‘I haven’t had a single normal year at university’: the UK students graduating without a graded degree

An unlucky cohort of undergraduates has been plagued by Covid restrictions, education strikes and finally a marking boycott

Emily Smith, a final-year geography student at Durham University, never imagined her already heavily disrupted university experience could end like this. She won’t be graduating this summer because half her work remains unmarked owing to a national marking boycott by lecturers.

She refuses to attend the “completion ceremony” Durham has offered her instead. Without an actual degree classification it seems like a “farce”. Like so many in this deeply unlucky cohort of students, she feels this is the last straw.

Kenneth Fowler obituary

My friend and teacher Kenneth Fowler, who has died aged 88, was an eminent historian of the hundred years war, and a leading light in the teaching of history over more than three decades at Edinburgh University.

Ken’s parents, Ronald and Ethel (nee McMahon), lived next door to the large grocer’s shop they kept at Clayton-le-Woods in Lancashire, and sent Ken and his older brother, David, later a successful businessman, to the local primary school, from where Ken went on to boarding school in Derbyshire.