Medr/2024/04: The National Student Survey 2025

Introduction

1. This publication sets out the arrangements for the National Student Survey (NSS) 2025 and the action required from all participating universities, colleges and other higher education providers by 29 November 2024. Providers are asked to:
– provide up-to-date contact details
– complete the ‘my survey options’ form
– submit NSS 2025 sample templates with contact details of eligible students.

Note that the six new Welsh subscribers to HESA, that have specifically designated higher education course provision and are submitting student record data for the first time for 2023/24, are not required to participate in the NSS 2025. We will be in contact with these six providers about future implementation of the NSS for them.

2. This publication also provides an overview of the administration of the survey, provider support contact details, survey timetable and dissemination of results.

Background

3. The NSS is a UK-wide survey undertaken by final year, undergraduate higher education students to give feedback on their course. It is managed by the Office for Students (OfS) on behalf of the UK funding and regulatory bodies – the Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland), the Scottish Funding Council and Medr (the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research in Wales). The survey provides information for prospective students to help them find the right course for them. It also provides valuable information for institutions, stakeholders and policymakers.

4. The survey will be delivered on behalf of the UK funding and regulatory bodies by:
– Ipsos, which will administer the survey.
– CACI Limited, which will deliver the data dissemination portal for providers.

5. The survey is a key component of the quality assurance and wider regulatory landscape in UK higher education. Participation is compulsory for higher education providers as follows:
– In Wales, providers that are regulated or funded by Medr for higher education provision are expected to participate in the NSS to ensure that the views of their diverse student populations are represented, in line with their duties to advance equality of opportunities, eliminate unlawful discrimination, foster good relations and promote equality. NSS outcomes will provide information to Medr, the regulator for tertiary education in Wales.
– In England, all providers registered with and regulated by the OfS will be expected to participate in the NSS as an ongoing condition of registration.
– In Northern Ireland, NSS participation is a condition of funding as set out in the financial memoranda between universities and the Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland). Further education colleges in Northern Ireland take part in the NSS to meet quality assurance requirements.
– In Scotland, participation is a condition of the Scottish Funding Council’s funding for higher education providers.

6. The OfS has confirmed that providers in England are not required to promote the 2025 survey to their students. Providers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are still required to promote the survey. We expect providers to review any internal campaigns, to ensure that they meet the guidance on marketing and promoting of the NSS and avoiding inappropriate influence (see the 2025 good practice guide).

7. During survey fieldwork responses will be monitored, and targeted follow-up will be carried out to ensure that publication thresholds are met. In early March, in addition to the targeted follow-up, all providers that are at risk of not meeting the publication threshold will be put into the booster phase to send additional email reminders and an additional SMS 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 for some until mid-April. The fieldwork timetable is set out in the Ipsos setup guide for providers which is available on the Ipsos NSS extranet.

The 2025 survey

8. For 2025, the NSS questionnaire will be the same as the NSS 2024. The survey will be delivered across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The freedom of expression question will be asked to students who study in England only and the overall satisfaction question will be asked to students in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland only.

9. The full list of NSS 2025 questions and response scales can be found on the OfS website.

10. The optional bank questions and their response scales will remain the same in 2025 using the Likert response scale.

11. Ipsos administers the survey on behalf of the UK funding and regulatory bodies. It is responsible for contacting students, promoting the survey and providing cleaned data to the UK funding and regulatory bodies.

12. As part of its role, Ipsos will liaise directly with providers regarding survey administration and will support the running of the survey by:
– offering guidance on the specifics of the survey programme, such as start week, selecting optional questions and provider-specific questions
– for providers promoting the survey
–* supplying NSS-branded marketing materials and advising providers on the production of their own materials.
–* facilitating provider incentive schemes to encourage students to take part in the survey.

13. Further information about marketing and promoting the survey will be provided in the good practice guide from Ipsos on 23 October 2024.

14. Providers will be invited to select one of five weeks when Ipsos can launch the survey to their students. There will be no communication from Ipsos with students outside of the times agreed with individual providers.

15. The survey timetable will run as follows:
i. The NSS will launch on 8 January 2025;
ii. The survey fieldwork will take place between 9 January and 30 April 2025 and will be run by Ipsos;
iii. The UK funding and regulatory bodies will issue a publication in spring 2025 detailing the plans for NSS 2025 results publication;
iv. A provisional date for publication of the NSS results on the OfS website is 9 July 2025 at 09:30am;
v. Detailed results will be supplied to individual providers through the new dissemination portal provided by CACI Limited on the same date and time;
vi. NSS results at course level will be published on the Discover Uni website.

16. Ipsos has issued a comprehensive guidance document, ‘Setting up and preparing for the National Student Survey 2025’, for all participating providers on 23 October 2024. The guidance should be read in conjunction with this publication.

17. For NSS 2025, CACI Limited will provide the survey results on a newly developed data dissemination portal on behalf of the UK funding and regulatory bodies. The results portal allows providers to access additional, unpublished elements of their data, including open text comments, data from the additional bank of questions and provider-specific questions, and data below the publication threshold.

18. The new NSS data dissemination portal will launch in December 2024. However, Texuna Technologies will continue to provide a dedicated NSS service desk support providers in accessing their data and responding to queries while the new portal is being developed. Guidance for providers about downloading historical data from the current NSS data dissemination portal will follow in due course.

19. For NSS 2025, CACI Limited will provide the survey results on the newly developed data dissemination portal on behalf of the UK funding and regulatory bodies. In preparation for dissemination of NSS 2025 results, CACI Limited will contact providers in spring 2025 to confirm user login details and confirm the details of publication of NSS 2025 results on the portal.

Discover Uni website

20. The Discover Uni website is a resource for prospective undergraduate students looking for information about undergraduate courses in the UK. It is managed by OfS on behalf of the UK funding and regulatory bodies. The NSS outcomes are published on the Discover Uni website annually. The current publication threshold for NSS results is a 50 per cent response rate and with at least 10 students responding.

21. The website also contains data taken from the HESA Graduate Outcomes survey, and the HESA Discover Uni return (formerly known as the Unistats return), which collects data about courses. More information about the HESA Discover Uni return is provided below.

HESA Discover Uni return 2024

22. All providers in Wales that subscribe to HESA make a Discover Uni data return to HESA to enable data about their courses to be included on the Discover Uni website. All providers regulated or directly funded by Medr for HE provision and providers with specifically designated HE course provision in Wales are required to submit this information to HESA for their provision.

Actions for providers

23. All higher education institutions and further education colleges in Wales that are regulated and/or funded for higher education provision should:
a) review and (where necessary) update their relevant NSS provider contact details by 29 November 2024. The information should be supplied using the ‘My details’ form on the NSS extranet. Ipsos issued login details for the NSS extranet to the nominated main and secondary NSS provider contacts in the week commencing 30 September 2024.
b) submit their completed ‘My survey options’ form by 29 November  2024 through the NSS extranet. This form asks for providers’ preferences on their survey start week, optional questions and details of any prize draws.
c) populate their NSS 2025 sample templates with the requested contact details for all students on their target list; this is a list of all students eligible for NSS 2025, based on the student data submitted to the 2023/24 HESA student record. Details should be supplied by 29 November 2024 via the ‘Upload sample data’ section of the NSS extranet. Any proposed additions to or removals from the target list should follow the process set out by Ipsos.

24. Instructions on how to supply this information are included in the NSS 2025 setup guide, which will be issued to provider contacts by Ipsos on 23 October 2024 and is also available on the NSS extranet. The guidance includes information regarding survey administration, key responsibilities and dates.

25. All providers are reminded to ensure that the course mapping to the relevant Common Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH) is correct. Providers should consider the resultant mapping to the CAH3 code in terms of the information that prospective students can access to inform decisions about studying higher education. Subject areas such as Nursing, Economics, and Finance may be areas that providers should review to confirm they are coded in the appropriate CAH3 subject.

26. Detailed guidance relating to NSS 2025 and the actions requested from higher education institutions and further education colleges in Wales who are returning student data to HESA and are participating in the NSS can be found at Annex A.

27. A summary of required action to be taken by participating providers is provided in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Provider actions and key milestones

Date	Actions
23 October 2024	Ipsos to issue NSS 2025 setup guide and good practice guide to providers.
29 November 2024	Review and update NSS contact details.
29 November 2024	Complete ‘my survey options’ form.
29 November 2024	Submit NSS 2025 sample templates with contact details of eligible students.
9 July 2025	Provisional date for publishing the NSS 2025 results on the OfS website and for dissemination of detailed results to individual providers through the NSS data dissemination portal.

Inappropriate influence on the survey

28. To maintain the integrity of the NSS data, it is important to ensure that students who complete the survey have not been influenced by their provider, or any other parties, to respond in a way that does not reflect their true opinion. The OfS is responsible for managing the process, on behalf of all the UK funding and regulatory bodies, to address any concerns that students have been inappropriately influenced in their completion of the NSS.

29. The procedures for investigating allegations of inappropriate influence on survey results are intended to be read in conjunction with the good practice guide issued by Ipsos, which explains what constitutes inappropriate influence and how to avoid it when encouraging student participation. We urge providers to ensure that all staff who are responsible for the running of the survey are familiar with Ipsos’s good practice guide, and seek advice where needed from Ipsos or the OfS on their approach to avoiding inappropriate influence. A representative from Medr will be involved in any review of a concern of inappropriate influence involving a Welsh higher education provider.

30. A student guide on inappropriate influence is available to help raise awareness among students of the value of their honest views, what to expect from NSS promotion, what is and is not allowed, and where they should go for help and support if they are concerned about being influenced. Providers are asked to inform students about this guide as part of their pre-launch survey plans. More details on this are provided in the NSS 2025 set-up guide issued by Ipsos.

Costs

31. Medr will cover the costs of the 2025 NSS for higher education providers which it regulates and funds.

Further information

32. The active support of participating providers is crucial to ensuring the survey data is of high quality. We encourage all providers and students’ unions to draw on the resources available and to get in touch if they require additional support:

Ipsos: [email protected]	The running of the survey, including: preparing for and marketing the survey; student target lists; optional questions; incentive schemes.
Texuna Technologies: [email protected]	Providers’ detailed results on the NSS data dissemination portal until 3 January 2025, after which CACI Limited will be taking over queries. The contact information for CACI Limited will be shared with providers in due course.
Office for Students [email protected]	Areas such as NSS policy and development; onward use of results; allegations of inappropriate influence.
Medr [email protected]	Any other queries relating to the operation of the NSS in Wales.

Assessing the impact of our policies

33. OfS has conducted a risk assessment screening. As partners in the OfS managed survey, we work with OfS to ensure that the survey and materials aimed at students are available in both Welsh and English in Wales. We will continue to assess the impact of the NSS on the Welsh language to ensure that students are able to fully participate in the NSS in their language of choice.