Mock TEF: the best UK universities for student satisfaction

The results of the 2017 TEF are now available

When you’re thinking about where to study, a very relevant question to ask is how happy you’ll be at different universities.

Although this is impossible to predict for an individual person, it is nonetheless useful to get a sense of how satisfied other students are with their experience at university.

Student satisfaction is to be used as a measure of the quality of the teaching at universities in the UK under the government’s proposed teaching excellence framework (TEF), which will assess and monitor institutions’ teaching performance.

Times Higher Education has created a mock ranking of the TEF results, broken down by three key metrics the government proposes to use, including student satisfaction.

More mock TEF predictions

Best UK universities overall
Best UK universities for graduate jobs
Best UK universities for completion rates

Like student experience surveys more generally, the resulting student satisfaction mock TEF ranking indicates that prestige and student satisfaction do not necessarily go hand in hand.

According to both the raw scores and the results benchmarked to account for differences arising from varying student demographics (which we use in the table below), younger universities or those that are not quite so internationally well-known often provide a better student experience than older institutions, such as the majority of the prestigious Russell Group.

Many of the best universities for student satisfaction were founded in the 19th or 20th century as "people’s universities", to serve those who could not access more elite institutions.

Keele University, which tops the benchmarked list and also achieves the highest absolute score for satisfaction, was explicitly established by the master of a University of Oxford college to provide working-class adults with a solid education.

Newcastle University in the North of England and the University of Oxford in the South are the best Russell Group universities for student satisfaction. Both achieve a high absolute score, but Newcastle University ranks higher relative to expectations.

While the overall satisfaction levels at a university are not fully representative of satisfaction with teaching, they do indicate a better experience in general. The full results and methodology for the mock TEF exercise are detailed here.

Mock TEF: UK universities ranked by student satisfaction

Sorted by benchmarked scores