The NSS shows us that students still seem to like higher education

Students are happier this year than last – across all themes in the National Student Survey.

Notably, a record 88.1 per cent of students who completed the NSS are positive about the quality of teaching on their course – with 93.6 per cent agreeing that teaching staff are good at explaining things.

We say this every year, but in any customer-focused service industry outside of the public sector these results would be celebrated as superlative. As would the response rate – 71.8 per cent of the eligible population (even though this is slightly lower than last year) is the kind of response that the Office for National Statistics dream about.

We hear a lot about poor quality courses and low value providers from ministers and commentators. Perhaps we need to hear more about how good the majority of higher education is, in the eyes of the students and graduates who participate in it.

Cynicism corner

Every year we also hear a chorus of complaints about how the whole survey is an engineered fix – conspiracism that reached ministerial levels during the Michelle Donelan era. Once again, we repeat – there is an opportunity to report any and all allegations of inappropriate influence, and this is open to staff, students, and concerned observers.

If you have evidence of undue pressure put on students – being told the survey is compulsory, pressure used to influence responses, doing the survey on behalf of students – send it to the Office for Students. It will be investigated, and if the allegations are proven results for that provider (or subject area within a provider) will not be published, and it is likely there will be additional consequences linked to registration conditions or consumer rights.

Results in full

There’s been some welcome changes to the plumbing of NSS results data this year: fields are named sensibly and documented fully. For smaller providers without data analysis capacity, this is a welcome improvement – especially as a change in visualisation design for the OfS’s own dashboards make them harder to read and less complete.

As usual I have my own dashboards at a provider level.

Note: these dashboards are necessarily large, complex, and involve chucking very large amounts of data about. I would recommend, for best results, a proper computer with a big screen and a decent internet connection. If you poke at this on a mobile browser you will be unhappy.

First of all, a look across the whole sector for all questions. You can filter by subject (use the subject level and subject filters together), level and mode of study, population (“registered” includes students taught elsewhere in a franchise or partnership agreement), and remove very small samples (by default for ease of reading I don’t display results with less than 50 responses, but you can easily add them back in).

The plot is of positivity – the proportion of respondents choosing the top two (of four) responses) – and this is compared with the benchmark. My preference here is to highlight where results are two standard deviations above or below the benchmark – using red and green – OfS by default uses a different (and to me, less clear) method.

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I use broadly the same approach to look at all subjects (you can choose one of three levels of granularity) within a given provider.

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And I’ve also put together a means of examining the full results (proportions responding with each answer rather than just positivity). You can select a subject at one of three levels, or see whole provider results. Here you can select a provider, the four home nations or the UK.

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(There’s something odd going on with the data for providers in Scotland – it looks like this is an error in the detailed results provided in the actual data publication and I’ll update that when I get to the bottom of it.)

Someone always asks why they can’t see results and/or benchmarks for their subject area in their provider. Data is suppressed in publications for a few reasons, in order to avoid identifying the responses of individual students:

• Where the response rate is below 50 per cent
• Where fewer than 10 students responded
• Where everyone in the population responded negatively, or only one student was positive. This usually happens for very small cohorts, and the data will still be included at lower levels of resolution within a particular subject.
• For benchmarks, these are not developed at a national level (for England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, UK), and may not be possible to develop where data is missing for a particular provider/subject/level/mode split

In the data I was able to spot five subject/provider/level/mode combinations where data is suppressed, and 116 where problems have arisen in developing benchmarks.

The quality report tells us that no data has been suppressed due to evidence of inappropriate influence

Are things really getting better?

The short answer here is, according to a rigorous population level satisfaction survey, yes they are.

But given the problems the sector has faced and continues to face as a result of financial concerns, it is right to take pause. It is widely accepted, for instance, that module choices available to final year students are becoming more limited as cuts begin to bite at departmental level – you’d look for a decline in course organisation and it is clear that this theme (Theme 5) shows a wider range of responses at provider level. But it is not as simple as correlating a year of horrifying headlines with a low score. There is clearly some impact at provider and course level – but the NSS is just one part of the picture here.

This tool will help you compare the positivity results for any two NSS questions or themes across the sector – with all the usual subject and course type filters. From my initial experiments I’m not seeing anything that explains the rise in satisfaction here – please do post in the comments if you do.

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Student characteristics

This year the “characteristics” data, which breaks down results for the UK and each sector at a whole-sector or top-level subject resolution, is published alongside the main results. Characteristics used this year include: age, disability flag, disability type, domicile (UK, EU, rest of World), ethnicity, locality, parental experience of higher education, sex, and sexual orientation. There’s also indices of multiple deprivation, and the relevant care experience marker, for each of the home nations. And England gets TUNDRA.

We are promised a split by provider type – unhelpfully this is provided as a characteristic rather than as a filter, and for England only. We were also supposed to get three additional characteristics – free school meals, service child status, and estranged status – these will supposedly turn up at a later date.

The easiest way to use this chart is to click on the characteristics in the legend at the bottom to highlight areas of interest. It is worth bearing in mind quite low numbers in some subgroups make these results an indication of where to investigate further rather than a finding in their own right.

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There’s a lot we can pull out of this one. Distance learners are unhappy with their ability to give feedback and have it acted on, and on the information they could access on mental health support – but they are pretty happy with their SU. The small number of students at level 4/5 providers are more likely to report satisfaction with freedom of speech, while disabled students with communication difficulties are least likely to be happy on that measure.

Older (31 and above) students tend to be most pleased with teaching and support – and most likely (along with distance learning students) to feel that marking is fair. Students at high-tariff and research intensive providers tend to be less happy with the feedback they get on their work.

For me, this shows that the variability in experience that might (in the dreams of David Willetts) have driven a beneficial market is mixed in with a variability that exists because of who you are rather than the choices you have made. And that, to me - and beyond even the "poor quality course" agenda - is where the work needs to be done.