Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the student drop out rate was at higher education institutions in England in each of the last five years.

Official statistics on student retention are published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) as part of their UK performance indicators, which can be found here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/performance-indicators.

The non-continuation section shows the results of two measures for understanding retention of students through their studies:

1. Non-continuation rates, defined as the percentage of first year students who do not continue their studies after 12 months (full-time students) or 24 months (part-time students).
2. Projected outcomes completion rates, which estimate the proportion of full-time first-degree starters that complete their degrees, based on the latest progression patterns at each provider.

The non-continuation section is available here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/performance-indicators/non-continuation.

Latest statistics published by HESA refer to students entering higher education (HE) in the academic year 2019/20 and whether they continued in the following academic year (2020/21). This is the first period of data that covers the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Table D, which can be found here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/performance-indicators/non-continuation/table-d includes non-continuation rates at English providers since 2014/15[1], and shows that 5.4% of young[2] UK domiciled full-time first degree entrants in the academic year 2019/20 did not continue after their first year of study. This rate represents a decrease from 6.7% for entrants in the 2018/19 academic year.

Table F, which can be found here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/performance-indicators/non-continuation/table-f includes projected outcomes at English providers since 1997/98, and shows that 81.7% of UK domiciled full-time first-degree starters in the 2019/20 academic year were projected to obtain a degree at the same HE provider where they started. 9.7% of these starters were projected to leave higher education with no award, and this is the lowest proportion since these statistics have been calculated.

[1] HESA’s publication archive contains historic non-continuation rates for academic years prior to 2014/15. These were calculated under a slightly different methodology, as set out in these publications. The archive is available here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/publications

[2] Aged 20 and under at time of entry.