Associations between characteristics of students

• Continuation quintile 1 shows groups of students who have the lowest chance of continuing their studies.
• Students in continuation quintile 5 have the highest chance of continuing their studies.
• We have calculated the full-time continuation measure for UK-domiciled students studying full-time undergraduate courses at English higher education providers.
• By default the chart shows how all UK-domiciled, full-time undergraduate students are distributed across the continuation quintiles.
• Where an attribute is selected for all twelve characteristics, then 100 per cent of students will be in a single continuation quintile. Otherwise, the chart shows the distribution of students holding the selected characteristics across the continuation quintiles.
• Below the chart is the derived quintile. If one or more characteristics remain unselected and are set to ‘—any [characteristic] –‘, then this shows the quintile that has been derived for this student group, based on a weighted average of the distribution of students across all the quintiles.

• Age group = students' age when they started their course.
• Care experience = whether the student has ever spent time in the care of a local authority in England or Wales, or Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland.
• Disability = their self-reported disability status.
• Ethnicity = a detailed description of their ethnicity.
• FSM eligibility = whether or not the student has been eligible to receive free school meals (FSM) in the six years prior to the March census date in their final year of key stage four (year 11).
• IDACI = their 'Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index' quintile. This is a measure of the proportion of children under the age of 16 in low-income households for an area. Only produced for students domiciled in England.
• IMD = their 'Index of Multiple Deprivation' quintile. This is a measure of multiple deprivation of small areas. Only produced for students domiciled in England.
• Local or distance learner= whether or not students live locally to their higher education provider or are distance learners.
• NS-SEC = the socio-economic background for students based on the occupation of the highest earning parent for students who were under 21 when they started their studies or the prior occupation of the student themselves otherwise. Details of the grouping used here can be found in Section 7 of these ONS webpages.
• Parental higher education = whether any of the student's parents have any higher education qualifications.
• Sex = displayed as female, male or other.
• TUNDRA = their ‘TUNDRA’ quintile. TUNDRA is an area-based measure that uses tracking of state-funded mainstream school pupils in England to calculate young participation. Quintile 1 shows the lowest rate of participation and quintile 5 shows the highest. TUNDRA data for students 21-years-old or over is not presented.

The proportions for the different quintiles are based on the population of young people that share the selected characteristics. While these proportions are visually represented here by 100 people the actual number may far exceed 100 or may be below 100.

Due to rounding, the proportions for the different quintiles may not sum to 100 per cent.

In the data download, populations have been rounded to the nearest 5. Groups with 1 or 2 individuals as well as groups which do not exist in the modelling data are shown as having a population of 0.