Academic year 2025/26

September Guarantee: offers of education and training for young people age 16 and 17

Data guidance

Published 29 January 2026

Description

This document describes the data included in the ‘September Guarantee: offers of education and training for young people age 16 and 17’ management information release’s underlying data. This data is released under the terms of the Open Government License and is intended to meet at least three stars for Open Data.

The September Guarantee helps local authorities fulfil their duty to provide education and training to young people and find them a suitable place. It also helps them to work with their partners, particularly schools and colleges, and to agree how the process will work in their area.

The offer should be appropriate to the young person’s needs and can include:

• full-time education in school sixth-forms or colleges
• an apprenticeship or traineeship
• employment combined with part-time education or training

Coverage

The underlying data files include national, regional and local authority September Guarantee figures in England. 

File formats and conventions

The files are in comma separated values format (.csv) with UTF-8 encoding.

Symbols used in the underlying data are as follows:

Symbol  |  Meaning
z       |  When an observation is not applicable

Data files

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.

September Guarantee

• Filename: UD_September_Guarantee_2025.csv
• Geographic levels: Local authority; National; Regional
• Time period: 2019 to 2025
• Content:
  National, regional and local authority September Guarantee figures

Variable names and descriptions

Variable names and descriptions for this file are provided below:

Variable name	Variable description
annual_change_offer_made	Annual change in the percentage receiving a suitable offer
cohort_number	Cohort number
no_offer	Percentage no offer
not_recorded	Percentage not recorded
offer_made_percentage	Percentage of young people who received a suitable offer
offer_not_appropriate	Percentage offer not appropriate

Footnotes

1. Caution should be applied when using these figures as this is management information data. The quality of data and how well 16 and 17 year olds are tracked can vary at local authority level. A small number of local authorities have experienced technical or administrative issues which may have additionally affected the quality of their September Guarantee returns.
2. Percentage of young people who received a suitable offer includes: education or training or continuing in education or training, continuing in employment with study (regulated qualification) and re-engagement activities.
3. Percentage offer not appropriate includes: going into employment without training, personal circumstances prevent learning and other reason.
4. Percentage no offer includes: application awaiting outcome, no appropriate provision and considering options/not applied for learning.
5. Percentage not recorded includes: unable to contact due to address not known or other reason and guarantee status not yet recorded.