What counts as participation has changed, but you have to squint to see it
The venerable Department for Education higher education participation measure has had a glow-up for the Starmer era.
More properly known as the CHEP-25 (Cohort-based Higher Education Participation) measure, it has always captured any participation in HE before the age of 25 by those who were in state or special schools at age 15. With the Prime Minister placing so much emphasis on non-HE routes – the pledge was two thirds of under 25s participating in higher-level learning by 2030 – CHEP-25 now includes everything above level 4, including apprenticeships and HTQs wherever they are delivered.
A “sub-target” provides that ten per cent of young people would be on the HTQ or apprenticeship routes by 2040. Based on the last available data, participation on higher level courses leading to level 4 or 5 qualification is at 5.7 per cent – the lowest on record. And a huge chunk of that is higher education anyway – stuff like HNCs, HNDs, and Foundation degrees.
This neatly illustrates another issue with this data. While a cohort level study (the most recent tracing the higher education experience of everyone in state education who was 15 in 2013-14) is a very robust approach it is necessarily lagged. That cohort hit 25 in 2023-24 and 50.4 per cent of them experience some kind of higher learning (using the previous, HE-only methodology that would have been 49.7 per cent).
So has there been any growth in mature participation? We can cautiously say yes, but we know that the majority of higher education participation happens by age 20. Rates of participation using the CHEP-20 methodology have been just below 50 per cent in recent years – for the 2013-14 cohort it was 45.7 per cent – and we hit 49.9 (that’s nearly half of 15 year olds in 2019-20 getting to HE before they were twenty).
So, the end of higher learning (non-HE, apprenticeships, mature study) where the government wants to grow is currently a very tiny proportion of what young people do. The dominant route remains the three year first degree taken straight out of school – and while we are starting to hear ministers emphasising the need for growth elsewhere it will take a long while to land in stats like these.