The league table season for UK universities has started, with the publication of the 2015 CUG table.

Looking at the top 10, there are  no surprises – the same 10 universities as were there last year, albeit in a slightly different order. There’s not that much surprise at the bottom end of the table either!

From the press release from CUG:

The strongest climbers (rising ten places or more compared with last year) include two specialist art-focused universities – the University of the Creative Arts (up 24 places) and the University of the Arts Bournemouth (up 18).
They are beneficiaries of a revised approach to classifications of staff, which has enabled them to treat many of their technical staff as academics, thereby significantly improving student: staff ratios.
Other climbers are Abertay (up 20), Derby (up 16), Manchester Metropolitan University (up 15), Cardiff (up 13), Winchester and Sheffield Hallam (up 11), and Bath Spa, De Montfort and Queen Margaret (all up ten places).
Ten universities fell ten places or more: Royal Agricultural University (down 32 places); Aberystwyth (down 17); Birmingham City (down 16); St George’s, University of London (down 12); Hull, Northampton, Buckinghamshire New, and Anglia Ruskin (all down 11); and Bedfordshire and Ulster (down ten).

The good news for Staffordshire University is that we have risen by 8 places, which is testament to work we have done in the last 2 years, focusing on student attainment and student satisfaction. In fact in all of the criteria measured, bar research which is unchanged for all universities, until the outcomes of REF, our actual score has improved. Of course everyone else has been improving too, but we are now going in the right direction!

So for Staffordshire, some good news, but as Paul Greatrix (@registrarism) at Nottingham University observes, “Overall, there is not a whole lot to get excited about this year”.