Lancaster University has once again been ranked among the UK’s top ten universities by its students for high-quality learning resources while academic support also scored highly with a 90% positivity score.

The National Student Survey (NSS) is one of the largest surveys of its kind in the world. This year it received responses from more than 357,000 final-year students across 528 universities, colleges and other higher education providers across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Students participating in the NSS are asked to rate a range of factors related to their academic experience, including teaching, resources, assessments and feedback as well as support for mental wellbeing with results used to calculate a ‘positivity measure’.

Lancaster University has improved its scores in five of the seven themes with academic support and the high quality of its learning resources rated particularly highly by Lancaster students participating in this year’s survey.

The NSS results follow a series of recent successes in other league tables, highlighting the University’s excellence in both teaching and research. Lancaster University is currently ranked joint 10th in the Complete University Guide 2026, 11th in The Guardian University Guide 2025 and 12th in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2025. Lancaster University also has the highest available overall Gold rating in the latest Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2023.

Some of Lancaster’s NSS highlights this year include:

Seventh* for overall learning resources (91.6%); 6th* for library resources (93.9%) and 13th* for overall organisation and management (84.6%) including course organisation ranked 8th* (85.4%). Students were also highly positive about the statement 'How good are teaching staff at explaining things?' (94.8%) placing the university 9^th*.

Academic support scored 90.2%, and 91.5% of students agreed it was easy to contact teaching staff when they were needed.

The survey was completed by 70.6% (compared to 71.5% national response) of Lancaster University final-year undergraduate students.

*Lancaster University has compared the positivity measures for ‘all taught undergraduates’ at different institutions using the publicly available 2025 results to calculate Lancaster’s position relative to the 131 participating universities but excluding further education colleges and specialist institutions.