On Monday, the third CUSU Council meeting this academic year saw members vote 31 to 1 in favour of supporting and encouraging a boycott of the National Student Survey (NSS).

CUSU renewed the policy to actively encourage finalists to boycott the NSS. The survey requires a 50% response rate to be valid. Cambridge students have successfully boycotted the NSS for the past three years, with response rates not having reached 50%.

The NSS is used to evaluate higher education institutions under the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The TEF connects university performance with tuition fees by ranking universities into gold, silver and bronze categories.

Controversially, those awarded gold and silver may then be allowed to raise their tuition fees. After a House of Commons in 2017, the link between the TEF and tuition fees will only be introduced in 2020, and will require an independent review of the TEF to be presented to parliament.

The CUSU motion references that “the TEF does not accurately reflect the educational excellence of an institution, as the NSS places weight on non-educational related outcomes, such as graduate destinations, and has been shown to reveal a negative bias towards female and BME academics.

“CUSU’s continued boycott of the NSS is a powerful signal of students’ discontent with the marketisation of Higher Education and the extortionate level of fees students are charged.”

The agenda also clarified that “boycotting the NSS would not negatively affect CUSU’s ability to make students’ voices heard at a University level due to the existence of other more robust student surveys such as the Student Barometer and CUSU’s Big Cambridge Survey.”

Campaigning will involve wide encouragement to finalists to boycott the survey, with active leafleting being continued from the last CUSU team’s efforts to support the boycott.

Cambridge Defend Education (CDE) staged a symbolic burning of leaflets promoting the National Student Survey (NSS) in January last year, as part of their campaign to boycott the survey.