Friday 14-10-2016 - 15:00

By Joe Cox, Vice President Art & Design and Media & Performing Arts

 

At our last meeting, the Executive Committee of Middlesex Students' Union voted unanimously to not boycott or sabotage the National Student Survey. This is why.

 

At the NUS National Conference 2016, the National Union of Students (NUS) officially adopted the policy for member students’ unions to boycott or sabotage the National Student Survey (NSS).

 

This was to protest the use of the NSS in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and the role this plays in raising student fees. This blog post explains Middlesex Student’s Union’s position on this matter.

 

If you were to sit down with a cross section of students from Middlesex University and ask them why they chose to come here, nine out of ten times you would get the same answer: to get a good degree from a good university. This culture exists within our student body for a number of reasons, but chief amongst them is the understanding that Middlesex is not a place people come to get the ‘traditional’ student experience; it is definitely not a place where people come to just spend three years clubbing and making friends, to stagger out the other end with a 2:2 and a good hangover remedy.

 

Middlesex is a place where people come to work hard and achieve great things, to move on to greater places and better opportunities, all made possible because they came to a good university to get a good degree.

 

As well as this, Middlesex plays a role in the higher education sector that is so crucial, yet so often overlooked by national organisations; Middlesex provides a space for those who have so often been failed by Britain’s dysfunctional education system. As an institution we don’t place a priority on entrance requirement based on an outdated system of testing young people. We are 98% state-schooled, 60% female and our Students' Union and University are currently working in partnership to develop an innovative, industry-leading learning model that puts students at the heart of the way we teach. We are first and foremost an educational institution, and that must be at the very centre of everything we do.

 

All of this combines to create a situation where the degree that a student gets at Middlesex is the most important thing to them, and the most important thing about that degree is that it is worth something. Degrees at Middlesex must be informative, competitive and known for their value – and the value of that degree is judged in one simple way: the National Student Survey.

 

Last year Middlesex sat at 89^th in the table of UK universities. This year we are at 78^th. Our students rely on the strong, growing reputation of the university in order to be as employable as possible, and the university's strong reputation relies on our national ranking, which in turn is given based on student responses in the National Student Survey.

 

This reason, first and foremost, is why MDXSU Executive Committee voted at our last meeting to not boycott or sabotage the NSS. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, if you were to ask any student at Middlesex why they came here, the answer would be to get a good degree. As a students' union - the body that exists to represent our students - we could not in good faith ask our students to actively devalue the degrees that they have spent three long years working hard for, with nothing more than a vague hope that it could effect a government policy in return. Our students would laugh at us, and they would be right to do so.

 

As well as this, there are a number of reasons why we believe that this policy is simply not adequate. Firstly, it will not work unless absolutely every union takes part, and can then convince a vast majority of their students to join them. For all of the reasons that I have outlined above, and so many more, this will not happen; even the NUS has admitted, after carrying out a consultation of member unions, that only 45% of the membership are committed to the boycott. As such, this policy is just not feasible.

 

Furthermore, this policy will negatively effect the work that Middlesex Students' Union does on behalf of our student body. In almost every single campaign we run, we start by taking the huge amounts of data and commentary made available to us through the NSS and using it as evidence to fight on behalf of students. Without this data we couldn’t have run many of the successful campaigns that we have in the past, and it will severely effect our ability to fight on behalf of our students in the future.

 

Finally, we do not believe that this policy, with all of its flaws and obvious pitfalls, is the best use of the time and resources that the NUS has available to it.

 

In the past months that the NUS has spent working to put together this campaign, they could have been hiring a professional lobbying company to talk to MPs on our behalf; could have been putting together a coherent plan for students' unions to contact their local MPs to argue for the reasons why the Higher Education Bill and Teaching Excellence Framework is not a good policy, and could have been making real change in the places where it is possible. Theresa May’s government has a majority of eleven. That means that the NUS only needed to convince twelve people in order to make this policy fall. Instead, they have pursued a route where they will need to convince seven million.

 

There is still time to rethink our national approach to this, but that rethink has to happen now.

 

For all of the reasons I have outlined here, MDXSU Executive Committee has decided not to adopt the policy of boycotting or sabotaging the NSS. Instead, we will be working with our student body to put together a coherent plan to use what power we have to fight the awful Higher Education Bill in a meaningful way.

 

As well as not complying with the NSS Boycott Policy, we have also decided to back a motion from the University of West London Student’s Union calling for a national ballot around the NSS boycott. The ballot is asking member unions to vote to carry out an equality impact assessment and risk assessment to be published on the proposed action to boycott the NSS.

 

We have backed this motion for two reasons. Firstly, we believe that it is important that member unions have a voice in what is happening: a national ballot delivers that. Secondly, we cannot stand by and let the NUS carry out this potentially damaging policy without first looking at what the long-term implications could be.

 

If you are a student and would like to talk to us about this further, please send me an email on j.l.cox@mdx.ac.uk, or just come down to the MDXSU office downstairs in MDX House and we will be happy to talk to you about it.