Please note that the date listed in the January Education Bulletin is incorrect, and the NSS launches at Warwick on Monday 5 February.

The National Student Survey (NSS) is a UK-wide survey of undergraduate students in their final year of study, and has run every year for nearly 20 years. As a regulated higher education provider, we’re obliged to take part and promote the survey – but we go further at Warwick, and make full use of students’ feedback to enhance the quality of their learning experience. Externally, the results are used to determine rankings in league tables, in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and are part of Office for Students (OfS) monitoring schemes.

Changes to the survey

No changes have been made to the survey this year. This will give us our first year of comparative data following changes implemented for the 2023 survey. To recap on the NSS 2023 changes:

• Learning community questions were replaced with new questions on mental health and wellbeing services, and freedom of expression.
• The 5-point Likert scale was replaced by a 4-point item-specific scale optimised to each question.
• Core questions were rephrased as questions rather than statements, and some had been changed.
• The overall satisfaction question was omitted. Warwick chose to include the optional question “I would recommend the University to future students.”

A full list of questions that students will be asked in 2024 can be found here.

Institutional choices for NSS 2024

The NSS 2024 opens for Warwick students on Monday 5 February, and runs to 30 April. A high-profile campaign will run across the University to encourage participation in the first three weeks, followed by further targeted support from the fourth week of the survey onwards.

The Office for Students has not changed the threshold publication rates, meaning that we still need to obtain a 50% response rate and 10 respondents for results to be released at course, departmental and subject level. However, we have set our sights on an institutional response rate of 70% overall and a departmental response rate of 65%, as we continue to build back towards pre-pandemic levels of completion.

How EPQ and the Student Communications team will help you get there

We are working with a network of staff leads in each department to disseminate campaign materials to students. However, we know that students are most likely to engage if they are encouraged to do so by staff they know, so we will work with you to provide materials and best practice ideas that you can deploy as a department alongside the institutional campaign.

We also encourage you to reflect on some of the improvements made previously to the course and broader student experience based on student feedback, as we know that including specific examples in communications helps students to understand how their feedback is used to improve the student experience, and may encourage participation.

Our dedicated webpages contain a wealth of resources to support colleagues in all aspects of delivering and promoting the NSS in their departments. Alongside these are recordings of recent briefings, which include details on: student eligibility, response rate targets, promotional campaign plans (including incentives), and details on the rules on inappropriate influence.

Please keep checking the webpages, as they will be continuously updated throughout the survey. Contact the student engagement team if you have any queries.