Widening Participation Indicators for Higher Education are Improving

Saturday 14 June 2008Comment on this article Permlink

The tenth set of UK higher education (HE) performance indicators, shows improvements across all three of the key indicators for widening participation.

The indicators are better for the most recent year’s data (2006-07) and also show a general trend of improvements over the past five years.

The indicators cover both widening participation and non-completion.

This year for the first time, a new measure of low-participation neighbourhoods (Participation Of Local Areas (POLAR2)) is being used.

A separate performance indicator on employment will be published in July.

A comparison of some of the key indicators for higher education institutions (HEIs) in England shows:

The proportion of young entrants (that is, aged 20 or younger) to full-time first degree courses who are from state schools has risen from 86.9 per cent in 2005-06 to 87.2 per cent for 2006-07
The proportion of young entrants to full-time first degree courses who are from low socio-economic backgrounds (NS-SEC groups 4 to 7) has increased from 29.1 per cent to 29.8 per cent
The proportion of young entrants who are from low-participation neighbourhoods has increased from 9.2 per cent to 9.6 per cent between 2005-06 and 2006-07
The indicators for completion do not show any significant changes this year with a projection of 13.9 per cent of students starting full-time first degree courses in 2005-06 neither receiving an award nor transferring to a different institution. This compares to a projected figure of 13.8 per cent for those starting in the previous year
The proportion of full-time first degree students in receipt of Disabled Students’ Allowance has increased 0.3 percentage points from 4.1 per cent in 2005-06 to 4.4 per cent in 2006-07.

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Source: HEFCE website.