After a recent query from a member, please see below some guidance on monitoring student visas. You can bookmark this page and share it with colleagues.
UCU legal advice remains that people should not wholly boycott the attendance process, because doing so would only be likely to harm the international students and can cause them to be deported from the country.
It is certainly within the bounds of our advice for members to push back on particular mechanisms for collecting that attendance, however. For example, choosing whether to take a manual register, use a QR code, or pass around a sheet for students to tick themselves off. Passing around a sheet and then turning that sheet in to the local administrators is sufficient.
It is also worth noting that GDPR concern goes both ways: we are not supposed to collect data we don’t need or hold it for no reason. But the university is also not really meant to tell instructors which students are on visas if it’s not necessary to do so. Collecting attendance for all students has the effect of anonymizing which students have this legal constraint, and we would expect the University to push back on a request to know which specific students are on visas.
Member are entitled to push back on particular technologies, or to request a QR code system be in place for their course, but not to refuse to do this work altogether.
If you have any questions on this, or require further clarification, please contact ucug@glasgow.ac.uk.