Your feedback

Why your feedback matters

Here at BU and SUBU, we’re committed to listening to your perspectives and feedback to improve your experience and drive creativity, innovation and change.

We want to make sure that your voice is heard and acted on. We encourage you to be an active collaborator in your university experience to develop confidence, improve your skills and reach your potential. See below for how to give us feedback about how you are finding your course or research, what is working well and any suggestions for improvement.

We understand that you need to know how we respond to your feedback and we want you to see its impact. We are committed to telling you about the feedback we’ve received and how it has been used, including the action we’ve taken.

How to feedback to BU and SUBU

Three students working together on a project around a computer monitor

We will be running some programme sessions throughout the year where we will look at what we have covered and what you learnt in your units. We will also talk about how you found the units and any other feedback you have.
At any time, you can share your feedback with your Student Rep, who is elected by their fellow students and works in partnership with the university to make the student experience better for everyone. Student Reps help to co-ordinate the student feedback from your academic programme, department and faculty. There are also Postgraduate Research Reps to represent the view of postgraduate research students.
To feed back to your Student Rep, you can either contact them directly or use SimOn, the online feedback tool overseen by the Students’ Union. There is a link to this platform on our virtual learning environment, Brightspace, under ‘Want to give feedback?’ Feedback gathered through SimOn is collated and reviewed by your Student Rep, SUBU officers and in student voice meetings. This enables SUBU to identify the larger-scale issues to work on for students, to inform the development of the services and opportunities offered by SUBU and also to highlight the aspects that are working well for students.
Your Student Rep will summarise the feedback they receive from their cohort (either directly or via SimOn and present it to your Programme Leader for discussion in a Student Staff Forum, held twice per semester. This is a collaborative partnership between a programme team and the elected Student Reps. The forum offers an important space for consulting with Student Reps, discussing potential enhancements and improvements, facilitating and evaluating the impact of actions, and communicating outcomes with you. If issues are raised which cannot be fully discussed and resolved (e.g. because they require actions which cannot be authorised by the programme team itself), these issues can be referred to the appropriate level within BU’s governance structure.
Each year, we recruit eight students to sit on the university’s Student Voice and Engagement Committee. This is a formal BU committee reporting to the University Executive Team and chaired by Vice-Chancellor, Professor John Vinney. Each meeting discusses a broad student theme and looks at what has been implemented, emerging trends amongst our students and what could be improved. We usually recruit members over the summer break, so look out for this opportunity. Alternatively, if you want to find out more, please contact [email protected]
SUBU also holds two dedicated feedback weeks. Speak Week usually takes place in November and March, so keep an eye out for these and how you can get involved.
Other opportunities to share your thoughts and experiences with SUBU include their How’s SUBU for You? survey, their You’re Brilliant award, the SUBU Summit and the Student Members Meeting. You can find out more about these and other feedback opportunities on the SUBU website.

External student surveys

National Student Survey (NSS)

The NSS is a nationwide, online survey for final year undergraduate students (level six), and all UK universities are required to offer the opportunity to take part to students. Participating in the NSS is a great opportunity to reflect honestly on your whole BU experience. We use your feedback to compile year-on-year comparative data and to identify areas for improvement, as well as those of strength to share best practice. Results are also publicly available in the form of the Discover Uni dataset (formerly Unistats), used by prospective students, their families and advisers to help make informed choices of where and what to study.

Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES)

The PTES helps BU to gather important information about the experiences of our postgraduate taught (PGT) students on Master’s courses (level seven). The survey is also carried out by other universities across the UK, which means we can compare how we are doing with other institutions. PTES covers students’ experiences in the key areas of teaching and learning, engagement, assessment and feedback, organisation and management, and skills development.

Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES)

The PRES is an opportunity for all postgraduate research (PGR) students to share your BU experiences. You can feedback to us about your supervision, the research environment at BU, assessments, resources, skills, and your development as a researcher. The feedback will be used to inform BU-wide enhancements to the PGR experience and inform faculty-level improvements to the research environment and support for PGRs. It will also help us to benchmark our performance against other higher education institutes to identify key areas for development, as the survey is also carried out by other universities across the UK.

Graduate Outcomes Survey

Responding to your survey feedback

We use the anonymised feedback from student surveys to enhance our understanding of your experience at BU. This is part of our cycle of continuous review and development of our academic provision and student experience. We also consider other forms of feedback and discuss with relevant staff what actions might be possible or appropriate and how to respond to the feedback.

We will provide you with a response to your feedback and information about actions we are taking. This may take the form of changes to how we do things on a unit, a programme or across BU. Sometimes feedback shows us that we need to improve our communications, so that you understand what we are doing and why.

Feedback and representation often lead to developments which will benefit future BU students. They may also result in immediate changes which directly affect you, where this is possible.