Postgraduate Research Experience Survey, 2025

The 2025 iteration of the Advance HE Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) saw 35,475 student responses from 93 providers, including four from Australia.

This is the “busy year” that persists after the survey moved from biennial to annual in 2017 – because there is an institutional cost to participation many providers have kept to the old pattern. Just 33 of the providers who participated last year have results included this time round, compared to 81 from the 2023 cohort.

All of which to say that these results are not really comparable year-on-year, despite the high number of responses.

The overall satisfaction level is the highest since 2011: 83 per cent or respondents score their experience with a 4 or 5 (on a five point Likert scale, corresponding to “definitely agree” or “mostly agree”). This continues an upward trend since the end of the pandemic restrictions, and although the trend itself may not be significant the fact that more than four in five postgraduate students are satisfied is notable in itself.

Advance HE suggests that improvements are due to improvements in the satisfaction of home students. These represent 57 per cent of this year’s sample, almost exactly the proportion of all postgraduate research students in the UK. This year 83 per cent of home students were satisfied overall, compared to 84 per cent of international students: the closest these two findings have been in recent years.

However home students are far less likely to report that their institution values and responds to their feedback – just 55 per cent of home students agreed with this statement, compared to 71 per cent of their international peers. International students are also more likely to feel like they were “part of a community” (67 per cent to 53 per cent) and more likely to feel a sense of belonging (70 per cent compared to 61 per cent).

This is a multi-year phenomenon – we don’t get any speculation as to why these patterns exist or persist within the survey narrative. It is possible that home students are more likely to have other responsibilities beyond their studies, and that this may affect their opportunities to participate in wider activities like research seminars – but it would be good to know for sure and I would be glad to see further polling on this next year.

Disabled students are another group less likely to feel that their feedback is valued or that they belong to their PGR community or the institution – though we are not told the proportion of the sample that report disabilities it is around 18 per cent for all PGRs studying in the UK – and the majority of PGRs with disabilities are UK domiciled.

What is notable is the proportion of disabled students who agree that reasonable adjustments have been made is lower for PGR (46 per cent) than PGT (69 per cent). One research student is quoted on this issue:

My interactions with disability services have been poor. There is a lack of understanding about the nature of research courses eg that they do not have a taught element and forms have been completed incorrectly. This does not give me confidence to use this service.

A sense of belonging, a feeling that you are being listened to, and the confidence to be creative are strong predictors of overall satisfaction – one is left with the impression that providers who listen to and understand their PGRs are more likely to have satisfied students. This is a finding that feels almost self-evident, but it is worth noting just how much impact belonging has in particular with overall satisfaction.

As Advance HE puts it:

Sense of belonging is part of the battery of statements on community introduced in 2023 and are consistently among the lower scoring areas. There has been an improvement since we first asked this question in 2023 but, given its consistent status as one of the two or three key drivers of satisfaction, this measure stands out as one of the key areas for institutions to try to understand better in order to help drive higher scores.

Community and research culture are among the areas in which PGRs are less satisfied, although things do seem to be improving over time. That’s not unusual in itself (scores for most aspects of PGR life have improved since the end of the pandemic restrictions) but it is notable that providers are beginning to understand the importance that students place on these aspects of a research degree.

The best performing area is supervision – some 89 per cent of students were satisfied with this aspect of their study – with research skills a couple of percentage points behind. Students are impressed with the skills and knowledge of their supervisors (93 per cent satisfied) and the amount of contact they have (92 per cent), although less so with their ability to identify development needs (80 per cent). As one PGR put it:

My supervisors are fantastic. I said before I started my PhD that I would need close support and regular checking in, which I have been given over and above what I expected. I have been consistently encouraged when my confidence is low and I think that outweighs any other quality you could ask for in a supervisory team.

PGR students with aspirations of a career in academia cannot have failed to have noticed the recent controversies around the way research culture is recognised, required, and rewarded in the Research Excellence Framework. The research culture questions in PRES focus on issues related to belonging – the availability of research seminars, opportunities to discuss research with peers, and the chance to become involved in a wider research community. This isn’t quite the same thing as REF was talks about – but it does throw some light on remote working experiences:

It would be nice to be in a building with other researchers who are working on similar topics. I find that those with overlapping interests are spread across many buildings and campuses, making it more difficult to meet up. I will have to then personally reach out individually in order to make time to meet with other relevant researchers. It is also more difficult to connect when many people work remotely.

This may also have a bearing on the availability of one key experience for PGRs – the ability to teach or demonstrate. Just 46 per cent of students said they had this opportunity – up from a genuinely concerning 37 per cent last year but still lower than many students would like it to be. Teaching experience is a key interest of those who wish to move into academic roles.

And it also represents a chance to get paid, of course– with just under three quarters of research students reporting a negative impact from rises in the the cost of living, and with a necessarily large amount of time needed for actual research this is currently a bigger concern for PGRs (72 per cent see an impact) than undergraduates (the latter as per the Student Academic Experience Survey, which showed 68 per cent experiencing an impact).

With a PhD itself representing a major financial investment, particularly among international students, the ability to take on paid work related to future employment is immensely valuable even for those not looking to become a researcher or lecturer. And it doesn’t feel like the opportunities are there for many PGRs.