The School has again achieved an exceptionally strong set of results at School level in the 2026 Undergraduate (UG) Survey, including overall satisfaction at 93%, with scores improving or being sustained in all but two categories.

The Undergraduate Survey ran from 2 February to 6 April and mirrors the questions asked in the National Student Survey (NSS), plus a small number of additional questions, e.g. on sense of belonging.

This year's survey response rate was 37%, which is comparable to the record high of 39% for last year, and represented feedback from 1,488 students across 18 departments.

Summary of highlights

Results have been broadly maintained this year, with highlights including:

• Overall satisfaction: The School-wide score remains strong at 93%, with 9 out of 18 departments achieving 95% or above, and 3 departments seeing 100% positivity.
• High-performing categories: School-wide average scores of 90% or above for Teaching on my programme, Academic Support, Learning Resources, Freedom of Expression, Programme Delivery, Academic Growth, and Overall Satisfaction.
• Assessment and feedback: Up 2 percentage points on last year, with improvements across all five questions in this category. This remains one of LSE’s weaker-performing areas.
• Student voice: The category score has improved by 1 percentage point to 82%, with mixed results at individual question level. This also remains one of LSE’s weaker-performing areas.
• Mental health and wellbeing: Two new questions on mental health and wellbeing support – separating departmental and central provision – each scored 89%, up from 81% for the combined question last year.
• Sense of belonging: Improvements across all questions, with the category up 5 percentage points to 78%. The largest gain was for “I feel supported by this university” (up 8 percentage points to 77%). Despite this improvement, this remains the School’s weakest-performing category.

For more detailed analysis and results, view the slide deck: Headline summary slide deck of the UG Survey 2025/26 results (PDF).

Themes from student comments

The School again used StudentVoice.ai, an AI-powered analysis tool, to summarise themes arising from student comments. These are largely similar to last year.

Key areas of strength identified by students include:

• High-quality teaching and support staff
• Academic and personal development
• Careers support and opportunities
• Extracurricular opportunities such as societies and events

Areas of concern raised by students include:

• Inconsistency in teaching quality between courses and teachers, and weak integration between departments.
• Teaching approaches, including over-reliance on reading from slides and poor alignment with assessments, with calls for more interactive and engaging lectures.
• Assessment and feedback, where students want more timely and personalised feedback, clearer expectations about what is examinable, more transparent marking criteria, fewer high-stakes exams, greater access to past papers or model answers, and clearer insight into how exams are marked.
• Workload and pressure, described as a “double-edged sword”, with intellectual challenge sometimes tipping into feeling overwhelmed. Many students link this to a wider culture of competition and career anxiety. Cost of living pressures and perceived lack of financial support also contribute to stress.
• Administration, including timetabling issues, late publication of exam timetables, fragmented systems and hard-to-navigate websites, and unclear signposting to wellbeing and careers services.
• Belonging and community, with some students describing LSE as fragmented, intense and isolating (varying by department). Students want more opportunities to connect beyond their programme, department or year group, and outside of SU societies.

The results reflect the work already under way across education and student experience, and will inform activity moving forward, including addressing areas where scores are lower.

Our ESE work 

For more information about work in Education and Student Experience (ESE), visit the ESE webpages.

For the data, surveys and insight that underpins the School’s ESE work, visit our Insights for staff webpage.