The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey is the largest survey of its kind. In 2025, over 35,000 Postgraduate Researchers from 93 institutions took part.
At LJMU, PRES was open for six weeks during April and May 2025. All actively registered PGRs were invited to respond. This included MPhil, PhD, Professional Doctorate and PhD by Published Works candidates. The response rate was 33%, identical to the sector rate for 2025.
The survey asked about the following areas of experience:
- Supervision.
- Resources: on-campus resources and online learning resources.
- Research culture.
- Community.
- Progression and assessment.
- Responsibilities.
- Support.
- Research skills.
- Professional development.
- Overall experience.
Each area has a set of up to four questions. The scores for each question set have been summarised into a single variable below to make them easier to digest.
The quarters and rankings are based on the 89 participating institutions that had 23 or more valid responses. These results have been provided by Advance HE.
More detailed institutional data are available to LJMU staff on the Power BI PRES report here. The Power BI report allows you to filter results by school, compare professional doctorate and PhD results, and see trends over time.
85% of LJMU PGRs said that overall they were satisfied with the experience of their research degree programme. This was 2% above the sector average, an improvement of 10% on the 2023 PRES LJMU score for overall experience.
The area LJMU PGRs were most positive about in relation to the sector was community. At 70%, this was 7% above the sector benchmark. The community questions focused on:
- feeling part of a PGR community
- feeling a sense of belonging at LJMU
- opportunities to interact with other PGRs
LJMU was ranked 1st in the sector for on-campus resources, 2nd for online learning resources and 6th for support.
On-campus resources asked about campus workspaces, library, IT and specialist resources.
Online resources asked about access to workspace, library and specialist resources while studying remotely.
Support asked about help with academic skills, IT and health and wellbeing.
Areas for improvement highlighted in the PRES 2025 results were supervision, research skills and research culture. These areas have all improved since PRES 2023 but are still just below the sector score or in the third quarter.
- Satisfaction with supervision was 89%, the same as the sector score but just in the third quarter. The lowest performing areas in this category were frequency of contact and help with training needs, both 1% below the sector average.
- Research skills scored 87% overall, in line with the sector but just in the third quarter. Within this category, confidence in critical skills to analyse findings was 2% below the sector average. There were, however, notable faculty variations, with HITS overall results for research skills 2% below and S&C results 5% above the sector average.
- Satisfaction with research culture was 1% below the sector average overall. The lowest scoring question in this category asked about 'access to a good range of seminars in my research area', and was 5% below the sector. Research culture scores were lower in S&C (5% below average) than in HITS (2% above average).
The results have been shared with schools, faculties and PGR representatives. The Doctoral Academy, in collaboration with PGR reps, has drawn up an action plan focusing on university-wide areas for improvement.
School and Faculty staff have access to detailed PRES data through Power BI. This shows school-level data and allows for longitudinal comparison. This has been used by Faculty Research Degree Committees (FRDC) to develop Faculty action plans for 2025-2027. Progress with action plans is reported at the PGR Forum and Research Degrees Board.
Staff can access LJMU PRES data by signing in to Power BI.
Find out more about PRES on the AdvanceHE website.
For any questions about PRES at LJMU, please contact the Doctoral Academy.
