Week 7, Lent Term 2018
Should LSESU Boycott the NSS?
Name of proposer: Alberico Ricci
Name of seconder: Anastazja Oppenheim
This Union notes
1. Over the past year, the government introduced a series of reforms to higher education, outlined in the HE White Paper and subsequently the Higher Education and Research Act. [1]
2. At their heart is the Teaching Excellence Framework which ranks universities Bronze, Silver and Gold according to a set of metrics including the National Student Survey (NSS) and graduate earnings. Universities with better TEF scores would be able to charge higher fees. [2]
3. The HE Act also seeks to marketise education by making it easier for private providers to award degrees and for existing universities to close down.
4. The HE reforms and TEF are already causing job cuts in multiple universities, for example in Manchester where over 100 redundancies have been announced, explicitly citing changes to HE policy as a reason. [3]
5. NUS passed a policy to encourage students to boycott the NSS to disrupt the TEF and the wider reforms. [4]
6. In at least 12 institutions, NSS response rates dropped below 50% as a result of the boycott, making the results unusable. In many others, response rates have also fallen significantly. [5]
7. This year, many SUs including Oxford, Cambridge, UAL, Goldsmiths, SOAS and others have already launched their boycott campaigns.
8. The boycott was widely reported in the media and mentioned in parliamentary debates around the Higher Education and Research Act. [6]
9. In 2017, Theresa May announced that tuition fees for the following academic year would not go up. However, there has been no guarantee that the freeze will continue for future years or that TEF
and fees will be delinked. [7]
10. The NSS itself has been discredited as a measure of teaching quality, including by the Royal Statistical Society. Its results have also been proven to reflect racial bias. [8][9]
11. LSESU has clear policy to oppose the TEF and campaign against it. [10]
This Union believes
1. TEF not only does not adequately measure teaching quality, it is actively damaging by pushing universities to meet dubious metrics instead of focusing on actually improving standards. It is also designed to make education even more unequal by allowing some institutions to charge more than others.
2. Marketisation forces universities to operate like businesses, prioritising the bottom line over students, staff and education. If TEF continues, it is likely to cause even more job losses and course closures.
3. Successful NSS boycott campaigns at multiple universities forced TEF and wider higher education policy onto the national agenda.
4. The NSS boycott contributed towards the government temporarily severing the link between TEF and tuition fees.
5. NSS is the only TEF metric that students have direct control over. Disrupting it is not only a symbolic action but gives us leverage in the campaign against marketisation.
6. For the campaign to be effective and not have a negative impact on individual institutions, as many SUs as possible need to take part.
7. While LSE decided to opt out of TEF this year, there is nothing (other than pressure from students and staff) stopping the School from re-entering in future years. What is more, the boycott is part of a national campaign against national HE policy in which it is important for LSE students to participate.
8. There are many better ways of giving feedback, such as internal surveys and the course rep system, which do not contribute to damaging higher education reforms.
This Union resolves
1. To promote a boycott of NSS 2018 and in future years while the campaign lasts, including through emails, posters, leafleting, stalls and social media throughout the time when the survey is open.
2. To refuse to promote the NSS or have any pro-NSS material with the SU logo on.
3. To meet with UCU to discuss the campaign, release a joint statement if possible and seek to inform academics and all university staff about the boycott.
4. To continue opposing the TEF and lobby LSE to not take part in it in future years as well.