Friends of the UCL Cut the Rent Campaign have produced a wonderful pamphlet detailing the background and history of this inspirational grassroots campaign.
Giving a detailed view of the rent strike between January and April, this beautiful and informative pamphlet is well worth a read. You can download the full text below:
Download the Rent Strike Pamphlet
Victory to the #RentStrike!
by Iida Käyhkö
As students living in London and paying tens of thousands of pounds to gain a degree that will most likely never lead to the fulfilling career we were falsely promised, the best we can realistically expect is a life devoid of happiness and security. Luckily, our university recognises our plight, as this common knowledge has now been turned into official UCL policy.
With the new extenuating circumstances regulations, circumstances such as “exam stress, financial problems, accommodation problems or domestic problems” are considered a part of the “everyday reality” of being a student, and UCL has decided that these situations are not in and of themselves sufficient grounds for extenuating circumstances. Because that’s just what student life is like in these times of marketised further education, right?
Under the new extenuating circumstances policy, it seems it will be almost impossible to get a deadline extension. The university is extremely unlikely to accept applications based on medical conditions that have not been fully diagnosed, or conditions that are already covered under examination arrangements. Furthermore, situations that were disclosed late will not be considered.
Not only do you need to go through reams of paperwork to apply for an extension and submit appropriate evidence, you could also be waiting for days to hear back from the faculty panel. Even more worryingly, these changes will predominantly affect students with ongoing medical issues, disabilities, learning difficulties and mental health conditions, as these situations are no longer acceptable grounds for extenuating circumstances.
One of the aims of the new regulations is to “foster a professional approach” through requiring students to “accept responsibility for their conduct” – after all, it’s not like some aspects of your life could ever be out of your control.
This gives us a glimpse into the university’s attitude towards the student body: UCL seems essentially distrusting of students, and regards struggles in the face of difficult personal circumstances as a sign of weakness, not a reality of life that affects us all. The university seems to suggest that a student can reasonably be expected not to experience any personal difficulties during a three-year degree – or at least, to be able to perform to their best ability regardless of any hardship. It’s our everyday reality as students after all.
UCL Defend Education, in conjunction with UCLU, has launched the #withoutEC campaign, collecting stories from students who have applied for extenuating circumstances in the past. Our goal is to highlight the importance of a fair and non-discriminatory extenuating circumstances policy, and to stress the importance of an adequate support system at university. The stories collected will be used (anonymously) to lobby UCL to repeal the new regulations.
So while you’re attending the funeral of a loved one, living off pot noodles for the third week in a row, or crying yourself to sleep every night from sheer stress and exhaustion, while your flat in halls has no hot water (again), just remember: UCL is “committed to the wellbeing and safety of our students” and seeks to “ensure your university experience is a fulfilling, healthy and enjoyable one”. Just don’t ask for an extension.
Share your stories of what life would be like #withoutEC – see www.facebook.com/withoutec
As if hiking our loan repayments, and cutting maintenance grants and Disabled Students’ Allowance, wasn’t enough for the Tory government, now they’ve unveiled plans for the worst attacks on education in decades. If we let them get away with it, it will mean the death of public education as we know it.
The power to raise the undergrad fee cap – already at £9000 – will be handed to ministers without even needing Parliament to vote. The Tories have learned from the massive protests in 2010 when Parliament voted to triple fees and students hit the streets and occupied campuses, coming dangerously close to getting enough MPs to rebel and stop the policy – now they want to do it behind closed doors.
Even more sinister are the plans for marketization. After multiple failed attempts to make higher education a competitive market, the Conservatives are going to hammer universities into an artificial market serving business. Jo Johnson, the minister responsible, described his vision of universities as no more than a “pipeline of graduates” supplying industry. Universities will be factories, where students are just raw material, to be moulded into ready-made workers for the benefit of employers.
Universities will be made to compete in a “Teaching Excellence Framework”, which will value teaching against metrics and tickboxes like graduate destination statistics and flawed “consumer satisfaction” surveys. The government wants education to serve the interests of employers and big business, rather than being a place for critical thinking, challenges to power and intellectual and artistic exploration. This will be reinforced by an even more narrow-minded assessment exercise in research, restricting academic freedom. Arts, humanities, social sciences and blue-sky science – anything that doesn’t serve short-term profits – face yet more pressure.
Universities that score well will be allowed to raise their fees above £9,000, worsening inequality in a divided system. Meanwhile the plans include preparations for worse-scoring public universities to be allowed to shut, collapsing under the weight of years of attacks. Simultaneously, further and life-long education face cuts that could shut 40% of further education and sixth form colleges.
In public universities’ place will rise private institutions prioritising shareholder profits over students: the reforms will give unfair assistance to these new providers, such as looser regulation of student numbers, and easier access to the right to call themselves “universities” and to public money.
Teaching quality won’t be improved by a competitive market. It depends instead on the resources available and teaching staff working conditions. We need to reverse years of squeezed funding, and the underpayment, overstretching and demoralisation of staff – especially precarious casualised academics like postgrad teaching assistants. Instead of using these metrics to intensify the pressure, exhaustion and insecurity of our staff, we want decent funding for teaching, and good pay and secure jobs for our teachers. These shouldn’t be funded by boosting fees – education should be free – but by taxing the rich and their businesses, and putting the banks we bailed out and their investments under democratic control. Our society has huge resources – we should put them to better use redistributing wealth and serving education, healthcare and public services.
Finally, even our ability to defend ourselves and education is under threat. The new trade union law places incredibly undemocratic restrictions on our staff’s ability to take action, and our student unions – already bureaucratised and tied down by regulations – face a similar threat as part of the reforms.
The outlook is bleak but we can beat these changes. We need to spread awareness, organise together, and use protest and direct action to force the government to drop the plans. UCL Defend Education, as part of the National Campaign Against Fees & Cuts, will be doing our bit here at UCL and we need you to get involved too. The battle starts with a protest, meeting 1pm 26 November at the main Quad. See you there!
by Sophie Watson – UCL Department of Latin and Greek
….And we will do it again!
Earlier this week UCL forked out £100k in compensation to residents of Campbell House West following 7 months of protest, strike action, and hard graft.
Full compensation to all 87 former residents of Campbell house West. Each resident is to receive up to £1368 in compensation following the dispute over unbearable living conditions and vermin infestations. UCL repeatedly responded with neglect, delay, and breach of contract.
The rent strike started on 8 May and during that time 17 complaint forms were submitted by to management. The strike was accompanied by more protests and direct actions. By the 10 October, there was still no outcome.
In addition to vermin infestations in the basement, the demolition works happening opposite the halls literally shook mirrors and tables. Unbearable noise forced many students to return home to revise, incurring huge travel costs, instead of being able to use their falsely marketed “study bedrooms.”
UCL did not only respond with senseless bureaucracy and lazy treatment, but also with illegal threats of academic sanctions and expulsion over withholding rent. This, of course, was totally illegal, and nothing but scare tactics.
Commenting on UCL’s response, Pascal LeTendre-Hanns (UCL Union Officer) said that: “The important thing is how much of an upward struggle it’s been for the residents and those supporting the campaign. UCL management have delayed, obfuscated and denied responsibility at every stage; that’s why this full compensation is such a huge vindication of the cause”.
Angus O’Brien (UCLU Halls Representative) who spoke at the complaints panel puts the victory into context: “this does not constitute the end of the campaign – due to wider concerns about sharply increasing rents, the 45% surplus made by UCL on running halls, totalling £15,779,000 profit this year, and diminishing standards, this this example will only prove to disenchanted students that disruptive protest works.”
For “UCL, Cut The Rent”, this is only the start. We’re now looking to get wider to get results for inhabitants of other halls, where UCL fails to adequately maintain facilities and justify their supernormal profit. Many students I have spoken to are hit hard in an attempt to make ends meet. Maintenance loans and grants almost never cover it, let alone allow some sort of weekly budget.
By celebrating the success of the Campbell House West Dispute, we demonstrate and maintain that students do not have to be exploited. UCL Management has been beaten, and can be beaten again. Wider action is on the cards with a larger and more empowered group of students from other halls, including a housing bloc at the 4th November student demo!
@rentcutUCL
by Tom Robinson – UCLU Welfare and International Officer
Students and our education are under attack like never before. We have already seen the tripling of tuition fees in 2010, a measure that barred many potential students from coming to university. Meanwhile, our education has been steadily marketised, with our institutions run like businesses aiming to generate profit.
Now the government intends to entirely scrap maintenance grants, replacing them with loans. This will mean that students from the poorest backgrounds take on yet more debt in order to access an education – if they even start at university in the first place. We know that many students who relied on maintenance grants in order to make it through their degree simply would not have been able to come if they had been forced to take on thousands of pounds more of debt instead.
We know that the system was not fit for purpose in the first place. Any system for allowing access to grants which is based on means testing will mean that some students do not receive that they need. It is difficult to legally prove estrangement from your parents, which means that many LGBTQ students who do not receive financial support from ‘phobic parents are unable to claim the amount of grant that they require. We can’t argue that we should keep the current system: we need to demand a radical change, with living maintenance grants for everyone.
We cannot and will not sit quietly as the government destroys the final chance for anyone other than the vastly rich to go to university. All around the country, students are mobilising. Students organised a series of protests and occupations of MPs’ offices in mid-September, demanding that they oppose government plans to scrap maintenance grants.
On October 14, students will be demonstrating at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to demand #GrantsNotDebt, and on November 4, students from all over the UK will converge on central London to march in our thousands to demand free education and living grants for all – no barriers, no borders, and no business.
This is the first of a series of ‘myth-busting’ articles about UCL’s polices that will seek to provide students with arguments to debunk management opposition to cutting the rent in student accommodation. Ok, let’s deal with the big myth first, head on:
In a letter to the Cut The Rent Campaign in March 2015, Vice Provost Rex Knight claimed that students in UCL accommodation ‘need to generate a contribution.’ By this he meant that that the annual income from our rents needs to be higher than the running costs of the halls. Furthermore, he argues, the surplus needs to increase every year. He wants the surplus to rise from just below £10m to £15m between 2014 and 2016 alone. This is a rise from a surplus of around £5m in 2009 (see graph). In 2014 UCL’s total income from rent was £31m and in 2016 it’s expected to be £34m. In other words, we can expect that between 2014 and 2016 32-44% of our rent won’t pay for the running costs of halls but for capital investment.
The claim that this money has to come out of students’ pockets is a myth.
Investment to improve the standards of halls is solely needed. However, the problem is that the money for these future redevelopments has been taken from students by raising rents at a rate far higher than inflation. Not only will students never see the benefits of the surplus we are generating but we are also paying more, proportionately and in real terms, every year. As a result, a huge number of rooms at UCL are now completely unaffordable.
Does UCL have other option than to exploit students in this way? Of course they do.
UCL has a lot of money. Over the next few year management want to increase the university’s overall surplus from 2.5 to 5.5% – sending an additional £47m going into the coffers every year. This is so that UCL can fulfil huge investments in new campus buildings. Between now and 2025 the bosses are planning to invest over £1bn in new facilities in Bloomsbury and Stratford. In principle there’s nothing wrong with these investments – because management decided to drastically increase student numbers we need more space. But it proves that for management raising the rent for students is not a must, it’s a matter of priorities. UCL could reduce the rate of its billion pound investments by 0.01% and afford to cut our rent by 40% if they wanted to. They chose not to, and no students were involved in making this decision.
To give another example of how management priorities to use our resources: In 2013 there were 377 members of the upper echelons of UCL staff and management who with salaries ranging between £100,000 and £320,000 per year, according to the university’s 2014 annual financial statement. At the time, 377 people represented slightly less than 4% of the entire UCL staff body. Roughly, they all received between 6 and 18 times more money than a university cleaner in a year. The combined cost to UCL for paying salaries to these 377 people was at least £51,640,000.*
A year later, the number of top staff and bosses earning over £100,000 had increased to 429, and top incomes rose to £350,000. All-in-all, the cost of paying these salaries went up by at least £7.5m, to at least £59,150,000. During the same period, rents for students went up by around 5%. Students became more exploited at the same time as those earning above £100,000 were paid more.
Compare these sums to the income and the surplus generated from students’ rent. Between 2014 and 2015 the UCL predicted an increase in the income from student accommodation by about £2m, from £31m to £33m. This meant yet another above-inflation rent increase for students. However, what these statistics demonstrate is that if UCL had frozen (not cut) the money they put into management pay in 2013, they could have instantly slashed rents by 24%, rather than increase them the following year.
The point here is not to say that there is a dichotomy between estates investment and student rents, or between management pay and student rents. Rather, it is to point out that the UCL has the money to cut rents for students if they wanted to, were they to rebalance their budgets. Student accommodation does not necessarily have to generate a surplus in order for UCL to keep improving standards in halls – it’s a matter of priorities. What we can conclude is that UCL is currently prioritising higher rents for students and higher pay for managers and that no students were involved in setting out these priorities.
Now the field is open to agree or disagree with these priorities.
* The statistics available do not reveal the exact amount every top staff member was paid, only the income brackets and the amount of people on salaries within these brackets. Therefore all calculations are conservative, estimating that all high-earners in one bracket receive the lowest salary in that bracket. All of the 68 people who earned between £100,000 and £110,000 in 2013 are assumed to have been paid £100,000. This is why all totals are labelled ‘at least.’
By Omar Raii – UCL Department of Mathematics
In May of this year, the Tories managed to gain an overall majority in the general election and got ready to continue in power for five more years, with plans of implementing even more devastating cuts to public services and an unrelenting austerity agenda.
Imagine if someone had said at the time that a few months later, the Labour party would be led by the vice-chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a man who had voted against the previous Labour government hundreds of times. Imagine if someone had said that this man would have as his Shadow Chancellor someone who described one of his hobbies as “generally fomenting the overthrow of capitalism”. It would probably have sounded somewhat surprising.
But that is of course exactly what has happened.
After over a hundred thousand people joined the Labour Party, as well as many registering as supporters, Jeremy Corbyn, initially quite the outsider with some bookies offering odds of 100-1 for his winning, was elected by a landslide on a mandate to oppose austerity and change the direction that Labour had been going down for many years.
Corbyn has chosen as his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, someone who has not only had a track record of opposing Tory attacks on working people, but who also has supported student protests in the past. This included visiting student occupations at UCL in 2010 and 2012 to show his solidarity!
There has been a somewhat refreshing renaissance within the Labour Party and in its relation to the government it was always meant to oppose. After a majority of Labour MPs shamefully abstaining on the Tory Welfare Bill, we are now in a position where every single Labour MP voted against the Tories’ ultra-restrictive Trade Union Bill and the party is now
promising to support strikes in future. The new Labour leader’s anti-austerity politics carried over also into education and debt, where he promised to end tuition fees, leading him to be very popular with student voters and being officially supported by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.
With the current Tory government planning on ending maintenance grants and furthering marketisation of education with the “Teaching Excellence Framework”, this has come as encouraging news.
But this honeymoon period can’t last forever. On September 20, various youth and student groups as well as individual Labour party members that had been supportive of the campaign to get Corbyn elected came together to set up a new organisation, Labour Young Socialists, in order to build on the momentum from the campaign and to further socialist ideas and democracy within Young Labour and Labour Students as well as the wider party.
If you’re a Labour member, get involved with Labour Young Socialists as well as your local Constituency Labour Party and fight for the socialist policies that Labour desperately needs.
by Angus O’Brien, UCLU Halls Accommodation Officer
If you’re reading this, the chances are that you either live in UCL halls or have done so recently. It is likely, then, that you know just how expensive it is – this year, the average cost per week of a room in UCL accommodation is £176, which is £7031.59 for the full year. This year, the very cheapest single room is £135.59 per week, coming to well over half the
entire loan available to students – if you are eligible for the full amount.
Yet six years ago, the picture was almost entirely different. In this time, rent has increased by an average of almost 56% – students are paying an average of £2484.94 more per year, and the cheapest room at UCL has increased by more than £40 weekly, from £94.01 per week.
So, are these rapid, high rent increases justified? The short answer is no – inflation has caused prices to rise by 19.8%
since 2009, and student income has only increased by 12% to 16%, depending on income bands.
Alongside this, UCL will be running a surplus of £15,779,000 from accommodation during this academic year, enough to fund a rent cut of almost 45% without affecting the running of halls.
We as students of UCL have decided that enough is enough – UCL cannot continue to raise the rent in halls as it wishes, ignoring the rapidly decreasing level of affordability. Living in halls now is almost impossible without financial assistance on top of your student loan and maintenance grant (including the UCL bursary!).
UCL cannot pretend to offer equal opportunities to students from all sections of society when the sky-high cost of living constitutes an unofficial entry requirement based on your financial position.
Asking nicely won’t make UCL accommodation affordable – your help is required to run the campaign to hold UCL to account.
Join us for this year’s first regular campaign meeting on Wednesday, 7th October and for more information on how to get involved check out facebook.com/uclcuttherent
1. Join the Campaign Meeting
The best way to meet others at UCL who are passionate and committed to making halls affordable is to go to the year’s first open meeting of the ‘UCL, Cut the Rent’ Campaign. The meeting will be on Wednesday 7 October at UCL and will give you lots of info and advice on what we can do together to force UCL to end their exploitative ways. Find all the details here: www.facebook.com/events/964826676907267/ (There will even be free food and drinks!)
2. Take part in your local Halls Assembly
Halls Assemblies are meetings at your hall where residents get together to decide for themselves how they would like their halls to be run. This is real democracy in practice – students making decisions for themselves about what changes they’d like see. This is an opportunity to unite with others in your hall around common issues and agree on how to improve anything from cockroaches to the lack of halls parties. Halls Assemblies can also be for making decisions about collective action such as writing letters to management and protesting poor maintenance and high rent. Many of the rules and conditions that UCL enforces are unfair – Halls Assemblies are where you and everybody else in your halls decide what to do about them.
Keep an eye out for your first local assembly. Anybody can call an assembly, so if you can’t find one scheduled for your halls you can establish one! Contact your Union Halls Officers to find out more details or help to organise a meeting.
3. Become a Halls Representative or join your halls committee Halls Election
Each hall at UCL should have a union halls rep and a residents’ committee. These are students who are elected to raise issues with UCL management, stay up to date with problems around your site and take on organising work for actions meeting, events and parties. Being a representative in the students union or on a committee is an important and rewarding job and a great way to meet and speak to others at your halls, find out what their problems are and meet with the bosses to demand that they get solved. UCL also gives a budget to halls that have a residents’ committee (£5 per resident, or between £1,000 to £4,500 per hall) – this money can be used for social events, parties, equipment for the common room or anything else residents decide. Union reps can also get the opportunity to bring issues faced by their constituents to meetings with other union officers, union general assemblies or meetings with UCL management. If you’re proactive and like getting involved and solving problems and issues for fairer halls, you should stand for election!
To join the election to be a union halls representative just follow this link: www.uclu.org/election/autumn-elections-2015 If you want to be part of your halls committee, write to the Union Halls Accommodation Officer and to your local site managers. Nominations for union representative close on Friday 9 October – so make sure to register on time!
4. Get organising for improvements
If you experience things in your flat that you think should be improved (Lower rent, no pests, better kitchens, or anything else), don’t keep it to yourself! Chances are that others in your flat, your block or your halls will be experiencing the same problem. Don’t feel that you’re not entitled to make complaints to UCL management or demand better. Talk to other people in your flats and in your halls, follow what’s going on on your halls facebook page or ask others if they’ve had the same problems. Find out what issues are around and decide how you’d like to see it fixed. Nobody likes pests! Is your fridge too small? Would you like to spend less money on rent? – Don’t accept poor conditions, and if you stand up for your flatmates’ problems you can count on them standing up for you.
5. Send your demands to UCL
Make sure to let UCL know what you want. Also make sure that you’re not alone in proposing improvements; remember – unity is strength. The more people who’re demanding change the more likely it is that management will be forced to take you seriously. UCL are experts at ignoring individual complaints and often dismiss students who write to them with. But when we get together me can make them listen – it’s thanks to collective strength and bargaining power that the ‘Cut the Rent’ Campaign has been able to win concessions in the past. Remember that you can always turn individual issues into collective disputes. If one of your flatmates has a broken window, you can speak up on their behalf and vice versa. Set up petitions and collect names of everybody who wants to see better conditions and lower rent.
Know who to contact at UCL and report service failures (report issues here) as soon as possible. If you don’t get a satisfactory response from your local site managers, write to their bosses. Don’t hesitate to send complaints or petitions to the Director of Student Accommodation (w.wilson@ucl.ac.uk) or the Head of Property (c.plank@ucl.ac.uk). Always contact your Union Halls Officers for advice and assistance.
6. Get your flatmates involved!
The more people are involved in the campaign for lower rent the more likely we are to succeed! Talk to your flatmates and others in your halls. Get them to come down to the next campaign meeting or Halls Assembly, and take part in a protest action. It’s our right to have decent and affordable homes – in a city beset by a housing crisis that’s hitting not only students, this is something that concerns everybody! Lower rent at UCL will help break the power of the landlords across London, but it will only happen if we get out mates to get on board too. Remember that this is a struggle we can win if we stand together.
Contact the ‘UCL, Cut the Rent’ Campaign here.
We’ve planned loads of events for you, we know exactly what you wanted and we’ve delivered like never before. Below is a handy guide to your life for the next few weeks:
06/10/15: 17:00 – Jeremy Corbyn: What Next For The Left?
In this year’s first UCL Left Forum meeting, we will try to answer the questions: what does Corbyn’s victory mean and what happens now and how can we make sure that all the people who are excited about left politics stay mobilized and militant? Afterwards, we’ll decamp to the UCLU Labour social!
Where?: Institute of Education Bar S14
Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/480458088800891/
07/10/15: 18:00 – Winning the Rent Cut – Open Meeting for the UCL, Cut the Rent Campaign
This meeting will focus on how a rent cut can be won – building on what has been learnt from the campaign last year and the successful action taken by the students protesting in Hawkridge House and Campbell House – and planning exactly the steps that will be taken in order to build an effective campaign from the residents in the halls upwards.
Where?: TBA
Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/964826676907267/
08/10/15: 18:00 – Grant Cuts, Rising Fees and a Housing Crisis: UCL Defend Education Launch Meeting with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners
The new Tory government is planning brutal attacks on students and education. They want to take maintenance grants away from the poorest students, hike up repayments on loans we’ve already taken out, and marketise universities while slashing funding for colleges – not to mention dismantling the wider welfare state while a cost of living crisis enforces rip-off rents.
But if we fight back together, we can beat them! UCL Defend Education is part of a movement campaigning to stop these attacks, and to win free, democratic education for everyone. Come along to find out more about activism at UCL, and engage in the debate over education, the priorities of society and what we as students can do about all this.
Speakers:
Clive Bradley, Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners (as featured in the film Pride)
Raquel Palmeira, National Campaign Against Fees & Cuts
Hannah Webb, National Union of Students Exec
Angus O’Brien, UCL Cut the Rent activist & UCLU Halls Officer
Tom Robinson, UCLU Welfare & International Officer
Where?: Kathleen Kenyon Room, Lewis’ Building
Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/744561008982297/
09/10/15: 19:00 – Pints and Politics: UCL Lefty Welcome Drinks
If you’re interested in lefty political ideas, crazy things such as reducing inequality, saving the environment and fighting cuts to public services, or if you’re just a bit weirded out by what David Cameron did during his time at university, come for a relaxed evening and a chat about politics and campaigns on and off campus.
No background knowledge is required – we won’t be giving you a test or make you argue with someone over their interpretation of the twenty-fourth page of the Communist Manifesto. Probably best not to come if you’re a Tory, though.
Have a soft or not soft drink and talk about stuff – and don’t worry, we’re nice people.
Where?: Institute of Education Bar
Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1472662343041562/
12/10/15: 17:00 – WTF IS GOING ON?: The Fight For Education
This meeting will explain “WTF is going on?”, with help from speakers involved in the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts and the National Union of Students, and discuss ideas about what we can do to get involved in the fight for education.
Where?: Institute of Education Bar S14
Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/543748365790984/
04/11/15: 13:00 – NATIONAL DEMO: Free Education and Living Grants For All
From scrapping Maintenance Grants, planning to raise tuition fees, slashing support for disabled students and making brutal funding cuts to Adult & Further Education; to keeping thousands of people locked up in detention centres and deporting international students to their deaths: the Conservative Government is attacking us from all sides, and it’s time to fight back.
Where?: Assemble on Malet Place
Event Page: www.facebook.com/events/1449378505377525/
Organise, Educate, Escalate 