What is the Advice Centre?

The Advice Centre is an advice, information and representation service provided by the SRC for all University of Glasgow students.

The Advice Centre offers free, impartial and confidential advice on a wide range of subjects.

For example:

• Benefits and Tax Credits
• Council Tax
• Employment Rights
• Financial Support for Students
• Income Tax/National Insurance
• Harassment, bullying or discrimination
• Health Issues that are affecting your studies, including advice on the Fitness to Study procedure
• Housing Issues
• Money and Consumer Advice

We may also be able to advise and represent you with regard to:

• Academic Appeals
• Formal and informal complaints
• Fitness to Practise procedures
• Academic Student Conduct issues, including Plagiarism and exam misconduct.
• Non-academic Student Conduct issues, including bullyng, harassment or GBV incidents. 

We are also a third party reporting centre for hate crime.

We will do our best to offer assistance on any other difficulties you might experience. If we can’t help, then we’re sure to know someone who can.

Where To Find Us

The Advice Centre is located on the ground floor of the McIntyre Building (next to the University Main Gate), and is staffed by professional and experienced advice workers. Our service is confidential.

If you need urgent help when the advice centre is closed, please see our Out of Hours and Emergency Help webpage for a list of contacts.

How to Contact Us

Email: advice@src.gla.ac.uk  

Alternatively, we can offer you an online appointment via Zoom or Teams.  To make a Zoom or Teams appointment please contact us on the email above.

Phone:  0141 330 5360.  British Sign Language (BSL) users can contact us via contactSCOTLAND-BSL

In-person appointments: We are operating a drop-in service and are open Monday to Friday between 11:30am and 4pm. If you would like to speak to a member of our team in person please make your way to The Welcome Point on the ground floor of The McIntyre Building and ask for The Advice Centre or email or phone us (details above).

*Please remember we don’t have access to your University records (e.g. MyCampus) so make sure you include any relevant information, (including if you’ve spoken to anyone else about the issue already).

What kind of service is it?

Confidential

The Advice Centre is committed to providing a confidential service. You will not be asked to state the nature of your enquiry in the presence of other people, and all interviews are confidential. Staff of The Advice Centre will not divulge the fact of your visit without your consent.

All staff working for The Advice Centre may share information amongst themselves and with the Chief Executive or Deputy Chief Executive where necessary. However, other members of the SRC staff, and the SRC Executive (student officers), are not permitted access to client information. Any information used for the purpose of reports or social policy campaigning will be anonymised so that no individual can be identified.

We may breach confidentiality in the following circumstances:

• If you give your consent for us to contact a third party to assist in resolving your enquiry.
• Where there is a legal obligation to disclose information (e.g. a court order).
• Where we believe that you, or a third party, is in serious personal danger.

Impartial

We aim to provide an impartial, non-judgemental service to all our clients. Don’t be worried or embarrassed about approaching us with a problem — we are not here to judge you, or to make decisions for you, but to help you decide what your options are in any given situation.

Independent

Although funded by the University of Glasgow, the SRC is a separate organisation. This means that our advice workers are able to give you independent advice and details of your enquiry are not shared with any University staff unless you ask us to.

Keeping Records

With your permission, we will keep a record of your visit and any discussions we have with you.  We process your personal data in accordance with the law as outlined in our Privacy Notice.

Representation Policy

It is our policy to offer representation for academic appeals, conduct cases, complaints, fitness to practise and certain limited housing tribunal cases. We may withdraw from representing you if your case is considered to be frivolous or vexatious, or if you don’t comply with the terms of The Advice Centre Representation Agreement.

Conflict of Interest

A perceived conflict of interest may arise when the Advice Centre is contacted by opposing parties involved in a dispute (e.g. a complaint by one student against another).

Normally this would be identified, at staff meetings and through casework monitoring by our Head of Advice. Advice Centre staff will be aware of cases where a conflict of interest might occur and will take care to share information with each other in order that any potential conflict can be identified at an early stage.

It is not a conflict of interest merely to give information (e.g. to explain a student’s rights under current housing legislation) to both parties to a dispute. However, if both parties ask for representation or advocacy then a conflict can arise.  For the vast majority of cases, we cannot represent both sides.

For most cases where a conflict is identified, the party who has approached the Advice Centre first will be represented. The other party will be offered assistance to obtain an alternative source of representation – e.g. a member of staff in another support service, or an external advice agency.

Only in scenarios where a student has reported another student for a breach of the Code of Student Conduct will the Advice Centre be able to represent both sides of a dispute.

Our procedure for dealing with both sides of Code of Student Conduct dispute is as follows:

Each party to the dispute will be allocated to a different Adviser.

Once the two sides of the dispute have been assigned to specific Advisers it is important that confidentiality is maintained. The sharing of basic information is permitted (e.g. the conflict of interest can be revealed, meeting dates etc) but no information gained from individual clients should be shared. The respective Advisers will not access any other party’s information held within the case management system.

For staff support, line management and case monitoring purposes the Head of Advice shall access any and all information held on the case at hand.  The Head of Advice will not disclose any details to either side that is not already available to them.

The Advice Staff will endeavour to minimise the potential that both parties visit the Advice Centre at the same time. It will not be considered a breach of confidentiality for Advisers to discuss any dates/times for meetings within the Advice Centre Team to facilitate this.

We have included details above on how we will adjust our standard procedures for this type of scenario, but if you have any more questions on this please reach out to us at advice@src.gla.ac.uk

The Advice Centre webpages – The Advice Team have put their wealth of experience and knowledge into producing these pages, which aim to cover our most common enquiries, and give the most useful information we can think of, and in some cases tools to help you resolve issues by yourself if you want to.  If there are other advice topics you’d like to see covered on the website, we’re very happy to hear from you.

Our Pages

Unhappy with the Advice Centre?

If you are unhappy with any aspect of the Advice Centre’s service to you, please let us know by speaking either to your advice worker or to the Head of Advice. We take all comments into account in deciding how to improve our service.

If you are still unhappy, and would like to lodge a formal complaint, the procedure is available from the SRC Contacts Page.

Adverts – from time to time you might see adverts of one kind or another on our website.  The Advice Team has no control over these, and we don’t endorse or promote any commercial companies over any others.  So just because there’s an advert for something our our pages, doesn’t mean we are recommending it.  If there’s a problem with something you’ve seen advertised on here, let us know.