We’re here to talk about HEIP – we’re here to talk about CHEP.

The former – the Higher Education Initial Participation measure – was used by DfE until 2023 to estimate the likelihood that a 17 year old would participate in higher education before the age of 30, if current participation rates persisted. It is still used in Wales, we got a HEIP measure for the 2022-23 cohort from Medr yesterday.

The latter – the Cohort-based Higher Education Participation measure – was published by DfE for England this morning, based on the 2022-23 academic year. It tracks individual cohorts of state and special school pupils from age 15 through to age 30, and notes where they participate in higher education to construct an overall participation rate for that cohort.

Why do we even care about participation rates by a particular age? Well, back at the 1999 Labour Party conference, one Tony Blair set “a target of 50 per cent of young adults going into higher education in the next century” – a target that retained a mythical power substantially beyond anything else Blair said, mostly due to the sheer number of times the Conservative party tried to disavow, scrap, or “cancel” it.

Words are always important – “young adult” didn’t just mean “school leaver”, “higher education” didn’t just mean “university”. The definition the government settled on is what became HEIP – the number of people under the age of 30 who had participated in any education at level 6 or above. And we passed the 50 per cent target, for England, in 2019 (for the 2017-18 academic year). Much to the chagrin of the government of the time – then Secretary of State Gavin Williamson symbolically “tore up” the target (again) in 2020.

Having met and/or abandoned the target, the future of HEIP was up for debate. In England, it was finally settled that we did need to have a decent timeseries on participation, but we would rethink the design. Following individual school cohorts means that we don’t need to control for the impact of migration and immigration on the number of young people in England, or redo the calculation when ONS revises its estimate of how many young people we have. It also means we can look in more detail at the impact that the type of school, and area of residence has on participation. Indeed, we could probably look at individual schools.

Your downside to CHEP is currency. You can only report on what a cohort does when it reaches 30 – for 2022-23 this reflects the cohort that was 15 in 2007-08, of which 49 per cent had at some point participated in higher education. This is the highest on record – up from 48.6 per cent for the previous cohort.

HEIP in Wales was 54.6 per cent last for 2022-23, down from the pandemic-era peak of 58.9 per cent and down from 56.6 per cent in 2019-20. This is not directly comparable to CHEPS.

Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking – DK, how does this relate to the participation rates we get from UCAS. For England, the acceptance rate for 18 year olds was 37.8 per cent for courses starting in 2022-23, 37.2 per cent now (for Wales, the numbers are 32.1 and 30.1 respectively). Obviously this is just the “straight from school” acceptances (18 year olds only), and refers only to applicants to traditional higher education via UCAS – the other measures include more people, accessing HE in more ways.

To illustrate this, look at this particularly aesthetic chart drawing on the DfE CHEPS data. While you can see that the majority of people who enter higher education do so at age 18, there is a sizeable proportion that do so in later life. The “year” here refers to the cohort year, rather than the year of entry.

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