The best Creative Writing course in the UK (if not the world)

  12th March 2014

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The National Student Survey asks all final-year students to give their opinions on their time at university, and this includes measuring how satisfied they were with their course. Well, over the past two years, Creative Writing students at the University of Gloucestershire have been more satisfied than the students of any other Creative Writing course in the country. In fact, for two years running, they’ve been totally satisfied. We’re talking 100%, maximum, full-on satisfaction. 24 carat gold satisfaction. To put that in context, no other course has recorded a 100% satisfaction rating for one of the last two years – let alone two years running.

Before we go on, let’s have a few disclaimers. We don’t actually think the National Student Survey is a particularly accurate measure of how good a course is. We think it produces unreliable data because sample sizes are often quite small. And we dispute the idea that just because a course scores lowly in the NSS it’s necessarily a bad course. Perhaps the students’ expectations were misplaced, or a small minority who were unreasonably dissatisfied (because they weren’t happy with their marks, say) swayed the results. What’s more, we don’t think courses should be competing to be the most popular: we think each course has an educational responsibility to promote its values of academic and artistic excellence. So when we say we’re the best Creative Wring course we’re partly joking: there are loads of great courses and what matters is that prospective students find the one that’s right for them.

All that said, we are really proud of how happy our students have been in recent years. We’re proud of their great achievements, our brilliant anthologies, our dedicated staff, our unique drama projects, our new novel-writing competition, our guest speakers, our tradition of open mic events, and the fact that many of our students form tight bonds with their peers and build friendships that will last a lifetime.

For the record, here are the top ten undergraduate Creative Writing courses ranked by 2013 + 2012 percentage satisfaction ratings as recorded by single honours students in the National Student Survey:

1. University of Gloucestershire: 200

2. University of East Anglia: 190

3. University of Winchester: 187

4. Edge Hill University: 186

5. Kingston University: 185

6. University of Salford: 185

7.  University of Portsmouth: 178

8.  University of Surrey: 177

9.  University of Hull: 174

10. University of Birmingham: 172

SECTOR AVERAGE: 166

(NB: Manchester Metropolitan scored second highest in 2013, with a satisfaction rating of 98%, but 2012 figures were not available)

Want to know more? Here’s what one of our current students thinks.