Information for staff

Academic Staff: Promote the survey to your final year students in your lectures. Download the NSS 2012 Powerpoint

Now entering its eighth year, the National Student Survey (NSS) started again at the University of Bradford on 23 January 2012.  

The NSS is a survey of mostly final year undergraduates in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and some institutions in Scotland. FE colleges with directly funded higher education students in England are also included. The survey is part of the revised system of quality assurance for higher education, which replaces subject review by the QAA, and is designed to run alongside the QAA institutional audit to generate more detailed public information about teaching quality. The NSS is commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) on behalf of all the funding bodies. Ipsos MORI, an independent research company, administers the survey.

Prospective students, their advisors and the public can view the published NSS results at Unistats.com.

Sir Alan Langlands, Chief Executive of HEFCE, said: `The results of the previous National Student Surveys were overwhelmingly positive endorsements of higher education. They will enable prospective students to make well informed choices about their courses. By providing valuable feedback on their learning experiences, today's students have an essential role in helping their successors to make the right decisions about their higher education.

Students are sent an invitation email to complete the NSS. Those who have not completed the survey are later contacted by post or ultimately by telephone. Early online completion is desirable so please make your students aware of the NSS and encourage them to complete the survey online at www.thestudentsurvey.com. Students may also opt out of the survey at any point during the fieldwork.

Becka Currant, Dean of Students will be coordinating our NSS promotion and ensuring that guidelines issued by HEFCE in relation to the promotion of the survey are adhered to. Please make sure that your students:

• feel free to give their honest feedback on what they liked and did not like about their course
• are not asked to fill in the survey while a member of staff is overseeing their responses or made to feel that their responses are being monitored
• are not encouraged to reflect in their answers anything other than their genuine perception of their experience

If you have any questions please contact b.colley@bradford.ac.uk. If your students have any questions please direct them to www.thestudentsurvey.com or they can contact the National Student Survey team at Ipsos MORI directly at thestudentsurvey@ipsos.com.