University of Nottingham opens PTES, showing how to close the feedback loop

By Student Voice AI

Updated Mar 20, 2026

On 2 March 2026, the University of Nottingham published The Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) is now open, inviting taught postgraduate students to share feedback on their experience before the survey closes on Friday 12 June 2026. This matters because the announcement does more than promote participation. It makes a direct link between collecting postgraduate feedback and showing students what changed last time, which is still one of the hardest parts of survey practice for many institutions. At Student Voice AI, we think that operational detail is the real story.

What has changed in Nottingham's Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey

The immediate change is local and practical rather than sector-wide. Nottingham has opened this year's PTES to its own taught postgraduate students in England, says the survey takes only a few minutes, confirms that responses are confidential, and offers entry into a prize draw for two £250 Love2Shop vouchers. The page tells students to log in through the university link, so this is clearly an institution-run fieldwork and communications exercise, not a national methodology change.

What makes the announcement more useful than a standard survey reminder is the way it positions the survey inside a wider feedback cycle. The university does not simply ask for views. It also points students to a page showing how earlier feedback has led to recent improvements, which gives the PTES launch a clearer enhancement purpose than many survey campaigns manage.

"Your feedback is invaluable and will help improve the experience for future students"

That approach matters because PTES is not a niche local questionnaire. Advance HE's Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey 2025 report describes PTES as a long-running sector tool for understanding the taught postgraduate experience across areas including teaching and learning, engagement, assessment and feedback, organisation and management, and skills development. The same report says 86 per cent of taught postgraduates were satisfied with the quality of their course in 2025, the highest level recorded since PTES began in its current form in 2014. In other words, when a university opens PTES, it is stepping into a familiar sector benchmark, but the local execution still shapes what institutions can learn and how much students trust the process.

What this means for institutions

First, universities should treat a PTES launch as the start of an action workflow, not the end of a comms workflow. If a provider is running PTES this spring, it should already know who will review the results, how postgraduate themes will be segmented, and how findings will be reported back to students and programme teams. Our earlier post on why it is important to close the loop in student voice initiatives is relevant here, because participation is easier to sustain when students can see that the last round of feedback led somewhere concrete.

Second, PTES needs institution-specific interpretation. Taught postgraduate cohorts are often more compressed, more diverse in mode of study, and more likely to be balancing study with work or other commitments than undergraduate cohorts. That means institutions should be ready to read PTES results alongside local context, for example dissertation support, summer supervision, course organisation, commuting patterns, or service access outside standard undergraduate rhythms. A headline benchmark is useful, but only if the university can translate it into actions at programme and support-service level.

Third, the Nottingham example is a reminder that survey architecture matters. Universities are now juggling NSS, PTES, module evaluations, pulse surveys, wellbeing surveys, and strategic consultations. If each one arrives without a clear purpose, ownership model, and feedback-back-to-students plan, the overall system becomes noisy. Our recent piece on teaching evaluation surveys working better when students and staff help design them is a useful companion, because good student voice systems depend as much on instrument design and governance as on response rates.

How student feedback analysis connects

PTES results are most useful when institutions can move beyond a single headline and understand which postgraduate issues recur across surveys, schools, and services. At Student Voice AI, we often see taught postgraduate concerns spread across several channels at once: PTES, local course surveys, rep feedback, service tickets, and open comments from related postgraduate work. When those sources are read together, universities get a much clearer picture of where friction is structural rather than incidental.

That is why open-text analysis still matters even when the sector survey itself supplies benchmarked metrics. Institutions need a defensible way to compare what taught postgraduates are saying about assessment, organisation, workload, belonging, or project support, and to connect those comments to action plans. Our post on Student Voice AI + evasys + Advance HE for PTES & PRES 2025 shows how that kind of cross-survey analysis is already becoming part of mainstream postgraduate feedback practice.

FAQ

Q: What should institutions do now if PTES is live at their university?

A: Finalise the post-fieldwork plan before the data lands. That means confirming ownership, deciding how postgraduate themes will be segmented, preparing a clear timetable for analysis, and drafting a "you said, we did" communications approach early rather than after results arrive.

Q: Who is affected by the Nottingham announcement, and what is the timeline?

A: The published announcement applies to taught postgraduate students at the University of Nottingham. It was published on 2 March 2026, says the survey is confidential, and states that the survey closes on Friday 12 June 2026. It is a university-level launch, not a UK-wide PTES methodology change.

Q: Why does a PTES launch matter for the wider student voice agenda?

A: Because student voice depends on more than asking the question. A PTES launch tests whether an institution can explain why it is collecting feedback, minimise burden, connect local results to sector benchmarks, and show students how evidence leads to action. Those are the same disciplines that make any survey programme credible.

References

[University of Nottingham]: "The Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) is now open" Published: 2026-03-02

[Advance HE]: "Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey 2025" Published: 2025-11-20

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