A high quality education

Ranked highly for our teaching approach by education experts and students alike, and internationally respected for our excellent research, your education is in safe hands.

Our teaching pedigree

At Stirling you'll find yourself part of an academic community with a strong staff-student dynamic. As well as teaching, our staff are responsible for their own research which means you get the best of both: an academic expert who also has real-world industry and business experience.

We were voted Scottish University of the Year 2009/10 by The Sunday Times. They praised our high quality of teaching and noted that 'Stirling has provided a distinctive higher education for the past 40 years in a fantastic setting'. It's not just education experts who rate us: we also earned high marks in the National Student Survey 2010, coming joint third in the UK when final-year students were asked to rank the overall quality of their programme. We achieved a rating of 88 percent, beating the UK average of 83 percent.

To make sure that our teaching remains at this high standard, we evaluate our approach every year (at least). Our students are an important part of the quality assurance process; we make sure we listen to what works for you and act on it to make improvements. That's just our own checks – we also take part in a quality assessment scheme that covers the whole university sector run by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.

How you'll be taught

We use a mixture of different approaches depending on the subject, the students and what we want you to achieve. You're likely to take part in:

• Lectures. These large classes form the basis of teaching in the early years of your programme
• Tutorials and seminar discussion groups. These supplement lectures and give you the chance to participate by, for example, preparing and giving a brief presentation, or contributing to discussions. The small group format allows for closer supervision and support.
• Laboratory sessions. Part of all sciences, including Computing Science and Psychology
• Fieldwork and excursions. Part of many natural science programmes
• Individual and group project work. Part of teaching in many Academic Schools, where both theoretical and real-life cases are studied

Our international reputation for research excellence

We're proud of the quality of our research and the real-world applications developed as a result: applications which shape and improve lives. Stirling's energetic research community includes, the Institute for Social Marketing, whose specialists on the impact of tobacco and alcohol marketing help to shape government policy; the world-renowned Dementia Services Development Centre; the Institute of Aquaculture, which is the leading international centre in its field, the biggest portfolio of health care knowledge transfer partnerships of any Scottish university, and many other areas of expertise from economics to the environment. What's more, the most recent UK-wide Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) judged 85 percent of our research to be internationally excellent and internationally recognised, with the top 10 percent of that judged to be world class.