National Student Survey - NSS

The NSS gathers students’ opinions on the quality of their courses which helps to:

inform prospective students’ choices
provide data that supports universities and colleges to improve the student experience
support public accountability.

Every university in the UK takes part in the NSS, as do many colleges. Response rates are consistently high.

The NSS is managed by the OfS on behalf of the UK funding and regulatory bodies – the Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland), The Scottish Funding Council and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales.

About the 2022 survey

For NSS 2022, the core questions did not change, but there were a few changes to parts of the survey in agreement with the UK funding and regulatory bodies:

To reduce the burden on universities and colleges during and in the aftermath of the pandemic, providers in England were not required to promote the survey to their students.
All providers were automatically included in a booster phase to send additional reminders to their non-responding students if their response rates were below 43 per cent.
The questions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the student experience were not repeated in the 2022 survey.
As part of the NSS review, a pilot survey ran alongside the NSS 2022 survey between January and March 2022 for a sample of students.

Providers can access their own detailed NSS results including subject-level question responses and open text comments results via the NSS Results Portal.

The NSS data is published in the same way as in previous years; however, there are minor changes in the way the data is presented:

Alongside the NSS 2022 results, an average agreement rate based on the results from 2020, 2021 and 2022, with each year weighted evenly, is published.
Healthcare placement questions are not published as part of the NSS data on the OfS website. The publication of this data is in review for 2023. Providers are able to receive their own responses to these questions through the NSS Results Portal.

NSS questionnaire

See the complete questionnaire used for the National Student Survey 2022

2022 survey data

Get the survey data

Explore the National Student Survey data in full

National Student Survey - NSS

NSS questionnaire

Get the survey data

See information about the 2021 survey

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National Student Survey - NSS

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