Produce and submit your report
Once you have had the conversation with your university or college, you can choose to produce your student submission in several ways:
- Written response (survey)
If you would like to complete your submission in writing, we have devised a survey to allow you to do this. View the survey questions.
- A video/podcast/presentation
You may prefer to produce a video, podcast, or presentation as your student submission. We encourage you to structure your video/podcast/presentation using the questions in the survey and conversation guide.
Please submit your written responses or your video/podcast/presentation via the survey link sent to the student representative.
If you have any questions while you are producing your student submission, please contact us at [email protected].
If you require any accessibility adjustments to enable you to access or complete the submission, please get in touch with us at [email protected].
Hints and tips on producing your submission
How much you write is up to you. However, we think that writing around 100-500 words per question will be enough to allow you to cover the relevant points.
Remember, you can pause your submission at any stage and come back to it later. If you want to do this, just click on ‘save and continue’. You will receive a new link to your email which you can then use to continue working on the survey whenever you are ready.
Think about what you want to say before starting to fill in any answers. This will allow you to consider how to incorporate different student views into your responses.
We encourage you to use the questions on our website as a guide about what to include. You could structure your submission in three parts, covering targets, activities and then student involvement.
If the file you are trying to upload is larger than 50MB, please email [email protected] to arrange an alternative upload method. The survey will only allow you to upload files that are 50MB or smaller.
In accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2018 and Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018, please ensure that no personal information is submitted and no individual students can be identified from the data reported (including small numbers of less than five individuals).
Please contact [email protected] if you are unsure about whether you can include something in your submission.
Remember that your student submission may be published by your university or college. Your university or college should ensure that your student submission and data is processed in a way that is consistent with data protection law.
We would like your student submission to include honest reflections on the performance of your university or college in relation to its 2019-20 access and participation plan.
We recognise that this may include areas where you feel it has not performed as well as it could have. In these instances, we would encourage you to talk to your university or college about why you have concerns. You should try to back up what you have said with examples and evidence whenever possible.
You will have an opportunity to share any additional comments you have, regardless of whether you submit the written survey or produce a video/podcast/presentation.
So, if you want to say something that doesn’t quite fit into the structure outlined in the questions on our website, you will still be able to include this in your submission. Also, If the students you talk to have differing views about your university or college, feel free to say this in your answers, highlighting the different perspectives.
We recommend that you identify a couple of students to support you, to help you do the best possible job and ensure you are not overwhelmed.
What happens after you have completed your submission
When you have successfully completed your student submission, you will see a thank you message, confirming that you have completed the survey. If you do not see this message, please email [email protected].
Your submission will then be carefully considered by the OfS alongside your university or college’s monitoring return. In a small number of cases, we may come back to you to clarify what has been said. This may happen if your student submission says something we are concerned about or differs greatly from the monitoring return.
Once we have finished looking at your student submission, we will send this to your university or college, who may publish it alongside its own monitoring return.
Your university or college may be provided with the opportunity to respond to the OfS on what you have said in your submission. This is why we encourage both students and universities and colleges to be open about what they have said in their reports.
If you would like to follow up with us about your student submission in the future, please email [email protected]. There are also many other opportunities for you to get involved. If you would like to hear about the other work we do at the OfS, or you are interested in receiving regular updates about our work, find out more about how to get involved.
We really appreciate you taking the time to complete the student submission, and hope you have found this a positive experience. Your voice matters, and we are very grateful to you for using it to help us tackle inequality in higher education, for the benefit of both current and future students.
