We use eight measures of performance, covering all stages of the student life cycle, to put together a league table for 66 subjects. We regard each provider of a subject as a department and ask each provider to tell us which of their students count within each department. Our intention is to indicate how likely each department is to deliver a positive all-round experience to future students and, in order to assess this, we refer to how past students in the department have fared.
We quantify the resources and staff contact that have been dedicated to past students, we look at the standards of entry and the likelihood that students will be supported to continue their studies, before looking at how likely students are to be satisfied, to exceed expectations of success and to have positive career prospects after completing the course. Bringing these measures together, we get an overall score for each department and rank departments against this. For comparability, the data we use focuses on full-time first-degree students.
For those prospective undergraduates who have not decided which subject they wish to study, but who still want to know where institutions rank in relation to one another, the Guardian scores have been averaged for each institution across all subjects to generate an institution-level table. The structure and methodology of the rankings has remained broadly constant since 2008, though the data that is commissioned by the JISC and Hesa sector bodies has been disrupted in recent years. Years from which data is drawnThe 2026 edition mainly refers to data from 2024/25.
The continuation and career prospects metrics refer to two cohorts of students who respectively started or completed their courses in the preceding years. Student-staff ratios and expenditure per studentData from 2024/25 was used to support these metrics, which depend upon a student FTE (full-time equivalent) value in order to express the figures as rates. Staff FTE and rates of expenditure were available in accordance with the definitions of previous years, but changes to the definition of student FTEs required additional attention.
Once again, this involved seeking a secondary source of data on total postgraduate research students for each institution but a new process to allocate this to cost centres was used. This involved calculating the FTE of research students for each Guardian subject group, connecting this to the associated cost centre (a many-to-one mapping) and using the resultant distribution to profile the total figure. A further adjustment to the student FTE calculations affected students who are recorded BOTH on a placement AND a year abroad.
In recent years both discounts (20% of full FTE if for a full year, 60% if a partial year) have been applied but now it is the minimum discount value from either status. It should also be noted that there are subtle differences in the definitions of student full-time equivalence between the reporting requirements that apply to institutions in Scotland and to institutions in the rest of the UK. The concepts of full-time equivalence are equivalent, but the approach to the time period in which the activity is reported differs.
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