To help higher education providers and other users to understand the methods that the Office for Students (OfS) use 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.
We keep the algorithms we use to produce our institutional performance measures under review. The latest algorithms underpin outputs that have been produced in March 2020:
These algorithms supersede those which were published and underpinned outputs produced in 2019. We have described the nature and impact of differences between successive versions of our algorithms:
We expect that our algorithms will continue to develop – in particular, to accommodate the outcomes of the forthcoming consultation on future approaches to the TEF and the ongoing monitoring of registration condition B3.
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 2020 core algorithms document are used as the basis for the definition of published data on the equality and diversity of students in higher education.
