The Cohort-based Higher Education Participation (CHEP) measure estimates the proportion of the population aiming to complete a qualification at Higher Education level.
The denominator used for the CHEP measure is pupils who attended state schools and all special schools (including non-maintained special schools) in England at age 15 as recorded in the School Census. The numerator is calculated by identifying pupils who progressed to UK Higher Education (Levels 4 and above (opens in new tab)) in the years following their schooling.
The measures are calculated using matched data. This matches the National Pupil Database (NPD) to the Individualised Learner Record (opens in new tab) (ILR), the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) Student Record and from 2014/15 to 2021/22, the HESA Alternative Provider Student Record. This allows pupils to be tracked from English schools at age 15 to HE at older ages.
The matched data relates to students who were aged 15 in the period 2001/02 to 2021/22, which allows us to track HE entry up to age 37 in the latest year (2023/24).
The measures cover HE courses at UK Higher Education Providers, Alternative Providers and English Further Education Colleges.
It must be noted, due to the matching procedures deployed, all figures in this publication should be treated as estimates and may include a small amount of double counting where pupils attend more than one school. Further details of the matching procedure can be found in the Matching process section below.
Independent schools
Pupils who attended independent schools are not currently included in the measure. The Department collects less detailed information on pupils who attend independent schools. This means that the figures are more sensitive to changes in the matching methodology over time than for state-funded schools which then affects the comparability of the figures. We will keep monitoring the stability of the matched independent schools data in the future with a view to including them.
Higher Education
Pupils are deemed to have participated in Higher Education where they are:
- Recorded in HESA's Standard Registration Population (opens in new tab), which requires a minimum of 2 weeks participation; or
- Recorded in the ILR as starting an HE learning aim or an apprenticeship programme that includes a component aim or programme aim at level 4 or higher that was either:
- Completed successfully
- Continuing into the following year
- Lasting over 6 months
Participation in HE at Alternative Providers has been included for students who started courses in 2014/15 or later.
An apprenticeship programme can contain multiple component aims, which make up part of the overarching apprenticeship framework or standard. For this publication, the component aim with the highest level is preferred over the overarching programme aim.
Exclusions
The following are not currently included in the CHEP measure:
- Pupils who attended independent schools
- HE or apprenticeship participation in Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish colleges and apprenticeship providers
- HE or apprenticeship participation outside the UK
There is also likely to be some unfunded learning in English further education colleges (FECs) that is not recorded as it is not mandatory for providers to record information in the ILR on their unfunded learners. There may also be higher-level learning in the private sector that is not recorded in administrative data held by government.
Breakdowns
Statistics are provided for the following breakdowns:
Age
Age relates to the age at the start of the academic year. Figures are provided for individual ages and are also grouped to show HE entry by age 20, 25 and 30. The main focus of the publication is HE entry by age 25 as this provides a balance between the timeliness of the measure and peak participation in HE.
16 year olds in Higher Education
Due to the small numbers involved, figures for students who entered HE at age 16 have been included in the figures but categorised as 17-year-olds.
Sex
From the 2023/24 academic year, the gender data item in the School Census has been replaced by a new sex data item.
The school census now collects the sex data item (a value which identifies the sex of a person as recognised in law) on a mandatory basis and schools are required to record it as ‘F’ (female) or ‘M’ (male), except for rare instances where the legal sex of a pupil cannot be established by the school. This differs from the historical collection of the gender data item which, while also being recoded as male or female, was self-declared and recorded according to the wishes of the parent and/or pupil.
For publication purposes, the historical gender variable and the new sex variable have been conflated into a single time series.
Region
Region is based on the location of the school that the pupil attended at age 15. The location of the school is determined by the Local Authority (LA) it reports to. In some cases, pupils may have lived in a different area to the one they have been reported in, including some pupils attending schools in England who lived in Wales or Scotland.
Free School Meals
Children in state-funded schools in England are entitled to receive free school meals if a parent or carer were in receipt of any of the following benefits:
- Income Support
- Income-based Jobseekers Allowance
- Income-related Employment and Support Allowance
- Support under Part VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999
- the guaranteed element of State Pension Credit
- Child Tax Credit (provided they were not also entitled to Working Tax Credit and had an annual gross income of no more than £16,190, as assessed by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs)
- Working Tax Credit run-on - paid for 4 weeks after you stop qualifying for Working Tax Credit
- Universal Credit - if you apply on or after 1 April 2018 your household income must be less than £7,400 a year (after tax and not including any benefits)
Pupils in families with no recourse to public funds (NPRF) can also be eligible for free school meals – see here for further information: Providing free school meals to families with no recourse to public funds (NRPF) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) (opens in new tab)
Since 1 April 2018, transitional protections have been in place during the roll out of Universal Credit. This has meant that pupils eligible for free school meals on or after 1 April 2018 retain their free school meals eligibility even if their circumstances change. Prior to the pandemic, this had been the main driver in the increase in the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals as pupils continue to become eligible but fewer pupils stop being eligible.
Any pupil gaining eligibility for free school meals after 1 April 2018 is protected against losing free school meals until the end of the 2025/26 academic year. From the start of the 2026/27 school year, the new eligibility criteria will be introduced meaning that all children from households in receipt of Universal Credit will be entitled to receive a free meal. It is the intention to end transitional protections alongside this change in threshold, with eligibility for all pupils reverting to whether they meet the eligibility criteria regardless of whether they were previously protected.
The proportion of pupils eligible for (and claiming) Free School Meals (FSM) can change over time depending on economic factors affecting employment and earnings and any changes to eligibility criteria. This means that in some years, when the proportion of pupils eligible for FSM is lower, the cohort eligible for FSM can be relatively more disadvantaged compared to All Other Pupils than in other years.
Table 1: Proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals when they were 15-years-old by school cohort, from 2001/02 to 2013/14 (the latest cohort to turn 25)
| Year aged 15 | Proportion eligible for free school meals |
|---|
| 2001/02 | 14.4% |
| 2002/03 | 14.1% |
| 2003/04 | 14.0% |
| 2004/05 | 13.8% |
| 2005/06 | 13.2% |
| 2006/07 | 12.9% |
| 2007/08 | 12.5% |
| 2008/09 | 12.9% |
| 2009/10 | 13.4% |
| 2010/11 | 14.0% |
| 2011/12 | 14.3% |
| 2012/13 | 14.9% |
| 2013/14 | 14.5% |
Disadvantage
A pupil is deemed to be ‘Disadvantaged’ if the school census recorded them as eligible for free school meals (FSM) at any point during the six years up to and including when they were 15 years old. Comparable figures are only available for the 2009/10 cohort onwards.
Qualification aim
Qualification aim refers to the qualification that the individual was aiming to achieve when they set out in their studies.
Apprenticeships are now being reported as a separate category in this section. This addition, along with the expanded scope of the release has resulted in:
- some pupils potentially being reported as having participated at an earlier date than they were in previous iterations of this release
- apprenticeships that were already in the data under the previous scope, now being separated into this apprenticeship category
- entrants to other qualification aims in this section falling slightly compared to previous releases in this series.
The figures in the “Qualification aim - previous methodology” table may not match the equivalent figures of previous releases due to revisions in the underlying data and methodology. Most notably, for earlier school cohorts, some entrants that were previously counted under "Other Undergraduate Qualifications" have been revised to be counted under "Foundation Degree" or "HNC/HND".
Level of study
Level of study refers to the level of qualification that the individual was aiming to achieve when they set out in their studies.
What qualification levels mean: England, Wales and Northern Ireland - GOV.UK (opens in new tab)
The level of the qualification relates to the level in the year in which it was taken. This publication covers the period when the qualifications framework changed from the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) to the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) and then the Regulated Qualifications Framework (RQF). This means that some qualifications will have changed level over time.
Level of study is derived differently for HESA and ILR records. In the HESA Student Record, level is based on the qualification category (opens in new tab) associated with the enrolment. The ILR includes information on the qualification level of learning aims. This information is taken directly from the learning aims reference service (opens in new tab), and its predecessors.
Prior to 2013/14, a large number of qualifications in the ILR were not categorised at a specific level. In these cases, the level of the qualification has been determined based on the qualification type, as is done in the case of HESA data.
For the remaining qualifications where the qualification type doesn’t align to a single level, we take the most recent recorded level for that qualification (where the qualification continued to exist in 2013/14 or later). These steps significantly reduce the number of qualifications where the specific level is unknown, however a small number remain.
Qualification level is only available on a consistent basis in the HESA data for qualifications undertaken from 2007/08 onwards. Therefore, participation data broken down by level of study for the 2001/02, 2002/03 and 2003/04 15-year-old cohorts have been deemed too unreliable and have not been published. Caution is advised when interpreting the statistics in this section.
For apprenticeships, we take a different approach as an apprenticeship programme can contain multiple component aims, which make up part of the overarching apprenticeship framework or standard. For this publication, if a component aim has a higher level than that of the overarching programme aim, then the component aim level is preferred to the programme aim level.
The figures in this release differ slightly to the section titled “CHEP-25 (all level 4+)” in the 2022/23 release due to improvements in the methodology.
Mode of study
Mode of study refers to whether a student has undertaken full-time or part-time higher education.
Where mode of study is not known, HE students with 450 or more planned learning hours have been classified as full-time, and those with under 450 planned learning hours have been classified as part-time.
An apprenticeship is not required to be defined as either full-time or part-time in the ILR. As such, it is not possible to directly compare statistics on mode of study between apprenticeships and traditional HE qualifications. For this reason, and to align with other published statistics, apprenticeships are counted as a separate category in this section.
