The UK Statistics Authority has designated these statistics as Accredited Official Statistics (previously called National Statistics), in accordance with the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 and signifying compliance with the Code of Practice for Statistics. Find out more about the Code of Practice for Statistics at the UK Statistics Authority’s website.
College Student Outcomes
Overview
- The known results for 40,520 full-time further education (FE) students enrolled on recognised qualifications in 2023-24 are as follows:
67.1% successfully completed their course.
12.4% completed their course but did not gain the qualification they were aiming for. Some of these students may gain their award at a later time.
20.6% withdrew from their course after the funding qualifying date.
- The known results for 24,475 full-time higher education (HE) students enrolled on recognised qualifications in 2023-24 are as follows:
66.9% successfully completed their course.
16.0% completed their course but did not gain the qualification they were aiming for. Some of these students may gain their award at a later time.
17.1% withdrew from their course after the funding qualifying date.
Male students were 5.6 percentage points (pp) more likely to successfully complete their FE programmes than female students, while the situation was reversed for HE programmes with a 4.3pp difference.
4.6% of FE students and 3.0% of HE students withdrew early and were not funded. The reason most commonly cited for withdrawing (either before or after the funding qualifying date) was non-attendance.
Notable Changes in Reporting
In previous publications, early withdrawals (i.e. students withdrawing from their course before the funding qualifying date) were included in the calculation of the College Student Outcomes. Following stakeholder consultation1, for the 2023-24 publication early withdrawals have been excluded from the main section of the report and instead are reported in a separate section. Previous years’ data has also been amended accordingly, and therefore the figures presented in this report will not match previous publications.
In 2023-24, the funding qualifying date for students on courses lasting more than 20 weeks was moved to earlier in the academic year. Up to 2022-23, full-time summer starts would have qualified for funding from 1st November; from 2023-24 onwards they will have qualified for funding in week five. This means that students who withdrew between week five and 1st November would be classified as early withdrawals in previous years, but from 2023-24 are classified as non-completions. The impact of this change is that the numbers of students reported as completing or not in 2023-24 increased, while the numbers reported as either early withdrawals or not decreased. The threshold date change may have influenced decisions by students or college staff, so it’s not possible to know how much of the year-on-year changes in early withdrawal and non-completion statistics resulted from this or were related to other issues. This must be considered when reviewing the trend across academic years. Numbers of students in the population can be reviewed in the College Region Nation PI tools available with the publication.
A section on the reasons for early withdrawal and non-completion has also been added to the report for 2023-24.
We will be keeping College Student Outcomes under review to ensure that they remain fit for purpose and aligned with other processes such as the Outcomes Framework and Assurance Model (OF&AM)2.