OIA announces new head

[Hetty ter Haar]

OIA announces new head

Donald MacLeod
Monday January 21, 2008

EducationGuardian.co.uk

The new head of the student complaints body in England and Wales is to
be Rob Behrens, a former senior civil servant, it was announced
today.
In May Baroness Ruth Deech will step down from the Office of the
Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), which she helped
establish.

Behrens, presently the complaints commissioner to the Bar Standards
Board, was previously a Cabinet Office senior civil servant and
secretary to the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

The OIA was set up to replace the antiquated complaints procedures at
individual universities, many involving an appeal to the Queen or a
local bishop as the university visitor.

The office, which is intended to provide a cheap and straightforward
alternative to the courts at a time when students are paying
increasing amounts of money for their degree courses, handled 465
complaints in 2006 and 327 in the first six months of 2007, according
to the latest report on its website.

Behrens said he was looking forward to building on the reputation that
the OIA has developed for seeing that every student complaint was
dealt with promptly and fairly.

"The existence of a rigorous, independent and impartial complaints
body for higher education is a student right, meets the needs of
universities and is in the public interest," he said.

Chairman of the OIA board of directors, Prof Norman Gowar, welcomed
Behrens' appointment and paid tribute to Deech, the first independent
adjudicator, who has held the post since April 2004. She had played a
crucial role in the establishment of the office, and acceptance of the
scheme among students and by the higher education sector, he said.

EducationGuardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008