All · Framework overview
Where students thrive and where they struggle: the student experience scorecard
Three million datapoints, one map of the student experience. For leaders deciding where to focus, the shape is clear: the strengths are people and relationships, the gaps are pressure, communication and equity.
The finding
Score every part of the experience on the same 0 to 10 scale and a clear shape appears. What students rate highest is about people and relationships. What they rate lowest is about pressure, communication and equity.
Cross-institution averages, scored 0 to 10. Higher is better.
What the data shows
The two ends of the scorecard tell a single story. Students feel supported by the people around them: teachers who are approachable, classrooms where it is safe to be wrong, colleagues on placement, peers. Where the relationship is close, the score is high; the single highest thing students rate is direct interaction with a teacher in a small class, at 9.1.
The strain is concentrated elsewhere: managing the stress of studying, feeling treated fairly, being kept informed in time, and confidence going into exams. These sit a point or more below the relational strengths. This is not a picture of disengaged or unhappy students. It is a picture of invested students under pressure, and a few specific, fixable gaps in how institutions communicate and support.
That distinction matters for where institutions spend effort. The instinct in a tough sector is often to work on belonging and motivation. The data says those are already strengths for most students. The opportunity is in the lower band, a point or two below the rest.
What it means for institutions
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Lead with the gap, not the average. A single overall wellbeing number hides the shape. The useful view is the spread: which specific subtopics sit two to three points below the rest, and for which cohorts.
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Build on the strengths to fix the weaknesses. Close teacher contact, a mistake-friendly classroom, and peers are exactly the resources that help students cope with stress and difficulty. The connections between subtopics are where the leverage is.
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Watch the band, continuously. Pressure is seasonal. It rises around assessment and eases after. A few check-ins a year track that rhythm, so support arrives when the pressure band is at its worst.
How we measure it
Based on StudentPulse check-in responses, scored 0 to 10, mapped to the 2026 framework (3 domains, 38 topics, 155 subtopics) and drawn from three million student datapoints collected since 2020. Scores are cross-institution aggregates. No single institution is identified, and a minimum group size is applied to every figure.