Students have found a weapon in their battle to stop the government raising tuition fees still further: at a conference in Brighton they have voted to sabotage two key surveys unless the government withdraws its planned reforms.
The National Union of Students will boycott both the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Destination of Leavers from higher education survey (DLHE), which provide statistics the government needs to carry out its plans.
The government intends to introduce a Teaching Excellence Framework (Tef) which will rank universities on a range of factors, including how well students rate them in the NSS. The DLHE reveals what students are doing six months after graduation, and is used to determine a university’s “employability” rating.
Universities that do well in the Tef are likely to be allowed to charge higher fees. If the government refuses to abandon this plan, the NUS says it will mobilise students to campaign for a boycott.
Anastazja Oppenheim, from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, said: “We know that if students, en masse, either refuse to fill in the surveys at all or sabotage it by giving artificially maximum or minimum scores, the results would become of little use and would wreck plans for the Tef. We hope it will act as a major disincentive for the government to go through with their agenda.”
Hope Worsdale, from the University of Warwick, added: “The NSS is used as a weapon to beat academic staff with, and as an excuse to cut to courses and close departments. The current reforms would further destroy public education as we know it, so it is fantastic news that the NUS has chosen to boycott these surveys in order to defeat them.”
However, students who voted against the motion are concerned that the boycott could alienate students from future consultations with the government.
Rosie McKenna, vice-president of academic representation at Edge Hill University, said the boycott “wasn’t very productive”.
“Voting for an amendment to the Tef motion, rather than completely disengaging with it, would have supported student unions better. It would have meant constructively engaging the government about the metrics we use,” she said.
Millie Thomas, a student at the University of Sunderland, doesn’t support the boycott because the NSS gives student unions valuable insights into what students think. “As a student officer, it’s the best way I can get information about students,” she says.
The campaign is due to start in September 2016, when the NUS plans to collect pledges from students that they will carry out the boycott if the government refuses their demands.
More angry voices from the NUS Conference
“It’s an awful time to be a medical student”
Zoe Brunswick, 21, a medical student at the University of Manchester, is campaigning against cuts to the NHS bursary. “As a medical student, the current climate is just awful,” she says. “The new contract for young doctors is making us work longer hours for less; it discriminates against people who want to work part time, or those who have children, or are ill. There’s nothing good about it.”
“There are bigger threats to free speech than students”
Vivienne Holmes, a maths and philosophy student at the University of Oxford, Chair of the university’s LGBT campaign, is worried about freedom of speech. “People accuse students of shutting down proper debate and freedom of speech, even when they’re actually defending against violent bigotry. People were angry about the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, but there are definitely bigger threats to freedom of speech than students,” he says.
“The government is disproportionately targeting Muslim speakers”
Joe Simpson, vice president for activities and development at King’s College London, has found that Prevent is doing damage to debate on his campus. “Prevent and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act mean the government is expecting us to censor a lot of speakers. Students at King’s see this as having an Islamophobic agenda and disproportionately targeting Muslim speakers and those that want to criticise British foreign policy.”
Source:Students vote to sabotage plans to rate teaching in universities