The summer secondary school exam season is coming up fast, with this year’s school leavers now into their final months of revision.
Many of them will be planning on heading off to university next, and may be striving for certain grades in order to lock down any conditional offers they’ve received. But life can throw you curveballs, and some students may not get into the universities they had hoped, or may have decided university was the right path for them a little later - and with about 160-odd universities scattered all across the UK, it’s hard to know where to start when it comes to weighing your options.
While each university will have its own pros and cons to consider, making sure you have a good experience there and learn a lot shouldn’t be overlooked. Nor should getting good value for your money. Although the maximum fees university students have to pay can differ depending on where in the UK they live (with universities in Scotland even being free for Scottish students), the cost of tuition is set to rise for undergraduate students in England from the start of the 2025/26 academic year - their first increase since 2017.
To help get this process started, we’ve taken a look at The Guardian’s new university league table for the 2025 academic year, sorting universities exclusively by their student satisfaction with teaching scores. This is an aggregate score out of 100, based on final-year students’ responses in the national student survey to four questions; how good are teaching staff at explaining things, how often do teaching staff make the subject engaging, how often is the course intellectually stimulating, and how often does your course challenge you to achieve your best work?
Their answers have been used to create a ‘satisfaction rate’ for each school, although it is worth noting that a few don’t have ratings in this measure specifically - which the paper says is likely due to no data being available.
Here were the 15 universities that came out on top:
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1. University of Oxford
The prestigious University of Oxford - in the city of Oxford, in England’s South East - is thought to be the oldest in the English-speaking world. One half of the elite ‘Oxbridge’ duo, it was the UK’s number one university overall for 2025, according to The Guardian’s ranking system. It was given a score of 94.3 out of 100 for student satisfaction, when it came to the teaching they had received there. | Adobe Stock
2. University of St Andrews
Another highly regarded institution, St Andrews was Scotland’s very first university, and is headquartered in St Andrews, Fife. It was ranked 2nd overall across the UK this year by The Guardian. It was given a score of 92.6 out of 100 for student satisfaction, when it came to the teaching they had received there. | Peter Thompson/Heritage Images/Getty Images
3. Buckinghamshire New University
In a sudden departure from the top ranked schools overall, the South East of England’s Buckinghamshire New University - which has campuses scattered across a number of the county’s major towns - also had particularly happy students. The Guardian ranked it 65th overall in the UK. It was given a score of 91.2 out of 100 for student satisfaction, when it came to the teaching they had received there. | Google
4. University of Suffolk
One of the country’s newer universities, Suffolk has several campuses across Suffolk and Norfolk, in the East of England. The Guardian ranked it 99th overall in the UK. It was given a score of 90.7 out of 100 for student satisfaction, when it came to the teaching they had received there. | Google