Student day of action: protests over government's higher education plans - Wednesday 14 March

Thousands of students boycott lectures and attend rallies to protest against growing cost of higher education

Today's events are the culmination of a week-long "Come Clean" campaign by the NUS. The union says that unlike for the NHS reforms, the government is not giving the public the opportunity to scrutinise major reforms to higher education. These reforms include the near-trebling of tuition fees to up to £9,000 this autumn and the opening-up to the private sector of degree-awarding powers.

While a white paper setting out the coalition's changes for higher education has been published, plans to publish a bill were quietly dropped or delayed in January.

Liam Burns, president of the NUS, says this "removed the opportunity for the kind of scrutiny that has been afforded to changes in the NHS".