Need help taking legal action over Plymouth University please.

As I said, there is nothing whatsoever in the OP about any purported offer being accepted.

Then why did the person on the phone tell them not to do anything and that they would be sending out the acceptance confirmation?

My advice - get over it.

The staff are under enough stress as it is, it's perfectly normal that they'll make one tiny mistake among the hundreds of calls they're receiving.

Forget about Plymouth, forget about the uni you rejected, and move on. If you have to wait another year then so be it. If anything, this falls on you for missing your firm and insurance offers.

The OP doesn't say anything about acceptance confirmation.

Whether or not the OP accepted what he thought was an offer over the phone, another argument the university could raise is that the OP knew (having been told) that he would receive a formal "offer" the next day, and that its communication over the phone cannot therefore reasonably have been thought by the OP to constitute an offer in the contractual sense.

They can raise it, but its not consistent wuth the rest of the message. If the offer was unconditional as the OP suggest then there are no conditions, they intend to be bound then. If they want to say only in writing or when its confirmed on tracking thats fair enough, but they have to state that as a term.

Instead they gave them information consistent with acceptance.

Its generally pointless suing unis becayse they have bottomless resources, but in this case the OP has nothing to lose about making a complaint. You only need to identify the person who took the call. A bit of persistence creates a chance they can give in. Weve already had a thread with a person getting a place in medicine for being persistent over a uni mess up that was much weaker than this.

All debate aside, has anyone actually noticed that the OPs username is AmusedDouche?

All debate aside, has anyone actually noticed that the OPs username is AmusedDouche?

There's nothing in the OP to suggest that he did accept any offer that was made, at least the way I read it.

Quite clearly common sense would indicate that. If he didn't accept the offer then why on earth would there be a problem the first place.

It's not laughable at all. They have wasted a year of OP's life by making an offer and retracting it as OP has turned down another opportunity and lost out. Also, if Optometry is one of the courses where this was the last year that the NHS would fund it, then this uni has potentially just cost OP an incredible amount of money. That's not unreasonable to sue over

The first thing the University's lawyers would point out would be that there is no proof of any of this. The second thing would probably be that OP turned down his other offers before receiving any written confirmation of the offer from Plymouth, meaning that the OP has at the very least muddied the waters as to who caused this problem. *

I'm pretty sure there would at the very least be records of these calls maybe not on the uni's end (how convenient that they claim it wasn't logged..) but from OP's phone provider's end. Why would a uni make a direct call to OP's phone if, for example, they purport to never have offered OP a place? Surely OP would've just been told on the phone there are no places.

OP acted on the basis of a verbal offer which, if accepted, was binding.

It's not unreasonable to then reject another offer - if anything OP was being courteous to another uni and not stringing them along, which I'm sure many students might do. I think the best bet would be for OP to call back whoever they spoke to last and ask leading questions that clearly records what happened, and audio records the call for proof*

Hi,

Plymouth University made me an unconditional offer through clearing yesterday for their Optometry course, They said they would email me confirmation of the offer, and accommodation details. They told me not to do anything else, not to call or contact them, but to wait for their email,

Today they rang me back saying the course was full. I am obviously pissed off, as their offer lead me to refuse another offer. I rang them to make a complaint, and the complaints manager told me the reception staff had only received 3 days training for clearing, and apologised for any mistakes. He then said that he had no way of verifying the details, and when I gave him the time of the call he said calls weren't recorded.*

What do I do?*

The first thing the University's lawyers would point out would be that there is no proof of any of this. The second thing would probably be that OP turned down his other offers before receiving any written confirmation of the offer from Plymouth, meaning that the OP has at the very least muddied the waters as to who caused this problem. *

If the lad have had the common sense to of asked who he was speaking to in the initial phone call then he have his back covered and have had some proof. But with no name he could have made it up.

But it works both ways. I heard of a guy who got into medical school with poor science A level results. He fictitiously claimed that he'd been given a clearance offer onto the Bachelor of Medicine course.

A few days later he phoned up admissions and asked why he had not received his confirmation email?
He chose a common name by sheer gamble of who he claimed to have spoken to in the clearance dept. (He'd never even spoken to anyone in clearance) The admissions officer bit his tongue and accepted this claim and despite poor A' level results he had to accept the lad into medical school. The irony is the lad had never even considered medicine as a career until weeks before clearance.
As far as I know he's now is entering his 3rd year and on the way to becoming a doctor.