National Student Survey - NSS

NSS 2022

See information for providers and action required

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 2022 survey

For NSS 2022, the core survey questions will not change and the survey will be delivered across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

There are some changes which have been agreed with the UK funding and regulatory bodies:

Questions about students’ experience of higher education during the coronavirus pandemic will not be asked in the 2022 survey.
Students studying degree apprenticeships will continue to remain eligible for the NSS. However, they will not be asked the additional questions about their training programmes. These questions are being considered under phase two of the wider review of the NSS, to ensure they are relevant and fit for purpose.
Students of NHS-funded courses in all countries in the UK are required to answer an additional set of NHS-specific questions about their placements. The methodology used to identify which students are eligible for these questions will be reviewed under phase two of the wider review of the NSS.
To reduce the work required of providers, it has been agreed that again in 2022, providers in England are not required to promote the survey to their students. Providers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are still required to promote the survey.
During survey fieldwork, responses will be monitored. In addition to a targeted follow-up to ensure that publication thresholds are met, if providers are at risk of not meeting the publication threshold, they will be put into the booster phase whereby additional email reminders and an additional SMS will be sent to their non-responding students. The booster phase will start automatically if a provider’s response rate is below 43 per cent by mid-March, and will continue until mid-April.
As part of the NSS review, a pilot survey will run alongside the NSS 2022 survey between January and March 2022 for a sample of students.

NSS questionnaire

See the complete questionnaire to be used for the National Student Survey 2022

Get the survey data

Download a complete archive of data from the National Student Survey

Find results from the 2021 survey on Discover Uni

NSS 2021 survey results are now available on the Discover Uni website.

About the 2021 survey

See information 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 were not published at provider level, but the findings were 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 could be used by providers, please see the related FAQs.

The NSS data was published in the same way as in previous years; however the OfS and UK funding and regulatory bodies took some decisions in the way that the NSS 2021 data was presented:

Alongside the NSS 2021 results, an average agreement rate based on the results from 2019, 2020 and 2021, with each year weighted evenly, was 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.

Last updated 25 October 2021 + show all updates

25 October 2021: Information added on NSS 2022 and link to guidance for providers
15 July 2021: Updated with 2021 NSS data
07 June 2021: Added link to plans for publication of NSS 2021
14 January 2021: Information added regarding new coronavirus pandemic questions in the survey
26 October 2020: Added link to the publication detailing arrangements for the 2021 NSS, and updated NSS questionnaire
24 September 2020: Link added to details of the review of the NSS.
15 July 2020: Page updated with the results of the 2020 NSS
10 June 2020: Update on the publication of the 2020 National Student Survey data
07 May 2020: Added link to information about the publication of NSS 2020 data
19 February 2020: Added link to the NSS 2020 publication

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National Student Survey - NSS

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