National Student Survey - NSS

NSS data: overview

This page contains an overview of the responses to the core questions asked as part of the 2021 National Student Survey (NSS). It can be used to understand how students in general responded to the core NSS questions. It also analyses responses by different student groups.

View responses to the additional COVID-related questions added in 2021.

View responses to the core questions split by higher education provider.

Feedback and questions about this data can be sent to [email protected].

What do these charts show?

These charts show the percentage of respondents who agreed (selected ‘Definitely agree’ or ‘Mostly agree’) to each question and scale in the NSS in the 2020 and 2021 surveys. A scale is a group of questions addressing the same theme.

There are three charts. The first shows responses for all questions and scales together, viewable by student’s mode of study and the nation in which they are taught. The remaining two charts show responses according to six student and course characteristics:

age
gender
ethnicity
disability status
subject classification
mode of study.

For each of the six characteristics, benchmark values have been calculated using the remaining five. Where we have calculated benchmark values, we have also shown the degree of certainty we have that the difference between the percentage of respondents who agreed and the benchmark value is statistically significant.

Characteristic data is shown separately for UK-domiciled and overseas students. Categories will not be shown where the response rate is lower than 50 per cent and there are fewer than 10 responses.

Methodology document

PDF, 212Kb

This document explains the methodology used to produce the NSS sector analysis published on 15 July 2021

Sector analysis data

XLSX, 505Kb

See the archive of data

2020

2019

Please note

In March 2021, we discovered an error in data from the 2020 and 2019 National Student Surveys.

The error occurred because in a small number of cases, we failed to incorporate some data about student characteristics, such as ethnicity and age. This error had a very small impact on the sector characteristic analysis.

The error was fixed for data from the 2020 survey, but remains in the data from the 2019 survey, because the error was found after the 2019 data had been superseded by the 2020 data.

While the impact of the error on the analysis is small, users of the data should be aware of the error’s existence. In particular, users may notice that the number of respondents has a decimal value where one might not be expected, such as for results split by ethnicity.

Contact

If you have any questions or feedback on these pages, please contact Jack Preston at [email protected].

Published 19 February 2020
Last updated 04 May 2022 + show all updates

04 May 2022: Minor correction to broken link in the 2021 methodology document
13 December 2021: Archive data added
15 July 2021: Updated with 2021 NSS data
24 March 2021: Sector analysis data added
17 March 2021: Update to temporarily remove the sector-level characteristic analysis.
27 October 2020: Analysis updated with the results of the 2020 NSS

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National Student Survey - NSS

NSS data: overview

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