Every institution runs surveys based on what they as an institution would like to understand, yet the surveys rarely add up to a coherent student feedback system.
Students experience feedback requests as disconnected events, tick-box exercises, or simply as something not worth completing because they won’t see the benefit. Staff struggle to understand why different surveys exist or how they relate to enhancement. Institutions worry about survey fatigue while continuing to launch new feedback activities.
Across the UK, the issue is rarely the number of surveys students are asked to complete but the absence of coordination.
Getting student feedback in the first place has never been the problem. The narrative built on what is asked, when, why, and what happens as a result is rarely made explicit. The result is a feedback landscape that feels busy but functions poorly.
In evasys’s work with over sixty universities and colleges across the UK and Ireland, the pattern is consistent: institutions are running between five and 15 surveys per academic year, with little shared understanding of how those surveys relate to one another, or to the institution’s own enhancement priorities. Survey fatigue, where it genuinely exists, is usually a symptom of this incoherence rather than a consequence of volume.
Drawing on SOAS’s experience of building a more coordinated approach to student feedback, we’ve explored what a student success framework looks like in practice. The framework itself was recently produced by Wonkhe and evasys in partnership with a reference group comprising UK higher education leaders and survey experts.
The framework describes three levels of system maturity – institutional coordination, strategic alignment, and system enhancement – and maps these across three groups whose experience the system has to work for: those who govern it, the staff who act on it, and the students it must make sense to.
The levels are cumulative rather than sequential: most institutions are working on all three at once. The framework is a shared language for asking “where are we, and where do we want to be?”
Ducks in a row
The first level of the framework is institutional coordination, where most institutions need to start, and where many are still working.
It concerns something deceptively simple: knowing what you are asking students, when, and why. In a well-coordinated system, different surveys serve distinct and complementary purposes at different points in the student journey, staff understand the rationale for each one, and students can see a clear path from giving feedback to something changing as a result.
In practice, this level of coordination is rarer than it should be.
Without it, institutions accumulate surveys over time – adding new ones in response to new priorities without rationalising what already exists. The result is fragmentation: overlapping timelines, unclear ownership, and a student experience of being asked repeatedly for feedback with no visible connection between one survey and the next. This is the real driver of survey fatigue, and it cannot be solved by communication campaigns or response rate initiatives alone.
Coordination also requires visibility. Establishing governance, knowing who’s asking students what, and when, is the foundation on which everything else depends. It is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It’s the precondition for a system that students and staff can trust.
This distinction between lead and lag indicators is also worth naming here. National surveys like the National Student Survey (NSS) are, by definition, lag indicators. They tell us how a cohort experienced their programme after the fact, and primarily for external accountability purposes. They’re important, but they can’t drive timely improvement. Internal module and programme evaluations are lead indicators. They surface issues in time to act.
A well-coordinated system understands this distinction and designs accordingly, treating the NSS not as the centre of the feedback universe but as one component within a larger, purposeful ecosystem.
The SOAS solution
Since 2025, SOAS has been rethinking student feedback as an institutional system rather than a collection of individual surveys.
Guided by a focus on student success and enhancement, we mapped our feedback activity across the student journey to ensure that each survey serves a distinct purpose, captures different forms of student insight, and contributes to a coherent picture of the student experience.
Our approach begins before students arrive on campus, enhanced by the introduction of the Advance HE Pre-Arrival Questionnaire (PAQ). The PAQ explores expectations, preparedness, transition, and early support needs, giving us insight we can act on before teaching begins.
During study, student evaluation of modules (SEMs) provide real-time insight into the live teaching and learning experience – focusing on communication, organisation, participation, support and preparedness – enabling staff to respond during the teaching period and giving students visible evidence that their feedback is being used.
“My Year @ SOAS” offers a programme-level perspective for continuing students, helping us understand the wider academic and student experience beyond national survey populations.
National surveys remain an important part of this ecosystem.
The NSS provides sector benchmarking for final-year undergraduates, while the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) captures the experiences of postgraduate taught students across themes including teaching, engagement, organisation and community.
The most significant shift, however, hasn’t been the introduction of new surveys but the creation of a more coordinated approach to student feedback overall. We recognised that survey fatigue is often a symptom of fragmented systems rather than excessive feedback activity.
Students and staff need to understand why they’re being asked for feedback, how different surveys connect to one another, and what happens as a result of the insights they provide.
Building on this, we’ve introduced clearer governance, improved communication about the purpose of each survey, strengthened feedback loops, and developed greater oversight of feedback activity across the institution. The aim is not to collect more data, but to create a student feedback system that is purposeful, connected and capable of informing enhancement throughout the student journey.
Three levels, three challenges
SOAS’s journey, from a collection of disconnected surveys to a purposeful, coordinated system, is not unique in its starting point.
It is, however, unusual in its intentionality. The questions that drove the redesign of their feedback activity are questions every institution should be sitting with. The three levels of the framework map onto three different kinds of institutional challenge.
At the coordination level, the challenge is visibility and governance: do you know what you’re asking, and does everyone involved understand why?
At the alignment level, the challenge is relevance: does your survey data connect to your student success objectives, and can you demonstrate that it does?
At the enhancement level, the challenge is momentum: is someone actively reviewing whether the system is still delivering what it was designed to do, or has it simply become a habit?
The reflective tool that accompanies this framework offers thirteen prompts for testing your own system against these levels. But five questions are worth taking back to your institution today:
- Can you clearly explain the purpose of every survey you run, and could your students?
- Do staff across the institution understand how different surveys connect to one another and to enhancement priorities?
- Can students see – concretely, not just in a you-said-we-did email – how their feedback leads to change?
- Who has oversight of all student feedback activity across your institution, and is that oversight meaningful or nominal?
- How do you decide when not to run a survey?
That last question remains the most revealing.
Institutions that can give a principled answer to it are institutions that have genuinely thought about what their feedback system is for. The goal is not fewer or more surveys but it is about better ones – purposefully designed, well-timed, and part of a system that students and staff understand and trust.
The conversation about student feedback has focused for too long on response rates and survey fatigue. The framework invites institutions to ask a different question: not whether they should collect student feedback, but whether their feedback systems are coherent, purposeful and aligned to student success.
