Desperate images of students taping signs appealing for help to the windows of halls of residences in lockdown paint a very different picture to my time in halls 25 years ago.

The situation in our universities should never have been allowed to happen and the unexpected emergency measures now in place are robbing young people of an important time in their lives.

In my fresher’s week, I moved into a six-bedroom flat in the Hillhead complex at Aberdeen with three Scots, two Englishmen and a Greek.

We shared a kitchen, a bathroom and trudged over to the main building for breakfast and dinner every day with hundreds of others.

We didn’t get a lot of sleep, we moved around in packs of 30 or 40 and entire corridors from various halls would mobilise for nights out.

Then there was matriculation and the societies fair, the course inductions and the walking tours of campus.

Queues and crowds everywhere, it was a whirlwind of new experiences and excitement – nothing about it was socially distant and that was the point.

I feel very sorry for those 17 and 18-year-olds, many of whom received downgraded results in August which put their very place at university or college in jeopardy.

Following an anxious and uncertain summer, they now face a grim reality of weeks confined to bedrooms, denied the free association of their peers while courses have been moved almost entirely to online platforms.

The student experience right now is a hollow and lonely facsimile of what it used to be.

But this crisis was not inevitable.

The leader of my party, Willie Rennie, had been asking Nicola Sturgeon for a plan on the students’ return for months, pointing out that it would be the biggest movement of people since the start of lockdown. In July, we called for mass testing to ensure that we were not seeding halls with coronavirus, but the SNP prevaricated, ignored the scientific modelling and did nothing.

Covid is in our student communities, that ship has sailed, but the Lib Dems are now calling for five things to salvage something for our students:

1. Mass testing on campus, so that students can be sure they are free of Covid and begin to socialise freely within normal guidelines;

2. The Government to return rent paid by students for rooms they aren’t using;

3. Protect the right of students to return home if they test negative without needing a special reason and without the threat of penalty;

4. Additional on-campus support for those who test positive and are unwell;

5. On-campus mental health support to reach students who feel trapped.

My old mentor Charles Kennedy said of his time at Glasgow, that “the university gives you your degree but the union gives you your education”.

Universities offer so much more than lectures and tutorials and your time in halls and in campus bars does a lot to shape the adult you will become.

So many students left home last week hoping to begin the rest of their lives. We should not have continued to promise them the experience they were expecting if we were unable to deliver it.

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