About our university
Royal Fort House
The is an international powerhouse of learning, discovery and enterprise. Its vision is of a university whose excellence is acknowledged locally, nationally and globally. The Sunday Times described the University of Bristol as ‘one of the jewels of British higher education’ and ‘at the cutting edge academically’.
Bristol is a member of the , a grouping of 18 research-led institutions of international standing, and of the of universities, an association of 20 major research-intensive universities of the UK.
The University is made up of 24 schools, organised in six faculties. It has approximately 12,000 undergraduate and 5,000 postgraduate students from around 100 countries. The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, which carried out an institutional audit of the University in 2008, awarded Bristol the highest rating available for its management of education and the academic standards of its awards. It has 31 Fellows of the Royal Society and nine of the British Academy – a remarkable achievement for a relatively compact university.
Bristol supports both individual scholarship and interdisciplinary research of the highest quality. In the most recent Research Assessment Exercise, 93 per cent of research at Bristol was deemed to be of international standard. Over 61 per cent of the research work assessed in 48 research fields was awarded either the top 4* rating, defined as ‘world leading’, or the 3* rating, classified as ‘internationally excellent’.
As measured by most research metrics, Bristol’s is number 3 in the UK after Cambridge and Oxford. It is the largest Faculty within the University with around 2,900 undergraduates, 850 postgraduates, 248 academic staff and 350 research staff. The Faculty has established good cross-school and cross-faculty links in teaching and research, and offers an outstanding intellectual environment for both its staff and its undergraduate and postgraduate students.
For an insight into the student perspective, see our and this for a flavour of life at Bristol.