To help higher education providers and other users to understand the methods that the Office for Students (OfS) currently uses to produce institutional performance measures, we have published a series of technical documents.
These documents provide a technical description of the categorisations applied to individualised student data records, which we currently use to generate our measures.
Providers can use these documents alongside their individualised data files. This should give them a more detailed understanding of exactly which and how students have contributed to our measures.
The algorithms published here underpin outputs that were produced in March 2021. They supersede algorithms underpinning outputs produced in earlier years, which have been archived but remain available below. We have described the nature and impact of differences between successive versions of our algorithms in the technical documentation we publish.
We are currently consulting on the construction of student outcome and experience indicators for use in OfS regulation, and how they will inform our regulation of student outcomes and assessments through a revised Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).
The descriptions and definitions of institutional performance measures included in these webpages do not align directly with those that we are proposing through our consultations. Our future approach to measures about the outcomes that a provider delivers for its students at different stages of the student lifecycle will be confirmed following conclusion of the consultations, at which time these webpages will be revised.
2021 algorithms
While all of the algorithms described in this series of technical documents are relevant to production of the OfS’s institutional performance measures, we use some of them in other OfS analysis and statistics. For example, algorithms found in our core algorithms documents are used as the basis for the definition of published data on the equality and diversity of students in higher education.
