I have concerns about the response rate for this year's National Student Survey - and I'm not alone.  The survey runs for several weeks, and every few days we receive a file from the polling organisation showing how we are getting on towards the overall target of 50% response at institutional level and for each individual department.  We achieved around 65% last session, although a couple of substantial departments didn't reach that level and didn't appear in the published results.  This year we are running a little behind the rates of response achieved week by week last year, and we are therefore under greater threat of not reaching the threshold.

Why does this matter?  Firstly it matters because we genuinely want to know what our graduating students think of their time here - whether their feelings are positive or not.  How can we work to improve the student experience unless we know the areas where they think we are deficient?  Fortunately there are not many of those across the university, although there is variability between departments.

Secondly, appearing in the various league tables that are derived from the NSS results - and in the Unistats web site that all candidates are invited to interrogate through the UCAS site - is important to keep our visibility high.  Now that UCAS applications are dealt with entirely on-line, the fact that a particular department might not appear in the Unistats database might lead applicants to believe that we do not offer that subject.

So today I had a meeting with the Student Union's Education Officer and with the head of Marketing - as well as the Head of Learning and Teaching Services - to plan how we can collectively campaign to encourage students to complete the survey before the deadline of the end of April.  I sent out a general e-mail to all heads of department near the start of the NSS period.  Now we are moving towards targeting particular departments - completion rates at the moment vary from around 20% to over 75%, and there may be something we can learn from departments producing the high response levels.

Sheffield overall has done well in the survey in recent years, holding a pretty consistent position at around 3rd within the Russell Group (last year exceeded only by Cambridge and Glashow - although Oxford failed to reach the 50% threshold and therefore was not included in the data results).  This is an enviable position to be in: hence my anxiety to ensure that we appear in the tables once again this year.