Associations between characteristics of students

Continuing in part-time higher education

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

What does the dashboard show?

Students in PT continuation quintile 1 have the lowest chance of continuing their studies.
Students in PT continuation quintile 5 have the highest chance of continuing their studies.
We have calculated the part-time continuation measure for UK-domiciled students studying part-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 seven 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.
Disability= their self-reported disability status.
Ethnicity= a detailed description of their ethnicity.
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.
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.

Why is POLAR4 not included in ABCS PT continuation?

POLAR4 is most applicable to young students. Since many PT students are not young, there is very little data on POLAR4 available and so it is not included.

Why are care experience, FSM eligibility, NS-SEC and parental higher education not included in ABCS PT continuation?

These four characteristics have been added to ABCS FT continuation, however, there is insufficient data for us to be able to include them in ABCS PT continuation. This is partly because we use a slightly older time series for part-time continuation (because we measure part-time continuation a year later than full-time continuation) partly because of the age profile of part-time students and partly because the number of part-time students is much lower than the number of full-time students.

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 PT continuation 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 PT continuation quintiles:

Published 26 November 2020
Last updated 09 February 2021 + show all updates

09 February 2021: Data files updated.

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Associations between characteristics of students

Continuing in part-time higher education

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