NSS: Outcome for 2022 survey announced

06 Jul 2022

Professor April McMahon, Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students, gives an update on our NSS results

The annual National Student Survey (NSS) results were released on Wednesday, 6 July, with our overall satisfaction score 71%, level with our 2021 outcome. In total, 62% of final year undergraduate students at our University completed the survey, compared with 63% last year.

The results follow several years of significant fluctuations, and a substantial fall in satisfaction in 2021. It is clearly disappointing not to have seen an overall uplift, but we do draw some positives from improving scores in certain themes such as learning resources, learning community, and learning opportunities – all areas we have sought to prioritise over the past year.

Overall, we have moved up eight places within the sector; but we remain very aware that we are still below the sector and the Russell Group averages for student satisfaction. While this outcome may be understandable given the impact of pandemic restrictions and regular industrial action on this group of students (around 25% of our student comments mention these factors), we cannot see it just through that lens.

We must therefore continue to press ahead with improvements in priority areas such as student voice, assessment & feedback, and timetabling – all of which have plans to address those challenges which will be further refined in light of these latest results.

Once again, we are very appreciative of the huge efforts of our staff throughout the year, and it is heartening to see where those efforts have been recognised in some students’ free-text comments. The contributions of many of our teaching and professional support staff, focus on the return to campus, and renewed access to learning resources are already emerging as positive themes.

As is always the case, we are currently looking at all the NSS data in detail to understand our performance in significantly more depth and to prioritise actions accordingly.

We know that every final year student who filled in the survey wanted to tell us something, positive or negative, and we continue to be completely committed to learning from those comments to improve teaching and student experiences – and driving our response rates higher in the year ahead.

Kind regards

Professor April McMahon  

Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students