Response to the Office for Students consultation on the National Student Survey

Earlier this year, the independent regulator for higher education, the Office for Students (OfS), opened a consultation on proposed changes to the National Student Survey (NSS). This included a proposal to introduce a new question around how well mental wellbeing support services are communicated to students. 

As the UK’s student mental health charity, we recognised the importance of engaging with this consultation, to share our insight and feedback. Our full response to the consultation is available to read on our website. 

As outlined in our response, we welcomed the proposal that a question on mental health and wellbeing be added to the NSS. However, we had concerns around the framing of the proposed question and therefore the usefulness of the data that responses would provide. The sole focus of the proposed question being the communication of support services means that responses would not give any insight into the prevalence of mental health issues amongst students, nor the factors shaping students’ wellbeing, or even the efficacy of support services themselves. With this in mind, our response proposed that the framing of the question be shifted, to better reflect the importance of a whole university approach to mental health and to capture more useful insights to inform both the sector and individual institutions. 

At the end of October, the OfS published an analysis of responses to the consultation, alongside their decisions. We were particularly pleased to see that there was much support across the sector for the inclusion of a question on mental health and wellbeing. This is a welcome sign that the higher education sector is moving towards adopting a whole university approach to mental health. However, we are disappointed that, despite ‘a number of respondents commenting on the appropriateness of the focus of the question’, the OfS has chosen to go ahead with asking the question around wellbeing as originally proposed. 

Student Minds recognises that consultations such as this one often receive extensive and detailed feedback from stakeholders, and that substantive change following a consultation isn’t always feasible. On this occasion however, we echo the concerns of other stakeholders in our sector and question the decisions made in response to this consultation, which received rich, high-quality feedback from experts in a number of areas. 

As a sector, it’s vital that we continue to work together, collaborate and take on feedback from one another in order to prioritise students and ensure their experience at university is a positive one. Without this, we risk losing out on opportunities to better understand and improve students’ experience and wellbeing. 

As such, we’d like to reiterate our openness for collaboration and willingness to engage in conversations around understanding student mental health and wellbeing. We hope there will be opportunities to develop this question set in the NSS in the future.