Description
This document describes the data included in the ‘Participation in education, training and employment’ National Statistics release’s underlying data. This data is released under the terms of the Open Government License (opens in a new tab) and is intended to meet at least three stars for Open Data (opens in a new tab).
The underlying data files include national participation estimates for 16-18 year olds in England and are broken down by (academic) age, sex, institution type, whether full-time (FT) or part-time (PT), and by highest study aim.
The methodology accompanying the release should be referenced alongside this data. It provides information on the data sources, their coverage and quality as well as explaining methodology used in producing the data.
Coverage
The data in this publication covers young people who reside in England, and is based on their academic age, that is their age at the start of the academic year, 31st August. The publication includes data on individual ages between 16 and 18 as well as for combined age groups, 16-17 and 16-18. The data is at national level only and cannot be disaggregated to sub-national levels, or by characteristics other than age and sex.
Participation estimates are broken down by (academic) age, sex, institution type, whether full-time (FT) or part-time (PT), and by highest study aim. This publication provides the official annual estimates of participation and NEET (not in education, employment or training) in England.
The publication also provides a robust estimate of the number and proportion of 16-18 year olds not in education and training (NET) and looks at the labour market status for both those young people identified as NET and those participating in education or training. Those identified as NET and not in employment are classified as NEET.
Local authority (LA) estimates of participation in education and work-based learning by 16- to 17-year-olds are no longer published as part of this release. The Department for Education publishes transparency data for local participation based on local authority management information, here: Participation in education and training by local authority. (opens in a new tab)
File formats and conventions
The files are in comma separated values format (.csv) with UTF-8 encoding.
The underlying data files contain unrounded figures as estimated from the administrative and survey data as outlined in the accompanying methodology .
No suppression has been applied, as the data is not considered sensitive and no additional characteristic or geography variables are included to enable individuals to be accurately identified.
Symbols used in the underlying data are as follows:
| Symbol | Meaning |
| z | When an observation is not applicable |
All data files associated with this releases are listed below with guidance on their content. To download any of these files, please visit our data catalogue.