Survey of sexual misconduct

In 2025 we are asking all final year students across England to complete a pilot survey on sexual misconduct in higher education.

To reduce burden on students and providers, the sexual misconduct survey follows the National Student Survey (NSS). Students can complete the sexual misconduct survey immediately after they have submitted their NSS response.

Although they share the same survey platform, the two surveys are entirely separate.

The surveys are available to students between 8 January and 30 April 2025.

Why are we doing this?

There is currently limited data on sexual misconduct affecting students in higher education in England.

Existing evidence includes quantitative data on the experience of crimes, small-scale surveys and polls, and research generally carried out at provider level. The nature of this evidence means that we do not have reliable data on the extent or scale of the issue of sexual misconduct in higher education.

Our 2025 survey builds on our 2023 sexual misconduct pilot survey, which was sent to students from a small group of providers.

By surveying students on a larger, national scale, we hope to:

• understand the prevalence of sexual misconduct experienced by students
• gain insight on how and where interventions might be targeted to tackle sexual misconduct
• test an approach to capturing prevalence data at a national level.

What do providers need to do?

Participating higher education providers need to ensure their final year students are informed about the survey.

Ipsos will email providers explaining the actions they need to take.

Download the information guide for providers from Ipsos

Download the advice for staff from Ipsos

How will results be published?

As we’re structuring and presenting the sexual misconduct survey separately from the NSS, we’re not going to publish the responses as part of the NSS dataset this year.

If the 2025 pilot data is of good quality, we expect to publish it at aggregate and sector level. Additionally, and where it’s possible to protect students’ anonymity, we plan to share with institutions their own 2025 pilot data so that it can support any local initiatives on this important issue.

We will evaluate the 2025 pilot survey and then decide when we should next run the sexual misconduct survey – we’re currently planning on the basis that this is likely to be in 2027. We may then publish data for individual institutions from the 2025 pilot survey alongside that new 2027 data, so that results from both surveys can be viewed together.