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 quintile 1 shows groups of students who have the lowest chance of accessing higher education.
Students in access quintile 5 have a high chance of accessing higher education.
By default the chart shows how all young people are distributed across the access quintiles.
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 quintile (where there is enough data to display this). Otherwise, the chart shows the distribution of students holding the selected characteristics across the access quintiles.

What are the characteristics?

Ethnicity= a detailed description of students' ethnicity.
FSM eligibility = whether or not the student has been eligible to receive free school meals (FSM) in the six years prior to the March census date in their final year of key stage four (year 11).
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 by local areas.

Note on proportions and rounding

The proportions for the different access quintiles 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 quintiles will sum to between 98 per cent and 102 per cent.

Get the data

Download the data for this dashboard:

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

Last updated 09 February 2021 + show all updates

09 February 2021: Updates to the the existing data.
26 November 2020: Dashboard updated to reflect new data.
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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