We keep asking students for feedback – but are we actually listening?

The latest National Student Survey (NSS) suggests students feel increasingly heard. But behind the improving figures sits a more interesting question. What does it actually mean for a university to listen to its students?

I began thinking about this while working on a project on how universities collect and use student feedback. It started as a practical question about course evaluation forms. What do universities actually do with the results? It became a broader inquiry into what separates collecting feedback from genuinely listening.

With two colleagues, I traced the problem across the feedback process. We looked at what students cannot see after submitting an evaluation form, and at how the design of the forms limits what they can say. Our focus groups revealed what surveys often lack. That is a genuine exchange in which students and institutions can question, explain and respond to one another. Student voice is not simply a measure of satisfaction. It is a form of agency sustained by transparency, dialogue and trust.

Behind the positive student voice figures

In England, 80.2 per cent of students responded positively to NSS questions on student voice, up from 77.6 per cent the previous year. Higher education has built a saturated infrastructure for collecting student opinion. But collection is a one-off transaction. Students submit their feedback, and their involvement often ends there.

The figures show students know their feedback is being gathered. They do not show whether students understand how it influenced a decision. A university can give students plenty of opportunities to speak, and even act on what they say, without students ever seeing their voice carry weight.

Asking is not the same as listening

Most students have filled in a course evaluation form. Fewer can tell you what happened to their answers. As the NSS shows, that is not because students believe universities do nothing with them. It is because the process is often invisible.

Staff may read responses, discuss themes within programme teams and make real, lasting changes. But students may never see those changes. This is especially true when changes arrive after they have finished the course, left the accommodation or stopped using the service. To a student, an invisible process looks remarkably like no process at all.

This is where the language of the “feedback loop” obscures a human problem. Collecting feedback, analysing it and closing the loop frames student voice as a data-processing problem. But students do not experience feedback that way. We experience it as communication. We want to know that somebody read what we wrote and considered it. And even when a change is impossible, we want to understand why.

What students said when we stopped asking them to tick boxes

If universities want feedback they can act on, they need to let students help decide what is worth asking. Our focus groups moved beyond the familiar “rate your course from one to five” model. In an interactive Miro activity, participants built on each other’s ideas and sorted meaningful feedback from what they considered a waste of time. Unsurprisingly, students had far more to say than a questionnaire might suggest.

More interestingly, it showed how the format of an evaluation shapes which experiences become visible. A fixed-response form does not just compress students’ views. It decides in advance which aspects of their education count. Discussion, by contrast, let students set their own priorities and consider perspectives beyond their own.

This is not an argument against numbers. But a number rarely explains itself. A student can report dissatisfaction without any chance to say what caused it or what should happen next.

The challenge is not to collect more feedback. It is to help students produce feedback universities can use. Less box-ticking, more box-making.

The politics of being listened to

When we presented our work at the University of Aberdeen’s Academic Development Symposium, I expected people to glance at our poster, ask a few polite questions and move on. Instead, they stopped. They asked what students had actually said and what we thought universities should do differently.

I found this amusingly ironic. Our project asked whether universities listen to student feedback, and suddenly someone was listening to ours. Criticising a university anonymously is quite different from standing in front of the people who work within it. You have to explain your reasoning and listen to theirs. You have to accept that problems are rarely solved by declaring a policy unpopular.

Student voice is not simply about having something to say. It is about having the confidence, evidence and opportunity to say it well. That is why dialogue can be more valuable than a survey response. It makes disagreement possible without creating conflict.

I had anticipated defensiveness. Instead, people challenged our assumptions while remaining genuinely interested. Listening does not mean agreeing with everything students say. It means taking what they say seriously enough to engage with it.

From student satisfaction to student agency

Higher education increasingly talks about students as “partners” and “co-creators”. But genuine partnership depends on reciprocity. It means treating students as participants in a transparent process, not sources of information whose role ends when they hit submit. If universities keep asking without making their decisions visible, student voice risks becoming performative.

A student should not need to see their exact suggestion implemented to believe it mattered. But they should be able to see that it entered the institutional conversation. That might mean explaining why a change was or was not made. It might mean bringing students into deciding what happens next. What matters is that communication runs in both directions.

The question we should be asking

The instinctive response to low engagement is to ask how we persuade more students to complete feedback. Maybe we should ask what would make them believe it is worth their time. The first question treats students as respondents. The second treats them as participants whose trust has to be earned, and a higher response rate cannot manufacture trust.

The 2026 NSS tells us perceptions of student voice are improving, and that is worth celebrating. But the more interesting challenge is deciding what we want “being heard” to mean. The strongest form of student voice is not a five-point scale, a response rate or even a policy change. It is knowing that when you speak, somebody is prepared to listen, respond and, where necessary, explain.