Bath’s Be Well report: connecting wellbeing questions and student feedback

Updated Sep 07, 2026

Bath’s 1 April 2026 announcement scheduled its spring Education & Student Experience Forum for 21 April. The agenda included Be Well Survey outcomes alongside inclusive education, access and participation, and employability. The announcement establishes the planned discussion, not its eventual decisions. Bath forum announcement.

What the annual report describes

The university’s 2024–25 Be Well report says wellbeing questions were embedded in course-level and placement surveys. It reports higher Be Well response rates following new promotion and oversight, and progress on representation, survey fatigue and use of feedback. The relevant section does not provide a quantified response-rate comparison or an evaluation of reduced fatigue.

It also describes departmental Assessment & Feedback roles and a future ambition to pilot and implement engagement analytics within three years. That ambition is not evidence that the platform was already operating. Be Well annual report, Learn section.

Bath promoted the annual report on 26 January 2026. These are therefore reported changes from the earlier academic year, not all new developments introduced at the April forum. Annual report announcement.

Give every question a purpose

Our recommendation is to map each feedback request to a decision and an owner. If a wellbeing question appears in several surveys, ask whether the repetition serves a different purpose or simply adds another request. Removing a question is useful only if the remaining routes still reach the students and experiences the review needs to understand.

Do not assume that adding a question means adding an open-text field, or that similarly labelled results can be merged. Check the actual instruments, response options and populations. A course survey and a dedicated wellbeing survey may reach different respondents at different points in the year.

When a change is made, record both its intended benefit and a way to evaluate it. For survey burden, that might include respondent feedback and completion behaviour, considered alongside coverage. A higher response rate alone cannot demonstrate less fatigue or more representative evidence.

The comment governance checklist can help define what may be compared and who will review the interpretation.

Review note, 7 September 2026: separated the forum agenda from prior-year reported progress, qualified unmeasured response and fatigue claims, and removed assumptions about open-text questions, platform delivery and causal effects.