Cambridge’s Veterinary Medicine school has been granted accreditation for another 12 months, provided it makes progress toward the requirements for full accreditation.

The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) announced on Tuesday (25/11) that Cambridge University’s Department of Veterinary Medicine could keep its current “conditional accreditation”. The RCVS made this decision on the basis that the vet school had already made significant progress, and expectations that progress will continue “at pace”.

Kitty, third-year student of veterinary medicine at Robinson, said, “the progress that has been made since the 2024 seems very promising,” but that “a few of us are feeling a bit worried that we haven’t gotten full accreditation from the recent visit”.

This follows an RCVS investigation in November last year which revealed that Cambridge’s vet school failed to meet 50 out of 77 of the RCVS’ standards for veterinary medicine courses.

In Tuesday’s announcement, the RCVS says that only 20 of the 55 original recommendations, made in November for the course to remain accredited, are still outstanding. The school now has until next October, RCVS’ next visit, to make further progress.

Kitty noted that her and most vet students currently feel “kind of powerless” in a “quite scary” situation, where “students feel there's nothing we can really do so we just have to leave it to the vet school and trust that they are doing the best they can”.

Among the variety of issues the RCVS found with Cambridge’s vet school in 2024 were that the school’s large animal isolation facility was not “fit for purpose”, meaning large animals requiring clinical isolation could “automatically be euthanised”.

The original report also accused Cambridge’s vet school of overlooking racism on work placements, assigning those clinics a “red flag” to warn students to avoid them rather than removing them from the database.

In response, the vet school dean, Dr Mark Holmes, said major improvements would require a “sustainable process of course-wide quality assurance and approval rather than just ticking off a to-do list of actions”.

The original RCVS investigation put the future of the course in doubt. Vet courses must be RCVS accredited for graduates to legally practice as a vet surgeon in the UK, leading to concerns that current Cambridge students could be transferred to other universities or private clinical providers for the rest of their clinical studies. This is despite Cambridge ranking first on the Guardian’s 2026 UK vet school league table, scoring 100 out of 100.

In March, Cambridge’s ‘Save the Vet School’ campaign led to the announcement that vet school intake would continue for the 2026/27 academic year. By June, there was growing confidence in the long-term future of the vet school following a meeting between education bosses and the veterinary sector.

In response to the latest investigation, an RCVS spokesperson said, “We appreciate the considerable efforts and hard work that the staff team within the veterinary department at Cambridge University have put into rectifying many of the issues identified in the 2024 accreditation event.”

They added, “However, as the report shows, there are still several outstanding areas of concern […] we have collaborated with Cambridge on putting together an action plan and timeline for meeting the 20 remaining recommendations and we hope that it will continue on its current trajectory towards meeting the RCVS accreditation standards.”