National Student Survey data: provider-level

The data dashboard allows you to select NSS results, using the filters at the top of the dashboard.

The dashboard has three separate views, selected using the “tabs” at the top of the dashboard:

• The “Show me all questions” view presents the NSS questions on a single page, for one country or provider at a time. Question 28 is shown separately from the other questions, due to its different format and coverage.
• The “Show me all subjects” view presents the NSS results for single question, and a single country or provider, broken down by subject of study.
• The “Show me all providers” view presents the results for a single question, for all countries and providers.

In all views, you can use the filters to focus on a particular population.  For example, when viewing the NSS results for the UK, you can use the filters to focus on those students who are studying full-time, or who are studying a particular subject.

In all views, you can use the “slider” in the centre of the filter bar to choose whether to view the positivity measure or the difference from benchmark.

The dashboard contains multiple filters and it will take a moment to reload the dashboard when each filter is changed. This loading time can vary based on internet speed and the processing power of the device used. We are aware that the dashboard can be particularly slow on the day of the annual NSS publication, due to the high number of users, and we are actively looking for solutions to this.

All the data available on the dashboards can be accessed using our data downloads, which we provide in CSV and Excel format.

In our data dashboards, the positivity measure and the difference from benchmark are surrounded by shaded bars. These indicate that the values are estimates, and may be affected by random variation. For example, the NSS results are a measurement at a point in time – it is possible that some respondents would respond differently on another day, and that this would lead to a different estimate. We refer to this as statistical uncertainty. 

The shaded bars show a range. We can be confident that the true value lies within this range. The shading of the bars indicates the changing likelihood that the true value falls outside the range of the shading. It is more likely that the true values falls within the heavily shaded areas, and less likely that it falls within the lightly shaded areas. Conversely, we can be very confident that the true value lies within the entire shaded range, and less confident that it lies within the narrower, heavily shaded area around the estimate.

The shaded bars are constructed from confidence intervals, ranging from 99.7 per cent to 75 per cent, with the shading changing with 2.5 percentage point increments.

Uncertainty depends heavily on population size. You will typically see that measures based on small populations are surrounded by wider shaded bars.

Find out more about the statistical methods used to create the shaded bars

Question 28 (“Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of teaching on my course”) has a different format from the other survey questions, and five rather than four response options. Because of this, the positivity measure for question 28 cannot be straightforwardly concerned with the positivity measure for the other questions. In particular, we would typically expect the positivity measure for question 28 to be lower than the positivity measure for the other questions, because we allow respondents to take a neutral stance (“Neither agree nor disagree”).

To make it clear that the results for question 28 cannot be compared with the results for the other questions, we have designed the dashboards so that question 28 always appears separately from the other results.

Question 28 is only asked of students studying in providers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Therefore, country-level statistics for question 28 are not provided for England, or for the UK.  

The data dashboard shows, for each question, the number of responses. This number is the total number of students who have responded to the question with a response other than “This does not apply to me”, reported as a full-person equivalence (FPE). This number is the denominator for the positivity measure.

The number of responses sometimes varies by question. This is mainly because differing numbers of students respond “This does not apply to me” to each question. It is also because some students start but do not complete the questionnaire.   

Through changing the filters on the data dashboard, you may arrive at a selection for which no data is available. This would happen, for instance, if you selected the filters “Apprenticeship” and “All undergraduates” for a provider that did not offer apprenticeships. When this happens, you will be presented with the message “Data unavailable”. You can leave this page by choosing a different combination of filters, or by refreshing your browser.

When NSS results are aggregated at the level of country (UK, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales) we do not calculate benchmarks. This is because the benchmarking method does not create meaningful results in many of these cases. The “Difference from benchmark” view will show “N/A” in these cases.

Rarely, we are unable to calculate benchmarks for provider-level data.  In some cases, one or more of the benchmarking factors are unknown for most students at a provider. In these cases the results are shown as “BK”. Benchmarks are also unavailable in some cases when the provider makes an extremely large contribution to its own benchmark. Again, these results are shown as “N/A”.  Similarly, we do not provide benchmarks when results are suppressed as “DPL”, or “DP”.  

If you receive an error message beginning with '{"result":' when trying to view a dashboard on our website, try closing and restarting your Internet browser. This issue can occur if you have viewed a dashboard on the OfS portal since opening your current browser session.

It is not possible to view our dashboards on the portal and on our website concurrently in the same browser. To switch between them you will need to restart your browser, delete your browser cookies, or use two different browsers.