Associations between characteristics of students

Continuing in full-time higher education

This dashboard shows how likely full-time students are to continue their studies into their second year or qualify by single or multiple characteristics.

What does the dashboard show?

Students in continuation quintile 1 have the lowest chance of continuing their studies.
Students in continuation quintile 5 have the highest chance of continuing their studies.
We have calculated the full-time continuation measure for UK-domiciled students studying full-time undergraduate courses at English higher education providers.
By default the chart shows how all UK-domiciled undergraduate students are distributed across the continuation quintiles.
Where all twelve characteristics are selected, all students will be a single continuation quintile (where there is enough data to display this). Otherwise, the chart shows the distribution of students holding the selected characteristics across the continuation quintiles.

What are the characteristics?

Age= students' age when they started their course.
Care experience = whether the student has ever spent time in the care of a local authority in England or Wales, or Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland.
Disability= their self-reported disability status.
Ethnicity= a detailed description of their 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).
NS-SEC = the socio-economic background for students based on the occupation of the highest earning parent for students who were under 21 when they started their studies or the prior occupation of the student themselves otherwise. Details of the grouping used here can be found in Section 7 of these ONS webpages.
Parental higher education = whether any of the students’ parents have any higher education qualifications.
Sex= displayed as either female or male. Where sex has been returned as other or unknown students are grouped as female to avoid discarding other information about those individuals.
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 that participates in higher education by local areas.
Local or distance learner= whether or not students live locally to their higher education provider or are distance learners.

IDACI and IMD are only produced for students domiciled in England; those students domiciled outside of England are not included in the quintiles of these measures. POLAR4 only applies to young students and POLAR4 data for students over 21 years old is not presented. Unknown or refused categories for care experience, ethnicity, FSM eligibility, NS-SEC and parental higher education are also not presented.

Note on proportions and rounding

The proportions for the different continuation quintiles are based on the population of students 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 students share the selected characteristics.

Due to rounding, the values for the different FT continuation quintiles will sum to between 98 per cent and 102 per cent.

Get the data

Download the data for this dashboard:

Continuing in higher education data (zip 170 MB)

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

Last updated 09 February 2021 + show all updates

09 February 2021: Tableau dashboard was not using the most recent ABCS full-time continuation data. The latest data corrects the error of data showing for the combination of age groups over 21 and any POLAR quintile. It affects the percentages by at most 1%.
26 November 2020: Dashboard updated with the latest data
24 January 2020: Data files updated to correct spelling errors in the text. No data changed.

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Associations between characteristics of students

Continuing in full-time higher education

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