Overseas students wrongly accused of cheating by the Home Office are developing a television drama pitch, inspired by the success of Mr Bates vs the Post Office in persuading politicians to look again at an unresolved scandal.
A group of students still battling to clear their names met earlier this month to begin writing an account of their experiences, which they hope will convey to a wider audience the catastrophic fallout from the Home Office’s decision to cancel about 35,000 international students’ visas amid allegations of cheating.
They describe this as a last-ditch attempt to focus public attention on a miscarriage of justice that has been simmering for a decade but never captured mainstream interest.
Nazek Ramadan, the director of Migrant Voice, a charity that has been trying to secure justice for the students since 2017, is running writing workshops with some of the students to help them tell their own stories. She has been frustrated by how hard it has been to get politicians and newspaper readers to engage with the English language test scandal.
“If it takes a drama to make people understand, then we’ll make a drama. We’ve been inspired by how people have responded to the Post Office drama, and there are so many parallels,” she said.
“This is a huge injustice that most people still don’t know about. Thousands of students, young men and women who came here in good faith, had their lives ruined. We want people to empathise and support them. What they went through must be documented.”
Ramadan first met students affected by the scandal in 2017 when they visited the charity she runs looking for advice on how to shake off the Home Office’s allegations of cheating, which were levelled against more than 35,000 people after a BBC Panorama documentary that showed widespread cheating in some Home Office-approved test centres.
Ramadan said: “I was so shocked by what I heard. People’s lives had been turned upside down, they were being treated like criminals, they lost friends, some were disowned by their families. Their parents thought the British legal system doesn’t lie – that if you have been accused, then that must be right. It was a nightmare for them.”
The charity’s work successfully linked students with lawyers who began to appeal against the allegations; so far more than 3,700 have won their appeals.
Ramadan has sought the advice of a film director, who has previously shown an interest in the charity’s work, but is hoping that drama commissioners will see the potential for a powerful story within the battles students are still fighting against the government. “This is not fiction, it’s real, an ongoing story of a live injustice. That’s what so compelling about it,” she said.
Patrick Lewis, a barrister with Garden Court chambers, has met many of the students involved. “The parallels with the Post Office scandal are tragically all too obvious,” he said. “I have represented in over 80 cases where individuals have faced removal from the UK based on the accusation of fraud. I have been successful in the vast majority of those appeals as there is evidence which raises real doubts about the reliability of the accusations that have been made.”
Navjot Kaur, 33, is one of the students involved in preliminary conversations over how to convert their experiences into drama. She came to Britain from Amritsar, India, to study tourism management when she was 19.
“I had no need to cheat in the English test – I had already scored high marks in a test I’d taken previously. This has ruined my life and my career. I still can’t travel. I wanted to be an air hostess. I can’t complete my dreams,” she said.
The ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office brought new attention this year to the Post Office Horizon scandal in which people were prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting because of faulty accounting software installed in the late 1990s.
