Students who switch courses

I’ve just come across another good case from the Court of Appeal that came out over the summer while I was away: the fantastically named GOO and Others [2008] EWCA Civ 747. It is yet another example of a long and tarnished line of tribunal case law being overturned.

I’ve decided to create a new category of posts to try and keep track of all these examples. It seems astounding that the Tribunal is so consistently wrong on controversial legal issues. Although, it must be said, there is one example of the Court of Appeal then itself being overturned by the House of Lords.

Anyway, the tribunal repeatedly held that a student admitted for one course of study could not, if turned down for a visa extension application, succeed on appeal if that student had subsequently started another course of study. This approach depended on a very narrow and highly technical construction of the immigration rules and it caused very unfair situations to develop, as the various factual backgrounds in the Oo and others case demonstrate. For example, students arriving in the UK to study one course who found that the college had closed down and who started and were succeeding on another course lost their appeals, as did students who had switched from one course to another for other perfectly legitimate reasons.

Well, the Court of Appeal has finally remedied that. As with the highly skilled migrants case, though, not before hundreds or maybe thousands of students lost their appeals because of the tribunal’s wilfully narrow, conservative approach.