By participating in the UK Engagement Survey, you will benefit from:
- critical data that informs enhancements to your learning and teaching;
- confidential and sophisticated benchmarking helping you understand how you compare with your peers and competitors; and
- the opportunity to include additional NSS questions, specific to your institutional priorities.
Get your surveys information pack
Click the button below and fill in the form to get further information about our student surveys sent to you.
What is the UK Engagement Survey?
A critical tool for improving student success
The amount of time and effort students invest in their studies and how students engage with learning is closely linked to their level of academic achievement. UKES is designed to help you get to the heart of this critical issue.
Unlike the National Student Survey (NSS), which collects data in an undergraduate student’s final year, the UK Engagement Survey takes place across all years of an undergraduate degree. This allows time to reflect on student responses and implement changes that will benefit students while they remain at your institution. It also offers a completely different perspective on questions of quality and true diagnostic potential. Used in conjunction with final year NSS feedback, it gives you deeper insights into student learning.
UKES helps you to better understand your students’ experience in the key areas of:
- Critical thinking
- Learning with others
- Interacting with staff
- Reflecting and connecting
- Course challenge
- Engagement with research
- Staff-student partnership
- Skills development (hard and soft skills)
- How students spend time
Data from the UK Engagement Survey allows providers to compare results against others in the sector at both subject and institution level. Institutions can use sector benchmarks, or use our custom benchmarking service to benchmark against groups of participating institutions, whilst preserving confidentiality. Results can be broken down by a range of course and demographic factors, helping you target enhancement where it is most needed.
Why participate in UKES?
Helps you identify your institution's strengths and weaknesses
The UK Engagement Survey (UKES) is an important tool for understanding how students experience their courses, how engaged they feel by the teaching and how supported they are in their learning and development.
The UK Engagement Survey (UKES) can provide your institution with feedback about how your students are challenged and encouraged by their studies. This information can be used to identify areas of strength and to address areas for development – increasing the appeal of programmes to students and making a difference to learning outcomes
Our Student Surveys Team has a wealth of knowledge, experience and expertise in the use of student surveys for enhancing learning and teaching. They will help you turn your survey results into useful insights and then positive action.
Final Reports
Over the past few years we have developed the UK Engagement Survey (UKES) to help your institution understand and improve students’ engagement with their studies. The survey uses selected questions from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which is widely used in the United States and around the world, alongside questions developed specifically for the UK.
UKES was piloted during 2013 and 2014. 2015/16 saw 29 institutions take part and given that it has been included in the TEF technical consultation for year 2 as a criterion that institutions can use in their submission of additional evidence, it is likely that the United Kingdom Engagement Survey (UKES) will continue to grow.
The Final Reports are available to download here and contain some very interesting and useful reading
- 2022 UK Engagement Survey
- 2021 UK Engagement Survey
- 2020 UK Engagement Survey
- 2019 UK Engagement Survey
- 2018 UK Engagement Survey
- 2017 UK Engagement Survey: Student participation and skills gain
- 2016 UK Engagement Survey: Student engagement and skills development
- 2015 UK Engagement Survey: Students’ perceptions of skills development
- UK Engagement Survey Pilot 2014
- UK Engagement Survey Pilot 2013
Testimonials
It’s really important that students aren’t just seen as passive consumers of their education but as partners. The [UK] Engagement Survey really puts their engagement with their studies at the heart of that.
Shaun Stephenson-McGall, Student Engagement Manager, University of Bath
What the UKES offers, and this is very similar to what happened with NSSE in the states, is it offers a completely different perspective on questions of quality. Particularly, it offers a counterpoint to the discourse about reputation and satisfaction, to really focus more on matters of teaching and learning.
Alex McCormick, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
Other surveys
Working with the Insights team
Advance HE’s Insights team is made up of experienced mixed-method researchers and experts in implementing surveys and other techniques for data collection. Our expert team can provide, qualitative, quantitative or mixed-methods offers, underpinned by sector-wide datasets from our student surveys and our sector leading higher education statistical reports. Whether you’re a sector agency, institute, university or another organisation with a higher education offer we will work with you to help higher education be the best that it can be.
