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.
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.
About the 2021 survey
For NSS 2021, the core questions did not change, but there were a few changes to parts of the survey which had been developed in agreement with the UK funding and regulatory bodies:
- To reduce the burden on universities and colleges during the pandemic, providers in England were not required to promote the 2021 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.
- A new set of questions were included to ask students about specific aspects of their experience during the coronavirus pandemic. Students chose whether to answer these additional questions and submitted their feedback on this topic after they completed the core questions.
The COVID-19 question results have not been published at provider level, but the findings have been presented by several broader sector splits such as subject and mode.
Providers can access their own detailed NSS results including subject-level question responses, open text comments and COVID-19 question results via the NSS Results Portal.
To see information on how the NSS results and Covid-19 question results can be used by providers, please see the related FAQs.
The NSS data has been published in the same way as in previous years, however the OfS and UK funding and regulatory bodies have taken some decisions in the way that the following NSS 2021 data is presented:
- Alongside the NSS 2021 results, an average agreement rate based on the results from 2019, 2020 and 2021, with each year weighted evenly, has been published.
- The 2021 statistics are based purely on 2021 data.
- NHS placement questions are not published as part of the NSS data on the OfS website. Providers are able to receive their own responses to these questions through the NSS Results Portal.
See the complete questionnaire used for the NSS 2021.
NSS 2020 survey results are currently published on the Discover Uni website. The NSS 2021 results will be published on this website in October 2021.
Download a complete archive of data from the National Student Survey
See the complete questionnaire used for the National Student Survey 2021
