Associations between characteristics of students

Access to higher education

This dashboard shows how likely groups of 18 or 19 year-olds are to access higher education by single or multiple characteristics.

What does the dashboard show?

Access group 1 shows groups of students who have a low chance of accessing higher education.
Students in access group 5 have a high chance of accessing higher education.
By default the chart shows how all young people are distributed across the access groups.
We have calculated the access measure for young people attending English maintained schools.
Where all six characteristics are selected, all students will be a single access group (where there is enough data to display this). Otherwise, the chart shows the distribution of students holding the selected characteristics across the access groups.

What are the characteristics?

Ethnicity = a detailed description of students' ethnicity.
Free school meals = whether or not students received free school meals in the year they sat their key stage four examinations (typically GCSEs).
Sex = collected as either female or male.
IDACI = their 'Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index' quintile. This is a measure of the proportion of children under the age of 16 in low income households for an area
IMD = their 'Index of Multiple Deprivation' quintile. This is a measure of multiple deprivation of small areas.
POLAR4 = their 'POLAR4' quintile. This is a measure of the proportion of the young population who participate in higher education.

Note on proportions and rounding

The proportions for the different access groups are based on the population of young people that share the selected characteristics. While these proportions are visually represented here by 100 people the actual number may far exceed 100 or may be below 100. For data protection reasons, we have not shown the data if fewer than 50 young people share the selected characteristics.

Due to rounding, the values for the different access groups will sum to between 98 per cent and 102 per cent.

Get the data

Download the data for this dashboard:

Access to higher education data (Excel)
Access to higher education data (CSV)

Find out which groups of students are members of the different access groups:

Access groups by student characteristics (Excel)
Access groups by student characteristics (CSV)

Please note these files were updated in January 2020 to add lines that were missing from the original file. No changes have been made to the data in the original file.

Last updated 24 January 2020 + show all updates

24 January 2020: Access groups by student characteristics data files updated to add lines that were missing from the original file

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Associations between characteristics of students

Access to higher education

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