On the face of it, the recent National Student Survey (NSS) results produced by the Office for Students give the sector cause for celebration.
Colleges appear 18 times in the top 50 providers for student satisfaction, out of a total of 425 providers on the list.
FE colleges provide a distinct and valuable higher education offer to their local communities and it is important that the sector fights to maintain and develop this element of our curriculum.
Compared with universities, however, the number of students we teach is generally very small and we need, therefore, to take care when interpreting the data at the sector level.
‘The law of small numbers’
The law of small numbers predicts that, because colleges teach small numbers of higher education students, they will appear disproportionately at the top and bottom of the student satisfaction distribution, and we see this consistently.
The Tes article on the results concentrated on colleges that scored highly but could equally well have focused on the much larger number of colleges with very low satisfaction scores.
The 2018 NSS shows that the top 50 organisations ranked for satisfaction included 18 colleges, 31 minor or niche HE providers and only one recognisable university, St Andrews in Scotland.
National Student Survey data
The same survey shows that the bottom 50 organisations comprised 35 colleges, 14 minor or niche HE providers and again only one recognisable university, the London School of Economics.
There is no obvious correlation either with what we know about the colleges at either end. The college at the foot of the table, Moulton, has recently been judged “inadequate” by Ofsted, and the 18 at the top include two “outstanding” providers. However, the bottom 35 contains six “outstanding” providers.
For those at the top, they deserve their chance to shout about their success loudly but we need to be careful in using the survey to assert a more general message about student satisfaction, given it is inevitable that small providers like colleges will always appear in large numbers at both the top and bottom of the rankings.
Ian Pryce is chief executive of Bedford College
