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

Updated Sep 07, 2026

Advance HE’s PRES 2025 announcement reports 83% overall satisfaction among postgraduate researchers, the highest level since 2011. More than 35,000 researchers responded across 93 institutions, including four in Australia. These are results from participating institutions, rather than a census of every postgraduate researcher. Advance HE announcement.

What the announcement supports

The published headline figures are:

• Supervision: 89% positive.
• Sense of belonging: 65%.
• Research culture: 63%, still among the lower-scoring areas.
• Overall satisfaction among disabled respondents: 74%, with an 11 percentage point gap relative to respondents who did not report a disability.
• Among disabled respondents, 46% agreed that their institution provided the reasonable adjustments they needed.

The announcement also highlights cost-of-living concerns, particularly for international researchers. It identifies report author Jonathan Neves as Advance HE’s Head of Research and Surveys. Headline findings and author attribution.

How to use the findings locally

Our practical suggestion is to consider supervision, belonging and research culture separately when planning follow-up. A strong aggregate result need not describe every department or group. Before comparing local scores with these headlines, check that the questions, reporting bases and survey periods match.

Open-text feedback can help identify experiences that respondents associate with a score. It cannot establish which institutional action caused the score to change. Invite postgraduate researchers to help interpret themes and select priorities, then give each proposed action an owner and review date.

For disability-related findings, use accessible follow-up routes and protect respondents from identification in small groups. Review the support process and students’ accounts together rather than treating a single percentage as a diagnosis.

Our public PGR comment categories provide a starting structure for organising comments; they do not replace institutional interpretation or the survey’s own methodology.

Correction, 7 September 2026: replaced incorrect satisfaction, belonging, research-culture and disability figures with the announcement’s values. Removed unsupported decimal precision, year-on-year changes, a gender comparison and a quotation that we could not verify. Corrected Jonathan Neves’s role. This summary is based on the official announcement; it does not claim a full methodological review of the sector report.