The results of the annual National Student Survey (NSS) were published by the Office for Students last week, (Wednesday 10 July).
The NSS remains the UK’s biggest student survey and gives an opportunity for final-year undergraduates to provide feedback on their course experience.
It is a key marker of students’ opinion and impacts on other measures of the University’s success such as league tables, our regulation by the Office for Students (OfS) and is vital for our own internal improvement, quality assurance and governance so that step-by-step we can make the UEA student experience the very best it can be.
The survey no longer has an overall satisfaction measure and the key indicator is the positivity score for each question.
Overall, the results for 2024 show improvement. There are increased positivity scores across all seven NSS themes and 23 out of 27 individual questions, illustrating that areas of hard work right across the University are starting to show results. There is a positive movement in absolute terms, and also increases in some of the areas which showed weaknesses in 2023.
The Student Voice section has shown significant improvements in an area where the University has scored relatively poorly in the past. Thank you to all colleagues across our Schools of Study and the Student Voice team who have taken significant steps in the last year to increase activity to listen and respond to student feedback.
The figures showed an increase in the positivity measure on the questions of How clear is it that students’ feedback on the course is acted upon? of 7 points from 56 to 63, while questions around students opportunities to give feedback on their course up 6ppts from 78 in 2023 to 84 in 2024 and the extent to which students opinions about the course are valued by staff increased by 5 points.
In other NSS key themes, scores across the questions in the Learning Opportunities theme improved in 2024.
All but one of the scores for Assessment and Feedback improved in 2024 including a rise of 5 points in the positivity score for How often does feedback help you to improve your work?
Scores for both questions on the Organisation and Management theme improved, including a 5 point increase in response to the question; How well were any changes to teaching on your course communicated? And both questions in the Academic Support theme also saw increased scores.
While these successes are very much to be welcomed, we still have work to do around Assessment and Feedback where the scores have improved but remain below the UEA-specific benchmark created by the OfS in responses to three questions in that area. Additionally, the University scored just below the benchmark score of 74.1 on How clear were the marking criteria used to assess your work?
The benchmark is a method the NSS uses to take account of the mix of courses and students at each institution, and judge how well an institution has performed compared with performance for similar types of students on similar types of courses in the higher education sector as a whole.
These results show solid progress from those of last year and are the results of lots of hard work. However, there are still some areas the University needs to improve on, such as Organisation and Management, where we are significantly below competitor institutions on questions of How well organised is your course and How well were any changes to teaching on your course communicated? We were also lower than our competitors on the question of How often is the course intellectually stimulating?
It is pleasing to see the successes of individual Schools. Physics achieved scores 5 points or more than the UEA institutional score in 18 questions across all themes.
Art, Media and American Studies, History, the Interdisciplinary Institute of the Arts (Liberal Arts course), Pharmacy and Sociology all scored five points or more than the UEA overall score across 10 questions or more. This reflects the areas of great strength and best practice across our disciplines at UEA. We also saw student verbatim comments marking our knowledgeable passionate and supportive staff.
I congratulate the achievement of 100% positivity scores in various areas from Physics, Liberal Arts, Counselling Psychotherapy and Occupational Therapy, American and Australasian studies, Earth Sciences, Chemistry, and Chemical processes and Energy Engineering. And finally, congratulations to subject areas achieving significantly above benchmark scores on a wide range of questions; Adult Nursing, Health Sciences, Midwifery, Children’s Nursing, Counselling, Psychotherapy and Occupational Therapy, Biomedical Sciences, Economics, Physics, American and Australasian Studies. A big thank you and well done to everyone who has driven these great results.
Our students have told us clearly that we must continue to focus on issues that matter to them on course changes, and feedback, especially assessment and we must ensure that remains our focus.
Colleagues will continue to analyse the NSS results and have given their initial analysis to the Senior Leadership Team which is being discussed with School colleagues to support their work. We will continue to use the data to inform improvement plans, and this will be discussed at the first governance committees of the academic year to ensure a focus on the key areas that will drive improvement.
Over the coming weeks, Schools will look closely at the detail of their results and formulate their action plans to take account of the issues that students have raised and identify areas of improvement or change.
Our new Student Education and Experience Strategy, launched this year, commits us to ensuring consistent performance across our provision and to delivering a positive teaching and learning student experience. As we embed the strategy further, these NSS results give us a great platform to go forward and learn from this invaluable feedback.
Thank you very much for your work that has driven improvement in our NSS results for this year. This is a marked improvement on 2023.
We still have much to do, but I know that we will keep the student voice at the very heart of our endeavours to provide the best possible student experience at UEA.
Best wishes,
David
Professor David Maguire
Vice-Chancellor and President
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