The University of Law Transforms Student Insight to Strengthen Module and Teaching Quality and Institutional Decision-Making

About The University of Law

The University of Law is a leading private university in the UK, specialising in practical legal education, business, criminology, psychology, computing and healthcare. With campuses in major cities including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Bristol, the institution is highly focused on employability and professional skills. Throughout its growth, the University has remained focused on delivering an outstanding student experience while using insight and evidence to continually enhance teaching, learning and institutional performance.

The Challenge: Scaling Student Insight Across a Growing Institution

When The University of Law began working with Explorance in 2019, its approach to collecting student feedback was no longer keeping pace with the institution’s rapid expansion.

Teaching quality evaluations were still being completed using paper-based questionnaires in classrooms, making the process difficult to manage, analyse and scale across multiple campuses. At the same time, the University was broadening its academic portfolio and placing greater emphasis on evidencing teaching excellence, student satisfaction and continuous improvement as required by initiatives such as the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

Annie Wheeler, Head of Commercial Insight, shared: “Initially most of our insight and survey activity sat within fairly regimented, structured processes One gap we had was around teaching quality evaluations. While the business continued to move forward with automation in many areas, our teaching quality evaluations were still being conducted on paper in classrooms. As we grew, we realised we needed a platform that could specifically support teaching quality evaluations. With TEF ratings in mind, and with the need to properly document and analyse feedback, we knew we needed a better platform to run the process.”

Initially, next-generation feedback analytics platform Blue was used specifically for teaching quality evaluations, with surveys triggered following teaching sessions to capture feedback on individual lecturers. However, as institutional priorities evolved, senior leadership recognised the need to move beyond evaluating individual teaching only and instead gain a broader understanding of the overall learning experience.

Within three years, the University redesigned its entire feedback programme, shifting towards module quality surveys before later developing a combined approach that evaluates both teaching quality and the wider learning experience. “In line with our institutional changes, Explorance turned everything around relatively quickly,” Annie commented. “That’s when the University really started paying much closer attention to the data we were receiving. From 2022 we were getting a robust amount of feedback.”

The Solution: Building a Centralised Student Insight Ecosystem with Blue, MLY and BlueX

Over the past seven years, The University of Law has continually expanded its use of the Explorance platform to create a comprehensive, institution-wide approach to student insight.

Blue now underpins the University’s core module quality and teaching quality evaluations, with automated surveys triggered at the end-of-module delivery across three reporting periods each academic year. Alongside improved survey design, reporting and governance, the University has steadily increased access to dashboards and insights across academic teams. “We started with what I would call relatively straightforward module quality questions,” Annie said. “We’ve since enhanced the survey design, reporting and the level of scrutiny applied to the results. Through Blue the quality of the data has improved significantly, and the importance of module quality surveys within the institution has increased alongside it.”

With staff engagement a top priority, Annie recalled: “A lot of work centred around securing buy-in from senior academic teams and programme directors. We needed to demonstrate the value of the data, explain what Blue could provide, and show what it meant for programme teams, academic managers and individual lecturers. However, a cross-functional approach is required – you need buy-in across the University.

“We regularly review survey design, reporting requirements and future developments, ensuring the platform continues to evolve alongside institutional priorities. We review potential changes to the programme, survey questions, reporting structures and rollout plans. We discuss what insights are emerging and whether any adjustments need to be made within the system. Explorance has been particularly helpful in supporting those changes. We’ve made a lot of them over the years, and the professional services team has always been extremely supportive throughout the entire process.”

As the programme matured, the University has started to expand beyond module evaluations and migrate its wider portfolio of recurring surveys into Blue. These will eventually include non-acceptor surveys, decliner surveys, first impressions surveys and end-of-course satisfaction surveys, creating a single platform for institutional insight.

To strengthen qualitative analysis, the University also introduced MLY, enabling thousands of open-text comments to be analysed automatically and grouped into meaningful themes. Annie detailed: “Looking through thousands of verbatim comments every year simply isn’t sustainable. Beyond the resource challenge, there are also questions around objectivity. I’d read a comment, place it into a theme, and then somebody else might interpret it differently. We had no effective way of processing large volumes of qualitative feedback. The verbatim comments are incredibly rich and valuable, but they were being used primarily to support the quantitative findings rather than adding deeper insight.

“That’s where MLY became valuable. Each year we identify a number of key institutional priorities – major themes that we want to improve. Before MLY, there could be significant debate about what the quantitative data and the verbatim feedback were telling us. Now we can analyse those comments at scale, group them into themes and identify patterns much more efficiently. The time savings alone have been significant. More importantly, it has strengthened confidence in the findings. People can clearly see how we arrived at our conclusions and there is a clear audit trail.

“Whether it’s TEF, audits or other internal reviews, there is always an emphasis on demonstrating how we listen to students, how we collect feedback and what we do with it. Because we can evidence the themes, sentiments and actions that emerge from the feedback, we can demonstrate how those decisions were reached.”

More recently, the University has begun implementing BlueX to extend survey capability across the institution for more “ad hoc surveys”.

“For me, BlueX will be about creating a single, governed environment for survey activity,” Annie revealed. “That means consistent branding, consistent survey standards, clear governance processes, visibility across the institution, and better coordination of survey activity. We’ll have formal approval processes for ad hoc surveys and an institutional survey calendar to ensure we’re not over-surveying students. We want to be very deliberate about what feedback we’re collecting and why. The goal isn’t simply to remove control. It’s to create a framework where people can move faster while still maintaining consistency and oversight. The biggest benefit is the combination of branding, standardisation and institutional visibility.”

The Outcome: Faster Decision-Making, Greater Ownership and a Stronger Student Voice

Today, Explorance plays a central role in how The University of Law listens to students and translates feedback into institutional action.

Annie, who won the Vision award for innovative use of feedback analytics at the Explorance Europe Customer Excellence Awards 2025, said: “We recognise the relationship between student satisfaction, growth and future enrolments. Poor satisfaction has implications beyond the immediate student experience. For a long time, we’ve recognised the correlation between future growth and whether students are satisfied, particularly with the learning experience. I think the biggest change through Explorance has been our ability to understand students better. We have a much clearer understanding of the issues affecting the University. There’s also a much stronger sense of ownership of the data.”

The speed of institutional action has also improved dramatically. “Before Explorance, action planning could be slow,” she continued. “It could take time to discuss findings, agree priorities and then come back with actions. Now the process is much faster. We’re able to combine module quality reporting with MLY’s thematic analysis and very quickly identify the most important issues. We can quickly present findings to senior leadership and say: ‘As a university, these are our key issues’. We can identify what is working well, where the challenges are, and where improvement is needed – and then quickly put action plans in place. That represents a huge difference for us.”

Looking ahead, the University is continuing to expand its partnership with Explorance through Managed Services, automation through Blue and onboarding additional areas of the University such as short courses, and exploring further enhancements with MLY and wider adoption of BlueX. Annie added: “For us, the next year is really about two things: We want to create more self-service capability and encourage greater ownership of insight and data throughout the University.”

Reflecting on the partnership, she concluded: “Whenever people ask me about Explorance, I have no hesitation in recommending them. I work with a lot of agencies across different parts of the business, and the relationship with Explorance feels different. This may not matter to everyone, but they’re exceptionally friendly, which I genuinely appreciate. They’re also incredibly adaptable. The professional services support is exceptional. I have nothing but positive things to say.”