The Office for Students (OfS) opened a consultation in April 2024 to seek views on outstanding issues following their 2023 review of the National Student Survey (NSS), including proposed theme measures for the NSS questions, and an update on benchmarking and response thresholds.
The consultation ran from 30 April 2024 to 30 May 2024.
Our response
In our response we urged OfS to exercise caution when grouping survey questions, highlighting cases where students' responses to individual questions may vary owing to the setting within which they are taught. There is a risk that provider scores will be altered as a result of proposed groupings.
We encouraged OfS to keep benchmarking under review and reiterated our proposals to incorporate age, accelerated provision, and online provision into benchmarking.
We also welcomed the decision to maintain existing minimum response thresholds, but called on OfS to keep this under review as the nature of higher education and delivery models change.
Other points we raised in our response include:
- That OfS should pay closer attention to specific provider types, such as specialist providers, and the industry settings and venues from which they teach.
- That the introduction of LLE will lead to the delivery of an expanded range of courses and increase student diversity, which should be considered in the context of future benchmarking.
- That our previous concerns around student groups or course groups unlikely to respond due to the timing of the survey - thus resulting in low response rates - will become increasingly relevant.
Read our full response using the download link below.