The enhancement of the student experience relies on good quality, widespread feedback from everyday students, and students’ unions – it aids quality enhancement through student written submissions, strengthens campaigns, and it can inform your plans, priorities and direction. Students’ unions have access to a wealth of information at their fingertips – for example data from the National Student Survey, and NUS student experience survey as well as internal sources of data. However, to really find out how your students are feeling, it’s often necessary to conduct your own research to fill the gaps that these create and give you a good overview of the whole student perspective.

It’s important that the work should not stop once the data has been analysed and the focus groups transcribed…Unions must be proactive in disseminating the results of their research to their students as well as embedding them in their campaigns to show students that their time and effort giving their feedback has resulted in identifiable outcomes and real valued changes. It is important to show them that what they said really did make positive things happen.

We are pleased to launched the Online Research Guide, offering detailed advice on researching the student experience. Discussing all stages of researching from planning and preparing, conducting research and analysing data collected. This new online resource will be a valuable point of reference for unions when researching the student body.