All actively registered Postgraduate Researchers will be invited to take part. This includes PhD, MPhil and Professional Doctorate students.
You will receive an email link to the survey on Monday 7th April from JISC Online Surveys. This will be sent to your LJMU email account. Please note that you won't receive a link if you are currently on a Leave of Absence.
If you have any problems accessing or completing the survey, please contact Victoria Sheppard in the Doctoral Academy: v.m.sheppard@ljmu.ac.uk.
Your survey response is confidential to the team processing the results and no reporting outside of this team will identify any individual. Any results communicated to academic staff will be anonymised.
The survey asks that any comments you make should not identify yourself or any specific members of staff.
You can find out more information about how your personal data is used and protected in the Postgraduate Research Evaluation Survey privacy notice.
Your feedback is important. Over one hundred universities and colleges take part in PRES, both in the UK and globally. This means we can compare your experience against similar postgraduates at other institutions to see if we are supporting your learning as we should. We use the findings to improve the experience for you and for future postgraduate researchers.
Anonymous survey responses are aggregated to produce an overall national report, published on the Advance HE website (opens in a new tab). The responses from PGRs at each participating university are also aggregated into a confidential report for that institution. A summary of the key LJMU results, and how they compare to the sector, will be shared with all LJMU PGRs later in the year.
A full report on the PRES results will be reviewed by the Doctoral Academy, your PGR Representatives, Faculty Research Degrees Committees, the University’s Research Degrees Board, PGR Forum and other relevant groups and committees. The results inform both University and Faculty-level action plans.
LJMU runs the PRES every two years. A summary of the 2023 PRES results can be found online. 2023 results showed higher than average satisfaction with PGR community, support and resources, and high engagement with development opportunities in comparison to the sector average. Supervision and research skills were identified as areas for improvement. Since 2023, University and Faculty action plans have focused on enhancing these areas. Actions have included more extensive required training for all supervisors as well as faculty-run supervisor days. The central PGR training offer has been enhanced to address the research skills that respondents felt least confident about, with a new series on methods and methodology, augmented with more subject-specific skills support from Research Centres and Institutes.
