Student Education News

Leeds among UK’s best universities

Leeds among UK’s best universities

The University of Leeds has been named runner-up for the University of the Year award in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2016.

It is the second consecutive year the University has taken the runner-up spot in the guide, which also ranks Leeds as the top university in the North region and the UK’s top redbrick university.

Sir Alan Langlands, University of Leeds’ Vice-Chancellor, said: “This is a welcome acknowledgement of the excellence of the staff and students at Leeds. Our continued success in the rankings has been driven by high levels of student satisfaction and world-class research.

“League tables can only provide a glimpse of the bustling life at a university, but this result rightly recognises Leeds as one of the UK’s top higher education institutions and among the world’s most respected universities.” 

The guide reports that the University has the best scores for teaching excellence (83.7%), student experience (88%) and graduate prospects (78.4%) in the Northern region.

The Times and The Sunday Times Good University Guide’s announcement  said: “[Leeds] has powered ahead thanks to high levels of student satisfaction, as well as strong outcomes in the latest research ratings, published last December. 

“Leeds does better than any other redbrick university — the big civic universities in Britain’s main industrial cities… Both the student experience and teaching quality scores were high, prompting a 16-place rise in the rankings for this measure.”

Leeds also reached its highest ever position in the guide’s statistical rankings, climbing to 14th overall from 17th last year. 

Leeds recently ranked 87th in the QS World University Rankings 2015/16, a league table of the world’s best universities. More than 80% of the research assessed in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) was considered world-leading or internationally excellent.

The Top 10 universities named by the Times and The Sunday Times guide are the universities of Surrey, Leeds, Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College London, St Andrews, Durham, Warwick, Exeter and the London School of Economics. The Top 10 represents an overall assessment of the highest-performing universities in the country. 

Further details of the league tables will be published in The Sunday Times on Sunday 20 September and in the Times on Monday and Tuesday, September 21 and 22.

For further information

Contact University of Leeds press office on 0113 343 4031 or email pressoffice@leeds.ac.uk

18th September 2015