BSC Education at Cardiff University: Working Together to Create an Excellent Student Experience

Over the last four years, our BSc Education programme at Cardiff has undergone a significant period of transformation. While our National Student Survey (NSS) scores are only one lens on that progress, they also point toward something deeper: a shift in culture, practice, and shared attention to the everyday experience of students and staff.

I became Education Teaching Team Lead in 2022, following a global pandemic, emergency shifts to online teaching, and sustained industrial action. The 2021 NSS results for the BSc Education programme hovered just above 50% in overall satisfaction, representing the challenges and difficulties facing both university students and staff. In free-text comments, students described their experience in fragmentary terms:  Feedback felt inconsistent, there was a perceived lack of programme coherence, and understandably, a sense of a loss of trust in higher education in general.

These challenges served as a catalyst for change and the basis for a programme of work I hoped to implement with colleagues and students alike. In response, the School appointed two new academic staff: Dr Vassiliki Papatsiba and Dr Anja Giudici, colleagues who bring both diversity and depth in teaching and research to our Education programmes. We also introduced clearer module documentation, began rebalancing the delivery of modules across semesters, and enhanced students’ sense of Cynefin through developing social/study spaces, extra-curricular activities and greater opportunities for dialogue with each other and academic staff.

Through initiatives led by Dr. Finn Bowring, we improved the structures of feedback and assessment, and with sustained efforts from Dr Mark Connolly, Dr Charlotte Brookfield and Dr Jenny Hoolachan, the School also enhanced its student academic representative (SAR) programme to better recognise and respond to our students’ needs.

By 2022, overall satisfaction in our BSc Education programme had risen to 56%, a modest but meaningful recovery, given pandemic legacies and structural strain. It reflected growing stability, clearer lines of communication, and more deliberate effort to address concerns. In 2023, I led discussions with colleagues about the pedagogical and curricular aspirations we had for our programmes and plans for how these can be interpreted through the student experience, including enacting values in practice, an emphasis on curricular coherence, and relational pedagogy.

As a result, overall satisfaction in Education for 2023 rose to 69.2%, with NSS results in areas such as “Staff are good at explaining things” reaching 100% positivity. Additionally, free comments shifted in tone: the general frustration of 2021 gave way to acknowledgement of clearer assessments, improved feedback, a more coherent module structure, a greater sense of belonging in the School and BSc Education programme, and more meaningful relationships with academic staff.

Over the past year, we’ve built on these strengths. We have implemented a variety of authentic assessments across our modules, promoted innovative and interactive learning experiences that bring teaching to life and help make learning visible to our students, all situated within a broad framework of relational and co-productive pedagogy designed to support our students to achieve the attributes and dispositions that will help them to achieve their goals now and in the future. The 24/25 NSS results reflect this work, showing a meaningful shift in the quality of the student experience. This year, 97.6% of Education students who completed the NSS indicated they were satisfied with the overall quality of the course. Additionally, we achieved 100% satisfaction on the following NSS items.

NSS 100% Student Satisfaction for BSc Education, Cardiff University:

• How good are teaching staff at explaining things?
• How well have the library resources supported your learning?

and above 90% on the following NSS items.

90%+ Student Satisfaction for BSc Education, Cardiff University: 

• How often do teaching staff make the subject engaging?
• To what extent does your course have the right balance of directed and independent study?
• How clear were the marking criteria used to assess your work?
• How often have you received assessment feedback on time?
• How easy was it to contact teaching staff when you needed to?
• How well have teaching staff supported your learning?
• How well organised is your course?
• How well were any changes to teaching on your course communicated?
• How easy is it to access subject specific resources (e.g., equipment, facilities, software) when you need them?
• To what extent do you get the right opportunities to give feedback on your course?

Students also described being part of our learning community as intellectually stimulating, supportive and inclusive. The continuing trend of improvement indicates that, even as universities face considerable challenges, here at Cardiff University, cultural change on our Education programmes has taken root and innovations designed to positively respond to our students’ needs and expectations over the years are now embedded practice.

Throughout, my aim as Education Team Lead hasn’t been metric uplift, but the co-creation of a university experience rooted in care, intellectual vitality, and shared responsibility. The action plans, away days, and what Pinar (2011) called ‘complicated conversations’ were never merely procedural; they were curricular, ethical, and deeply human. As we move into 2025/26, our task isn’t to replicate, but to build upon this success. We will continue to work in dialogue with each other and our students, and to ask, together, what kind of education our students, and our society, need.

As someone entrusted with leading this work, I’m grateful to the students who shared their experiences with us, and also my colleagues who tested, revised, and shared practices that have responded to these needs. I often write here about values, curriculum theory, and the ethical dimensions of pedagogy, and I believe (and continue to hope) our recent NSS results reflect these commitments and their practical outcomes. It’s one thing to affirm the importance of student voice, but it’s quite another to build the structures where it is heard, acted on and celebrated.

As we look ahead to the 2025/26 academic year, we do so not as a team chasing another uplift, but as members of a learning community that is eager to meet and exceed those expectations. I’m grateful to the students who have challenged us with care, to the colleagues who have led with diligence and clarity, and to the broader School community for creating space for this work to happen.