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StudentPulse

The academic year in review · 2025/26

State of the Student Experience 2026

What 2.7 million student check-in datapoints reveal about the 2025/26 academic year: when experience bends, how far apart your own departments really are, and what the students who are thriving say their institution got right.

What's inside

  1. Intro
    The year bends at examsExam confidence falls from 7.2 in October to 5.4 in April. An annual survey samples one point on that curve and reports it as the year.
  2. Background
    Background & methodOne student experience, three domains, 38 topics, and how we read them honestly.
  3. Chapter 1
    Personal: the load students carryOne student in five doubts they can do the work in front of them. Four ordinary teaching practices drew zero mentions from that group, and dozens from the students who are thriving.
  4. Chapter 2
    Social: the fabric that holdsNearly one student in four is struggling on belonging. Blended sector benchmarks report one in fourteen.
  5. Chapter 3
    Academic: what the institution providesStudents rate teaching highly and still cannot find the timetable. They spend the free-text box thanking their teachers, not complaining about them.
  6. Close
    What it meansThree decisions for quality, wellbeing and leadership teams, and when in the year to make them.

Free. Built for quality, wellbeing and leadership teams. Figures are cross-institution aggregates; see the methodology.

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A few things students told us this year

The findings are free. Here's a taste of what's inside.

What separates the best institutions

We ranked all 38 topics by how sharply they separate the strongest institutions from the weakest. In third place: how well students manage stress.

The two biggest gaps are both things an institution directly controls, and most leaders guess wrong about them. See #1 and #2 in the report.

The scorecard

Students rate most of the 38 topics above 7 out of 10. But one topic scores lowest of all, and it isn't stress, money or workload.

It's a topic most institutions assume they're doing fine on. The full scorecard is in the report.

The exam-window dip

Students start each semester confident, above 8 out of 10 on feeling ready for exams. By the April exam window that has collapsed to a single, much lower number.

It tells you exactly which two months to staff support before, not after. The number is in the report.

Best-in-class vs the rest

The strongest institutions average 8.9 out of 10. The weakest, on the same scale with the same students, average just 6.4.

A full grade apart, and the gap isn't where most people think. What the top 10% do differently is the heart of the report.

Get early access Free. Sign up now; we email it at launch in September 2026.