All too often, learner feedback is collected too late to make any real difference to your provision. But when done right, it can sharpen curriculum, boost engagement, reduce drop-out rates and show regulators you’re serious about quality.
In this short article, we’ll explore how learner feedback can transform your delivery and the practical strategies you can adopt to start collecting it today.
Learner feedback serves as a vital tool in the apprenticeship journey, which can help you understand how well your content is resonating and where adjustments might be necessary. In fact, feedback can highlight curriculum strengths, offer early indicators of learner disengagement and even aid in meeting regulatory requirements.
While most providers invest significant time and resources in designing structured activities, even the best-designed programmes can occasionally miss the mark. Learner feedback offers a valuable opportunity to pinpoint where your content is unclear, where delivery methods could be more engaging or where the structure needs to be re-adjusted, so that learners can thrive.
Learner disengagement remains one of the biggest challenges for training providers. Frustrations with unclear expectations or a lack of challenge can quietly suppress a learner’s motivation. Left unaddressed, these issues can ultimately lead to learner withdrawal.
Giving your learners the opportunity to share feedback on tasks and activities can highlight where they’re struggling and feeling overwhelmed. Consequently, you can identify problems early and address them before they escalate, maintaining your learners’ engagement for the duration of the programme.
Gathering learner feedback can not only help you with curriculum enhancements and learner engagement but also with improving the quality of your provision, contributing to regulatory requirements.
In its annual report, Ofsted praised the improvements in apprenticeship quality to date and highlighted the efforts of training providers going the extra mile to achieve the best possible outcomes for learners.
The clearest ways to demonstrate your commitment is by using learner feedback to shape real, measurable changes. If you are actively listening to learners’ voices and developing actionable plans, you will be well-positioned to showcase your commitment to continuous improvement during your next Ofsted inspection.
Collecting learner feedback should be intentional, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that provide a clearer picture of how your apprentices are experiencing their programmes. Here are three practical approaches:
1) Surveys and Questionnaires
One of the most common methods for collecting feedback is through regular surveys and questionnaires. These can be issued at key points during the learner journey - at the beginning of their programme, during reviews and upon completion of their course.
The purpose of a learner survey is to understand how your apprentices are experiencing your programme while there’s still time to improve it. It helps you identify what’s landing well, where extra support is needed and what barriers learners are facing.
To effectively encourage learner participation, focus on creating surveys that are clear and straightforward. Use both quantitative and qualitative questions to gather comprehensive feedback while ensuring the process remains engaging and easy to navigate.
You can ask questions about the quality of teaching, the effectiveness of the content and how satisfied your learners were with the overall programme. Here are 5 good questions to ask in your next learner survey:
How would you rate the quality of the teaching?
Was the training relevant to your needs?
Was the content well organised and easy to follow?
Were the training objectives clearly defined?
How could this training be improved?
You can also check out this article, which lists useful questions to ask your learners during each stage of their training.
2) Learner Interviews
Although you may need to overcome barriers such as learners being unwilling to attend sessions or share honest opinions about their programmes, conducting one-to-one discussions with apprentices can offer more detailed, qualitative feedback.
These conversations can allow learners to express their experiences and concerns in their own words, and when run regularly and by someone learners trust, they can help uncover issues that might not appear in other formats, especially around motivation, confidence and support.
To get the most out of these interviews, keep the sessions short and focused to around 10-15 minutes, using open-ended questions about the learner’s experience. Make sure your tone is conversational, and where possible, have someone neutral (not their direct tutor) lead the discussion to encourage openness.
3) Bud’s Content Insights
Using integrated features like Bud’s Content Insights can also offer a seamless way to gather timely learner feedback. Apprentices can quickly rate activities with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down functionality and add comments to explain their response.
Bud’s Content Insights feature has provided huge benefits for creative training provider Access Industry. Having been using the feature since November 2024, they have already started to see incredible results, including driving cultural change.
This feedback is crucial for understanding how well the content meets learners’ needs and expectations, making it easy to capture honest reflections on what’s working and what’s not.
For Rose Taylor, Head of Quality and Curriculum, this has meant that by capturing instant, in-the-moment reaction to sessions and materials, you have access to real-time data to “react to and make changes before the next cycle of apprentices undertakes that particular session”.
As a result, Rose added, “You are not waiting for the survey cycle, and you have clear sight of the session/standard/trainer the feedback is linked to, which in normal surveys can take time to dissect and understand due to the nature of the anonymity they normally involve”.
Gathering meaningful learner feedback is a crucial component of delivering high-quality education and training, which can help meet learners’ needs.
Book a discovery call to find out how a learner management system like Bud can help you drive high-quality improvement and scalability across your programmes.