Listen to the recording

The reputation of a crucial government-backed league table was undermined yesterday after two senior lecturers were caught telling students to boost their college’s rankings.

Fiona Barlow-Brown and Fred Vallee-Tourangeau, psychology lecturers at Kingston University, were secretly recorded urging undergraduates to give Kingston a glowing report in this year’s National Student Survey (NSS). More than 100 students were told by Dr Barlow-Brown that their degrees would be “s**t” unless the university, in southwest London, did well.

The recording came to light weeks after a top educationalist criticised the “widespread” manipulation of the survey by universities. In a letter to Times Higher Education in March, Professor Lee Harvey said that the NSS, which asks final-year students 22 questions about their college experience, was a “hopelessly inadequate improvement tool”. Examples of institutions encouraging students to provide good NSS ratings were rife, he added.

Professor Harvey was suspended later from his post as a director of the Higher Education Academy — partly for criticising the survey, which was introduced in 2005 by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and is sent to the majority of final-year students.

Kingston University admitted yesterday that the recording was authentic and expressed regret for the “inappropriate comments”.

Dr Barlow-Brown, who is now on maternity leave, was heard telling students that their employment chances would be directly affected by Kingston’s standing in the NSS.

“The results of this survey get fed . . . into league tables,” she said. “The league tables are what prospective employers and graduate courses use to assess the value of your degree.

“If Kingston comes down the bottom, no one’s going to want to employ you because they’re going to think your degree is s**t,” she added. “Although this is going to sound incredibly biased, if you think something’s a four, my encouragement would be to give it a five. Because that’s what everyone else is doing.”

Dr Vallee-Tourangeau then urged students to use internal university feedback forms for “all that garbage you’re spewing out about us. But that is not the place of National Student Survey to do so,” he said.

The Higher Education Funding Council said that it was aware of the incident and was taking it very seriously. “If evidence of this is formally brought to us we may either request an explanation or require an investigation to be carried out,” a spokesman said.

The funding council admitted that other “isolated” cases of alleged manipulation had been made known to them, but insisted that the survey remained “a very valuable source of information for prospective students”.

Professor Peter Scott, Vice-Chancellor at Kingston University, said: “We believe this to be an isolated incident and regret the inappropriate comments made to students. As soon as we were alerted to this allegation we investigated the matter and looked at ways to ensure that such a mistake was not repeated. We have kept Hefce \ fully informed about our investigation.”

The National Student Survey was introduced by the council as part of its quality assurance process — “to gather feedback on the quality of students’ courses in order to contribute to public accountability”. It costs £2 million a year to run.

The results are incorporated into the main university league tables, including The Times’ Good University Guide.

Last year the student unions at Cambridge and Oxford boycotted the NSS, saying they thought that

it was “oversimplistic”. The University of Oxford has developed its own questionnaire, prompting allegations of elitism from other university unions.

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