King’s has been omitted from the NSS list for student satisfaction

The National Student Survey is a yearly survey which reports on student satisfaction per university, usually featuring most, if not all, institutions in the UK. However, this year’s survey saw major universities – King’s, Oxford and Cambridge – being missed out from the list.

According to the Times Higher Education website, these major universities were missed out as, "in order to be eligible, at least 50 per cent of final-year undergraduates must complete the questionnaire."

This year, the survey response rate dropped from 72% to 68% from last year’s results, arguably due to the NSS boycott carried out by the National Union of Students, NUS, which saw over 25 student unions campaign for their students to refuse to take part in the survey.

NUS claimed that its boycott was due to "student feedback [being] used to raise student fees", as the government arguably wanted to use TEFL (Teaching Excellence Framework) and NSS results to justify the increase in tuition fees.

The boycott was successful among KCL students, with The Tab King’s previously interviewing KCLSU president Ben Hunt about the issue. Ben said that "we have demonstrated to King’s and to Government that we will not accept any more increases to our fees."

The full official KCLSU statement can be read here.