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. It uses 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, full-time undergraduate students are distributed across the continuation quintiles.
Where all 12 characteristics are selected, all students will be in 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 student's parents have any higher education qualifications.
Sex = displayed as female, male or other.
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.
TUNDRA = their ‘TUNDRA’ quintile. TUNDRA is an area-based measure that uses tracking of state-funded mainstream school pupils in England to calculate young participation. Quintile 1 shows the lowest rate of participation and quintile 5 shows the highest.
Local or distance learner= whether or not students live locally to their higher education provider or are distance learners.

IDACI, IMD and TUNDRA are only produced for students domiciled in England. Additionally, TUNDRA only applies to young students and TUNDRA data for students over 21 years old is not presented. Unknown or N/A categories for care experience, ethnicity, FSM eligibility, NS-SEC and parental higher education are also not presented.

Why is TUNDRA included in ABCS FT continuation?

TUNDRA is most applicable to young students. Since the majority of students on full-time courses started when they were under 21, it is most relevant to this population.

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.

We have not shown the data if fewer than 50 young people share the selected characteristics, as it is insufficient data to make generalisations about the likely outcomes for students with this set of characteristics.

However, groups with more than three students, but less than 50 are included in the data downloads, but this data should be used with caution.

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:

Continuing in higher education data (zip)

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

Last updated 13 October 2021 + show all updates

13 October 2021: Updated for the latest ABCS report
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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