Every year, the National Student Survey asks final year undergraduates across the UK the same questions about their course. It is anonymous, it is independent, and there is nowhere for an institution to hide in it. This year, 133 of our final year students answered. This is what they said.

94.4 per cent rated the teaching on their course positively. To understand what that number means, you need to know how the Office for Students reads it. They do not compare us with a national average. They build a benchmark specifically for us: what students with our subject mix and our backgrounds would be expected to say about any provider in the country. That expected figure is 88.5. Ours is 94.4, and the published data says with 92.8 per cent confidence that the difference is real, not luck. The OfS calls that materially above benchmark. It is the strongest thing their data can say about teaching.

The same holds for learning opportunities, where our students scored us 90.8 against an expected 84.4.

Inside those themes sit the answers we care about most. Ninety seven per cent said teaching staff make the subject engaging. More than nine in ten said the course is intellectually stimulating and that it is building the knowledge and skills they will need. And 91.4 per cent said they felt free to express their ideas, opinions and beliefs. In a place that exists to train artists, that last one is not a nice-to-have. Nobody learns to act, to design, to light a stage or to run one, in a room where they are afraid to be wrong out loud.

It is worth saying why this matters beyond our own walls. Training like ours is intensive and expensive to do well. It happens in small groups, over long hours, in workshops and rehearsal rooms rather than lecture halls, taught by people who are still working in the industry they teach. Across the country, that kind of provision is under real pressure, and the question keeps being asked whether it is worth what it costs. These results are part of the answer. When you ask the students themselves, independently and anonymously, this is what they say about it.

Rose Bruford College CEO and Principal, Professor Randall Whittaker said:

Behind every one of these numbers is a student, many of them the first in their family to train as an artist, telling us that the teaching here challenges them, stretches them and prepares them for a future they will define for themselves. That is what specialist education does when it is done well, and it is why places like Rose Bruford matter. I am grateful to our students for their honesty and to our staff, whose work this is.

Our students also told us where they want to see us do better: our facilities, our technology and the systems that sit around the course. They are right, and that is where our investment plans are pointed.

The full results for every provider in the country are published on the Office for Students website.