Department for Education
Calendar year 2025

Participation in education, training and employment age 16 to 21

Participation in education and apprenticeships from DfE administrative data. It also includes NEET estimates from the LFS to give a full picture of activity.

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Data guidance

Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.

Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.

Description

This document describes the data included in the ‘Participation in education, training and employment age 16-21 accredited official statistics release’s underlying data. This data is released under the terms of the Open Government License (opens in new tab) and is intended to meet at least three stars for Open Data (opens in new tab). 

The release includes estimates from the labour force survey (LFS) on proportions of the population in England Not in education, employment and training (NEET). Estimates from the LFS are badged as ‘official statistics in development’ due to issues with response rates in recent years. The release also includes age 19-21 participation in education and apprenticeship estimates for the first time and these are also badged as ‘official statistics in development’ in order to assess user feedback and explore enhancements to the methodology.

The underlying data files include national participation estimates from DfE administrative data for 16-21 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. Estimates of proportions of the population not in education, employment or training (NEET), not in education and training (NET) and proportions in wider training not captured by administrative data and employment are included from the LFS.  Also included are participation estimates for those in education and apprenticeships by local authority and characteristics for those educated in the state funded sector at age 15.

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 21 as well as for combined age groups, 16-17, 16-18, 16-21 and 18-21. 

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 .

Some suppression has been applied to the state funded cohort data by local authority where the population category is less than 5.

Symbols used in the underlying data are as follows:

SymbolMeaning
zWhen an observation is not applicable
cWhere a cohort population is less than 5
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Contact us

If you have a specific enquiry about Participation in education, training and employment age 16 to 21 statistics and data:

Post-16 statistics team

Email: post16.statistics@education.gov.uk
Contact name: Sally Marshall

Press office

If you have a media enquiry:

Telephone: 020 7783 8300

Public enquiries

If you have a general enquiry about the Department for Education (DfE) or education:

Phone: 0370 000 2288

Opening times

Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 5.30pm (closed on bank holidays)

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