SINCE 1999, the four UK higher education funding bodies have published annual performance indicators (PIs) to provide robust and useful management information for higher education institutions on, for example, student completion rates and employment of graduates.
The Performance Indicators Steering Group, which oversees the development and publication of the performance indicators on behalf of the funding bodies and the HE sector, carried out a review of the indicators towards the end of 2006.
Participants decided that there should only be minor changes to the existing indicators, and that none of them should be dropped at present. See continued support for higher education performance indicators on the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) website for more details.
The performance indicators cover the following areas:
- Access to higher education - how successful institutions are in recruiting students from under-represented areas and backgrounds
- The proportion of students who do not continue beyond the first year at an institution
- Projected completion rates based on current movement of students between years of study
- The proportion of graduates who are employed or undertaking further study six months after graduation
- Research output
Full definitions of all these are included in each year's PI report.
In viewing PI reports it is important to realise that because there are such differences between institutions, the average values for the whole of the higher education sector are not necessarily helpful when comparing higher education institutions.
Sector averages are therefore calculated for each institution, which take into account some of the factors which contribute to differences between them. The factors are: subject of study, qualifications on entry, age on entry (young or mature). The average that has been adjusted for these factors is called the adjusted sector benchmark.
The benchmark can be used in two ways; to see how well an institution is performing compared to the HE sector as a whole and to decide whether it is meaningful to compare two institutions.
The benchmarks are not targets and have no financial penalties associated with them.
It is also important to exercise caution when looking at year-on-year changes because the differences are generally very small and may reflect changes to student demographics or in some cases changes to data collection.
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