National Student Survey

NSS 2024

According to feedback from the National Student Survey 2024:

Worcester students continue to comment on the positive aspects of their experience. These include:

  • the excellent quality of teaching and support provided by staff
  • the strong application of theory to practice
  • the knowledge of and passion for their subject displayed by staff

Your feedback counts – together we have made the following changes to enhance your student experience:

In relation to your academic experience, we are: 

  • Sharing best practice on Personal Academic Tutoring in School forums, providing training to staff and working to raise visibility of PAT with students
  • Improving guidance for course teams on academic induction, to reinforce key skills and messages throughout the early weeks of the course
  • We continually review how we allocate students to placements and are working hard on making further improvements ahead of the 2025/26 academic year – this will include ensuring all returning students receive details of their placement at least 6 weeks before their placement starts

To support health and well-being, we are: 

  • Able to provide you with practical support via our student life advisers within our student support and wellbeing team, alongside our counselling and mental health service
  • Holding induction and welcome activities for our students who arrive in January
  • Relabelling disabled toilets to accessible toilets following feedback from the Disabled Students’ Network
  • Providing the CallMy app that students can use in the event of an emergency on campus to summon help and TalkWorc - our 24/7 text support service with Shout

To help with the cost of living, we are: 

  • Supporting students across campus to ‘Heat and Eat’ with microwaves and kettles as part of our response to the cost of living
  • Hosting Repair Cafes to support our sustainability agenda as well as helping to manage costs for students
  • Removing all Library Services fines for all university members and automatically renewing books up to nine times, unless the book is reserved. (Overdue books after this point will incur a charge)
  • Providing long opening hours and extensive resources in The Hive, to ensure a warm, safe place to study and a new Sensory Guide that helps students find a study space to suit them

In relation to assessment and feedback, we have taken a number of steps:

  • Our Study Skills portal has been reviewed and refreshed to ensure information is up to date and relevant, and a new section added to support Academic Writing. We have refreshed the Starting at University section, to provide skills guidance and support pre-arrival
  • We are piloting early reassessment opportunities for Level 4 first semester 15 credit modules – this means you can complete any reassessment in semester two for any failed modules, rather than waiting until the summer
  • We have asked all courses to consider how students can use generative artificial intelligence tools (e.g. Chat GPT) for different kinds of assessments and have produced guidance on using GenAI and referencing