NSS Success for PAIS

Published on 14.7.25

No 1 or 2 in the Russell Group for 10 years in a row!

The Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) is thrilled to announce that we are No 2 amongst Russell Group Politics Departments, in the National Student Survey (NSS) 2025. *

Even more impressively, this is the TENTH year in a row that we have been ranked No 1 or No 2 – with 7 years at No 1. **

This is a testament to our long-standing excellence in teaching, support and student experience and reflects the depth, consistency and quality of our provision.

Highlights from this year’s results include:

• 91.7 per cent responded positively to questions relating to ‘academic support’
• 93 per cent received positively to questions relating to ‘learning resources’
• We scored 97 per cent on library resources supporting students learning
• 96.6 per cent responded positively to the question of teaching staff being good at explaining things
• 91.2 per cent of students responded positively to the question on having the right opportunities to give feedback on their course
• Communication about mental wellbeing support services (86.9 per cent positivity – up from 79.4 per cent last year).

These results are due to an outstanding team effort among our fantastic students, academics, and professional services colleagues, and demonstrate a partnership which we are extremely proud of. Looking to the future, we will:

• Intensify work on our curriculum review
• Deepen our work on decolonising the curriculum
• Enhance employability and skills development
• Further improve organisation and communications
• Clarify further the marking criteria and assessment expectations
• Strengthen collaboration with partner departments, especially for joint degrees

We look forward to continuing to work in partnership with our amazing students and dedicated staff to sustain and build on these strong results. At the start of the new academic year, we will feed back in greater detail to all students, and we will discuss and take forward ideas for further enhancement of the PAIS student experience via our Student Staff Liaison Committees (SSLCs).

A huge thank you to everyone involved in this decade of success. We look forward to another year of innovation, partnership, and continued enhancements to the student experience.

*See the Office For Students Website for more details and the full data. The results are based on the official Common Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH) subject breakdowns and the 23 Russell Group institutions which met the publications threshold for Politics.

**This is based on the ‘overall student satisfaction’ question which was part of the core NSS questionnaire in England between 2016 and 2022 and an average positivity score taking into account questions across the survey once the core overall satisfaction question was removed in 2023.