Survey of sexual misconduct

In 2025 we asked all final year students across England to complete a pilot survey on sexual misconduct in higher education.

To reduce burden on students and providers, the sexual misconduct survey followed the National Student Survey (NSS). 

Although they shared the same survey platform, the two surveys were entirely separate.

The 2025 NSS and sexual misconduct pilot surveys have now closed.

Why did we do this?

There is currently limited data on sexual misconduct affecting students in higher education in England.

Existing evidence includes quantitative data on the experience of crimes, small-scale surveys and polls, and research generally carried out at provider level. The nature of this evidence means that we do not have reliable data on the extent or scale of the issue of sexual misconduct in higher education.

Our 2025 survey builds on our 2023 sexual misconduct pilot survey, which was sent to students from a small group of providers.

By surveying students on a larger, national scale, we hoped to:

• understand the prevalence of sexual misconduct experienced by students
• gain insight on how and where interventions might be targeted to tackle sexual misconduct
• test an approach to capturing prevalence data at a national level.

Next steps

We will make decisions about what survey data will be made available to institutions and where, once we have analysed all the data.

Where possible, we plan to publish data from the 2025 pilot aggregated at sector level with a breakdown analysis of the data by student characteristics.   

As the sexual misconduct survey was a pilot survey distinct from the NSS, we do not plan to publish provider-level data at the same time as the NSS and the data will not appear as part of the 2025 OfS-published NSS dataset.  

Where data quality is sufficient and student anonymity can be assured, we plan to share with providers their own 2025 SMS pilot data so that it can support any local initiatives on this important issue. This data will be aggregated to ensure student anonymity. 

We are aiming to publish the data from the pilot in September 2025. We will share further details about the data publication in due course.