Results for this year’s National Student Survey (NSS) are now available to view online via Tableau. The data can be filtered by department and provides information on the wider sector.

Further analysis on department and course data will follow in the coming days, along with open comments. Headline data can be found below.  

Please note that there were significant changes to the NSS this year, which will impact data analysis and make year-on-year comparisons difficult. The five-point strongly agree / strongly disagree Likert scale has been replaced with a four-point response scale and the neutral option removed. The summative ‘Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of my course’ question has also been removed, alongside a number of other small changes. 

Having had their data omitted in recent years due to student boycotts, Oxford and Cambridge both appear in this year’s data sets, which has had a mixed impact on scores across the Russell Group and the wider sector.  

As an institution, our mean score across all questions is 3.03 out of a possible 4.00. This puts us below the sector benchmark of 3.06 but places us 11th within the Russell Group, a notable rise of three positions compared to 2022. 

Our highest scoring questions include ‘How well have the library resources supported your learning?’ with a mean score of 3.34, ‘How often is the course mentally stimulating?’ with a mean score of 3.27 and ‘How easy was it to contact teaching staff when you needed to?’ with a mean score of 3.26. 

Based on aggregated responses, three schools/departments achieved an overall satisfaction score of 90% or more – Veterinary Medicine (94%) and Education (92%) and Classics & Archaeology (90%).  

Learnings will be used to identify areas for improvement and inform NSS action plans at a local level. 

Thank you to everyone who helped spread awareness of this year’s campaign. Your support is instrumental in allowing us to collect feedback from students and make improvements to their experience. Your support this year helped us to achieve a 72.44% response rate – our highest since before the pandemic. 

About the NSS

The annual survey is made up of 27 questions covering course teaching, learning opportunities, assessment and feedback, academic support, organisation and management, learning resources, learning community, student voice and student union.