Not all of 20,000 'complaints' received by universities were complaints

"University complaints by students top 20,000", said a BBC headline yesterday.

The figure was based on Freedom of Information responses from 120 Universities. But the article itself makes clear it includes academic appeals by students, not just complaints.

Anglia Ruskin University, which was listed as having received the highest number of appeals and complaints in 2012/13, has said that only 9 out of 992 of these were what it calls "actual complaints".

The rest were academic appeals. These happen either when students query the marks they've received in exams or other assessed work, or notify the University of mitigating circumstances they believe have affected their performance.

We don't have a similar breakdown of the responses from all 120 institutions, so we don't know how many of the 20,000 were appeals and how many were complaints. And we don't know if the figures provided by Universities are comparable — the different numbers of appeals might reflect the different methods the universities have of handling them.