Each department varies a lot within LSE: budget, student bodies -> the support we get. My department is relatively small, this means most of my lecturers and class teachers ACTUALLY knows who we are and hence support us whenever we need (you can think of it as student staff ratio). I’m not talking about all small departments are good, but in terms of the relativity, if you want a closely knitted community, I’d say go for the department and see how it looks like. For my department though, the “smallness” also contribute to the fact that we are poor. It took years of planning to make our winter/summer ball. But it was worth it! In terms of the school in general, I think they put in so much effort to communicate with the students, multiple lunch time session with free pizza and drinks to lure the students to give our their opinion. But to be honest, I don’t think the students have this impression that the school is listening to them. They have other system to support it like the Student-Staff Liason Committee, which the student can give feedback to their representatives, and then through the SSLC of each course/department it then feedback to the whole school etc, but I think a lot of advice/opinion/suggestion get lost in the processes, so it turns out the department is effective in adapting to what the student wants, but the school would not (of course there’s also the scaling problem, but I’m not gonna lie, I see departmental changes, but not the school) –
Lastly, LSE is a never ending construction site. So it’s always “noisy” if you can bear that, then I think you are pretty good to go