Rating the United Kingdom's Architecture Schools

Final Edition

Note Along with the rest of this site, this page ceased updating in 2014. No further results will be published.

The Good Oil

Results for our 2009 survey are shown here. We provide two indicators:

Median Research Score
% of staff in the top quartile

For information on what these numbers mean, read this page. Can't find your school? Find out why.

You can also read why British architecture academics are pissing their pants at any sort of assessment of their performance.

Other Assessments of UK Schools

The United Kingdom has conducted research audits of its universities since 1992. You should check out their results at the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 (RAE 2008) homepage. This will be replaced by the Research Excellence Framework, to be completed in 2014.

We have included three other indicators, which measure not just research, but overall quality:

The Guardian University Guide average teaching score.
The Complete University Guide total score (CUG).
The UK government's National Student Survey (NSS) overal satisfaction score. Nominally available from UniStats. While this site provides very comprehensive information for each school, it does not provide an easy way to aggregate data for comparison. The NSS data we use comes from the CUG information.

The Teaching Quality Information provides further information, albeit in a difficult format. Finally British students should check out the remnants of Will I See My Tutor, a site that terrified Britain's lazy and complacent dons {professors} so much they had it shut down in 2007.

Current rankings

Click on the headers to sort the table.

University	Median Research Score (2009/13)	% of staff in the top quartile (2009/13)	Guardian University Guide (2012)	NSS (2013)	CUG (2014)
Anglia Ruskin	–	–	72	4	76
Arts University Bournemouth	–	–	72	4	78
Birmingham City University	–	–	61	4	78
Cardiff University	4	48	96	4	94
Coventry University	–	–	–	4	58
De Montfort University	–	–	57	4	–
Edinburgh School of Architecture	–	–	83	4	97
Glasgow School of Art	1	30	66	–	–
Kingston University	1	24	69	4	80
Leeds Metropolitan University	0	7	59	4	81
Liverpool John Moores University	0	22	52	4	85
London Metropolitan University	0	24	72	4	85
London South Bank University	0	16	52	4	77
Manchester School of Architecture	0	15	79	4	93
Northumbria University	0	14	81	4	74
Nottingham Trent University	0	0	43	4	70
Oxford Brookes University	3	35	79	4	84
Queen's University of Belfast	3	27	77	4	66
Robert Gordon University	0	13	70	4	66
Royal College of Art	25	100	–	–	–
Sheffield Hallam University	0	15	65	4	52
University College London	5	44	100	4	96
University for the Creative Arts	1	13	57	4	68
University of Bath	10	67	96	5	100
University of Bolton	–	–	72	4	81
University of Brighton	–	–	46	4	87
University of Cambridge	9	64	97	4	98
University of Central Lancashire	–	–	–	4	79
University of Dundee	–	–	68	4	85
University of East London	–	–	35	4	78
University of Greenwich	1	42	51	4	78
University of Huddersfield	–	–	66	4	83
University of Kent	0	9	80	4	85
University of Lincoln	0	7	65	4	85
University of Liverpool	3	39	81	4	92
University of Newcastle upon Tyne	2	35	82	4	90
University of Nottingham	1	16	79	4	80
University of Plymouth	–	–	64	4	74
University of Portsmouth	0	6	62	4	68
University of Sheffield	7	52	82	4	68
University of Strathclyde	3	21	69	4	82
University of the West of England	1	32	75	4	78
University of Ulster	0	8	58	4	58
University of Westminster	1	28	66	4	62
University of Salford	–	–	–	4	64