Key performance measure 10

‘We will identify and celebrate achievements, helping institutions to learn from and build on the success of others, alongside highlighting concerns, empowering universities and colleges to drive positive change.’ (The OfS strategy 2025 to 2030)

Through the data, information, research and analysis that we publish, we will help to shape the debate around higher education, contributing to a flourishing sector that continues to improve.

Levels of engagement with these publications help us to understand their usefulness and relevance, as well as the extent to which the OfS is trusted as a credible source of information and insight.

This KPM therefore tracks the number of engaged sessions with non-regulatory publications via our website. A high or rising number of engagements suggests we are engaging a wide audience and helping to foster high quality dialogue and debate.

KPM 10 shows that the number of engaged sessions is driven by the OfS’s cyclical publication schedule. In the July to September quarters in 2024 and 2025, there were 198,900 and 185,200 engaged sessions respectively, compared with between 60,000 and 95,000 in other quarters. Summer increases were primarily driven by visits to the National Student Survey webpages which were published in July each year. The number of engaged sessions was lower in January to March 2026 and April to June 2026 than in the corresponding periods in 2024 and 2025.

This KPM counts the number of online engagements with a distinct category of publications over a three month period. It tracks the number of engaged sessions during which the user viewed at least one non-regulatory publication, which are those intended to shape people's views on the higher education sector as a whole and are not primarily intended to support direct regulatory intervention. It includes:

• Insight briefs
• Student insight reports
• Data analysis
• Blog posts
• Data dashboards
• Case studies
• OfS commissioned independent research

It excludes output which is purely regulatory or informative.

The KPM measures the number of engaged sessions as defined by Google Analytics. Engaged sessions are those where a user spends more than ten seconds on the OfS website or viewed two or more screens or pages.

It should be noted that this measure is imperfect and may not always indicate a user is engaged. A session may last longer than needed because the user is struggling to find the information they need. Alternatively, a session may last less than ten seconds because a webpage is clear and information is easy to find, and so would not be counted in our data even though the user was engaged and the webpage served its purpose. Despite this, we expect that in most cases, the measure effectively reports cases where a page was useful to a user.

The data has been backdated to October 2023.

The number of publications of interest published each quarter varies over the reporting period.

Download the data for KPM 10