Young participation by area

These pages show our different measures of young participation in higher education by local areas.

They look at how likely young people are to participate in higher education across the UK and show how this varies by area.

What can I find on these pages?

These pages look at our area-based measures of young participation, including the historical measure, POLAR (the participation of local areas) and newer measure, TUNDRA (tracking underrepresentation by area).

We have also published all the data which underlies the different measures and the searchable tools.

After consideration and improvements made from previous publications of TUNDRA, the latest update to TUNDRA is no longer marked as experimental. TUNDRA is an enhanced area-based measure which uses individualised data and tracks individuals from key stage 4 to higher education.

TUNDRA allows for improved calculations of participation rates and provides more consistency across our measures as well as with related DfE participation statistics. It also restricts its population to English state-funded mainstream schools, which improves targeting by allowing us to unmask pockets of low participation.

We will not be making any changes or updates to the POLAR4 methodology and there will be no POLAR5. However, we will continue to include POLAR4 in our updates to our postcode look-up. As a result it will still be possible to find the POLAR4 quintile associated with both existing and new postcodes.

TUNDRA is our most recent measure of young participation. While it is not a direct replacement for POLAR, wherever possible we recommend that TUNDRA is used when an area-based measure of young participation in higher education is needed. There may be occasions when using POLAR can provide additional insights or provide coverage for areas that TUNDRA does not. 

We encourage providers to use individual measures of disadvantage when considering barriers or risks to access and participation. Our area-based measures can provide complementary insights in the use of these measures. Examples of this can be found on our access and participation or associations between characteristics of students dashboards.