National Student Survey
survey of final-year degree students in the UK
The National Student Survey is an annual survey, launched in 2005, of all final year undergraduate degree students at institutions in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The survey is designed to assess undergraduate students' opinions of the quality of their degree programmes, with seven different scores published including an "overall satisfaction" mark.
NSS is conducted by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Office for Students and the UK higher education funding bodies.
Methodology
Coverage
When launched in 2005, the NSS covered all final year undergraduate degree students in publicly funded universities (higher education institutes) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. All universities were obliged to provide contact details for eligible students, though participation is voluntary for the students themselves. This has since been extended to universities in Scotland.
Since 2008, Further Education Colleges (FECs) with directly funded higher education students in England have been eligible to participate.
The National Student Survey has recently come under scrutiny for its links with the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), leading to 25 student associations alongside the National Union of Students supporting a boycott of the NSS in 2017. The NSS link with the Teaching Excellence Framework was criticized in 2017 with a report from the Royal Statistical Society who described that there was 'no reliable association between the two'.
Contacting students
Contact details for students are supplied by the education institutions to the survey research organisation Ipsos MORI. The survey organisation attempts to contact students in January and February, initially by email, to invite them to participate in the online survey.
“National Student Survey” enters the record as survey of final-year degree students in the UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National, Student and Survey can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6978750. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2008 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Student Survey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.