Advance HE: PRES 2025 shows decade-high satisfaction, and how to act on PGR feedback

By Student Voice AI

Published Feb 20, 2026 · Updated Feb 20, 2026

On 19 February 2026, Advance HE published headline findings from the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2025, reporting the highest overall satisfaction in more than 10 years. For universities, the message is not just “satisfaction is up”; it is a prompt to get sharper about what drives the postgraduate research (PGR) experience, and to make sure feedback is analysed in a way that leads to visible action. [Advance HE announcement]

What has changed in PRES 2025

Advance HE reports that PRES 2025 includes 35,514 postgraduate researchers across 93 institutions, including four in Australia. The headline shift is a positive one: overall satisfaction is up to 74.6%, an increase of 1.5 percentage points on the previous year.

The announcement also highlights improvements in areas that often drive “why” behind PGR feedback:

Satisfaction with supervisor: 89.4% (+1.9)
Research culture: 81.2% (+2.2)
Sense of belonging: 78.3% (+1.8)
Facilities are good: 83.6% (+1.0)
Opportunity to engage with the broader research community: 66.3% (+0.8)

Two equity signals are particularly relevant for institutions using student voice evidence in quality enhancement. First, Advance HE notes that female PGR satisfaction is now on a par with male PGR satisfaction. Second, disabled PGR satisfaction remains lower (70.1%), which makes segmentation and follow-up action essential.

“These findings show that investing in the right things can bring down dissatisfaction and improve satisfaction overall.” Jonathan Neves, Chief Executive, Advance HE

What this means for institutions

If your institution participates in PRES, these results are a useful benchmarking moment, but they are also a reminder that top-line satisfaction is an outcome, not an intervention. To decide what to do next, teams typically need to translate survey results into a small set of addressable priorities such as supervision consistency, access to facilities, research community and culture, and practical support.

PRES 2025 also reinforces the case for disaggregating PGR feedback beyond “all respondents”. Parity improvements are worth recognising, but the persistence of a satisfaction gap for disabled PGRs makes it risky to rely on averages. Institutions should expect to do a second pass that looks at where experience differs by protected characteristic, discipline, mode and stage, and then map those differences to specific changes and owners.

Finally, the areas highlighted by Advance HE are exactly the ones where PGRs tend to provide the most useful specificity in qualitative comments: what “belonging” looks like day-to-day, where research culture is thriving or fraying, and what support feels missing. That is the level of detail that helps you move from reporting to action.

How student feedback analysis connects

Student Voice AI carried out the full free text analysis on all PRES 2025 data. Advance HE commissioned Student Voice AI, in partnership with survey platform evasys, to provide thematic coding and dashboards for every open-text comment submitted across all 93 participating institutions. The analysis covers both open questions ("most positive aspect" and "one thing to improve"), classifying each sentence into 26 PGR-specific sub-categories using our UK higher education trained machine-learning model. This is the fourth consecutive year Student Voice AI has delivered PRES open-text analysis for Advance HE. For full details on the commission, see our announcement post.

The numbers tell you where to look, but the comments tell you what to fix. Pairing the PRES headline metrics with a repeatable analysis of open-text means institutions can move from reporting satisfaction shifts to attributing them to specific aspects of supervision, culture, facilities and support.

If you want your analysis to be usable in supervisor development, doctoral college planning, and committee reporting, a practical approach is to map open-text to a stable PGR theme structure, then track themes over time. For an example theme structure, see our PGR comment themes and categories resource. For teams scaling analysis across multiple surveys and internal channels, our governance checklist is a helpful starting point.

FAQ

Q: What should institutions do now with the PRES 2025 results?

A: Use the headline shifts to prioritise a short list of action areas, then triangulate with open-text and local intelligence. In practice, that means: segment by key cohorts (including disabled PGRs), identify the biggest drivers of dissatisfaction by theme, assign owners, and publish “you said, we did” updates so PGRs can see what changed.

Q: Who is PRES 2025 based on, and is it UK-wide?

A: Advance HE reports that PRES 2025 includes 35,514 postgraduate researchers across 93 institutions, including four in Australia. UK institutions typically use it as a sector benchmark for the PGR experience, alongside local doctoral surveys and pulse feedback.

Q: How does this change how we should use student voice evidence?

A: It strengthens the case for treating PGR feedback as an ongoing quality signal, not a once-a-year report. When satisfaction shifts, open-text analysis helps you attribute change to specific aspects of experience (supervision, culture, facilities, support) and evidence what you did in response.

References

[Advance HE]: "Postgraduate research experience up to highest level of satisfaction in more than 10 years"
Published: 2026-02-19

[Advance HE]: "Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES)"
Published: 2025-11-04

[Advance HE]: "Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2025"
Published: 2026-02-19

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