The National Student Survey (NSS) 2025 results show continued year-on-year growth in positivity ratings given by final year students at Brunel University of London.
The NSS, run by the Office for Students (OfS), is an independent survey that gathers students' opinions on the quality of their course and their experience during their studies. In 2025, over 357,000 students took part from 307 different institutions, including 131 mainstream universities across the UK.
At Brunel University of London, our students’ positivity scores increased year-on-year for 24 out of the 27 core questions asked.
OfS categorise these questions into themes, which likewise show some great results for Brunel. Highlights include Academic Support, with 88% of students giving positive feedback about the support they’ve had from teaching staff; Assessment & Feedback, which our students rate better than the benchmarks set by the OfS; and Organisation & Management, for which we continue to score higher than the national average. Our ratings have also improved year-on-year for Teaching, Learning Opportunities and Learning Resources.
Many individual departments and courses at Brunel have achieved particularly high ratings. Based on combined scores across UK-wide NSS questions, Brunel ranks in the top 10 UK universities for:
Journalism and Politics also rank in the top quartile; while our courses across Business, Business Computing, Computer Science, Education, Finance, Games Design, Media Studies and Physiotherapy are all notably rated in the top half of UK universities.
Brunel’s relatively new Nursing Associate Higher Apprenticeship programme also achieved 91% average positivity across all core NSS questions, substantially higher than national averages for Nursing apprenticeships.
Taken together, the results show that Brunel remains firmly among the top 40 pre-92 research-intensive universities in the UK.