Advance HE's pre-arrival questionnaire case study shows how disclosure gaps can hide students from support
Updated Jun 12, 2026
student supportstudent voiceEarly student voice is less useful if the students who disclose a need never make it into the datasets used for support. On 10 June 2026, Advance HE published Who are we missing?, a University of East London case study showing how pre-arrival questionnaire data exposed disclosure gaps in institutional records for disability, care-experienced status, and estrangement. For teams working on student voice in higher education, that matters because a missing record is not just a data issue. It can become a missed support offer, a distorted access and participation picture, and weaker evidence about what students need before teaching even starts.
What has changed in pre-arrival questionnaire use
This is not a new national survey requirement. It is a June 2026 institutional case study showing what happens when universities match pre-arrival survey data to named student records with consent. Advance HE says UEL has used the Pre-arrival Academic Questionnaire since 2021, but the first national pilot allowed entrants to provide student IDs and consent so teams could compare responses with institutional systems and act earlier. That builds on the wider pre-arrival questionnaire pilot findings, but moves from a sector-wide signal to an operational test.
UEL focused on three access and participation plan priority groups that depend heavily on self-disclosure: disability, estranged status, and care-experienced status. It cleaned the PAQ dataset, removed duplicates and invalid IDs, matched responses to institutional records, and used descriptive analysis in Power BI. The biggest gap was disability: 38.38 per cent disclosed in the PAQ, compared with 11.5 per cent in institutional records, a 26.9 percentage-point difference. The gap was even larger for some groups, including overseas students, 37.3 per cent in the PAQ versus 1.0 per cent in institutional records, and postgraduates, 37.9 per cent versus 6.9 per cent.
"some students may be overlooked due to data gaps"
For estranged and care-experienced status, the percentage gaps were smaller, but the missing-data problem was still severe. 65.8 per cent of estranged status and 86.3 per cent of care-experienced status were not recorded in institutional systems. Among overseas students, care experience was recorded as missing in 100 per cent of institutional records. The scope is one English university case study rather than a sector benchmark, but the implication is clear: institutions can be making support decisions with incomplete student profile data even when students have already disclosed something important.
What this means for institutions
The main lesson is not simply to collect more survey data. It is to test whether survey, admissions, and student support systems agree about who students are. Where self-disclosed identities appear in pre-arrival or early-term surveys but not in operational records, teams should review the wording of disclosure questions, consent routes, matching processes, and staff handoffs. Universities often focus on response rates when they review student feedback systems. This case study is a reminder that capture quality matters just as much.
It also shows why institutions should avoid treating "prefer not to say" and "not recorded" as the same thing. In UEL's analysis, the most serious gaps were concentrated among overseas students, postgraduates, and some later entry routes. That makes this a segmentation problem as much as a data problem. As our post on student survey benchmarking and triangulation argues, evidence gets more useful when institutions compare survey signals with administrative records, continuation data, and service take-up rather than reading each source alone.
The practical next step is early action. If pre-arrival data suggests students are worried about disclosure, or reveals groups that institutional systems rarely capture well, the response should sit inside induction, signposting, and support workflows, not in a retrospective dashboard alone. The benefit is earlier identification of students who may need help, and a more defensible evidence base when teams report on access, continuation, and student experience.
How student feedback analysis connects
This matters for comment analysis because subgroup evidence is only as reliable as the identifiers behind it. If disability, care-experienced status, or estrangement are inconsistently recorded, universities will struggle to segment open-text feedback credibly across pre-arrival surveys, induction pulses, module evaluations, and national surveys. That does not make qualitative evidence less useful. It means the governance around identity data has to be tighter before institutions can trust the patterns they see.
A governed workflow such as Student Voice Analytics becomes more useful once teams want to compare what students disclose before arrival with what they later say in comments about support, belonging, assessment, or communication. The real value is not another dashboard. It is a clearer trail from early disclosure, to later feedback, to action on the groups most at risk of being missed.
FAQ
Q: What should institutions do now if they want to act on this case study?
A: Start by comparing pre-arrival, induction, and early-term survey data with the student characteristics held in your institutional systems for the groups you most need to support. If the records do not line up, review question wording, consent, matching, and handoff processes before assuming the problem is only low disclosure.
Q: What is the timeline and scope of this change?
A: Advance HE published the case study on 10 June 2026. It describes work at the University of East London, which has used the Pre-arrival Academic Questionnaire since 2021 and used the first national pilot model to match responses to student records with consent. The case study is institution-specific, but the data quality issues it highlights are relevant across UK higher education.
Q: What is the broader implication for student voice?
A: Student voice evidence is not only about asking students better questions. It is also about whether institutions can identify, segment, and act on what students say in a reliable way. If key groups disappear between survey response and institutional record, the evidence base will look tidier than the student experience really is.
References
[Advance HE]: "Who are we missing?" Published: 2026-06-10
[Advance HE]: "Pre-arrival questionnaire (PAQ) national pilot wave 1 initial results" Published: 2026-04-16
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