Contextual information and background to help you understand our applicant numbers and demographics admission statistics.
The applicant numbers and demographics admissions statistics are intended to complement the existing routes by which the public can access data on our admissions. These statistics make it easier for you to access our data, without having to compile it from multiple sources or wait for an FOI request to be fulfilled.
We have provided our statistics in standard CSV format to reduce obstacles to analysis. They are accompanied by definitions of University area groupings or applicant characteristic groupings, and technical notes to assist interpretation.
We will relsease an updated datasets each winter, providing data on the admissions cycles completed in September of the same year.
We have a responsibility to make sure that we do not risk identifying individual applicants by publishing this data. As such, in line with the HESA rounding and suppression policy, all figures are rounded to the nearest 5. This means that, for example, where 0 is reported this may be rounded from 1 or 2.
Providing the statistics as a single table splitting counts by all University areas and applicant characteristics would require a significant degree of rounding that would sum to misleading totals. Instead, the whole dataset is provided as a series of tables with different aggregations.
There are several established routes for accessing statistics about university admissions:
Additionally, we receive and respond to a high volume of requests under the Freedom of Information Act, many of which are about admissions. In the 2020/21 academic year we fulfilled or partially fulfilled more than 120 admissions-related FOI requests.
We aim to:
Successfully achieving these ambitions requires careful management of the admissions process in order to recruit the desired quantity and quality of students. The admissions process is however a complex challenge for any higher education provider and inherently involves a significant degree of uncertainty and a number of factors that are beyond our control.
Recruiting 100 students, for example, is not as simple as issuing 100 offers. If we issue an offer to an applicant, the applicant may choose to either accept or decline this offer (or if they are a UCAS applicant they may also make the offer their ‘Insurance’ choice) and we must estimate the likelihood of them responding each way. If the applicant does accept the offer, in most cases this offer will be conditional on them achieving the required grades in pending qualifications and so we must also estimate the likelihood of them meeting these conditions. If the applicant does meet the conditions of their offer they may still choose to relinquish their place for instance by releasing themselves into Clearing, and we must also estimate the likelihood of them doing this. If the applicant does not formally withdraw they still simply fail to register at the start of the new academic year and again we must estimate the likelihood of this happening.
There are countless other factors and potential outcomes for applicants that impact the likelihood of an offer holder becoming a student. As is standard across the sector, we therefore have to issue more offers than the number of students we intend to recruit and employ complex forecasting models to estimate how many offers we should make to achieve its intake targets. The difficulty of this task means that it is almost impossible for us to recruit exactly the number of students specified by our intake targets and we must instead balance the competing risks of undershoot and overshoot.
We have the autonomy to admit students that have narrowly missed the terms of their offer or the advertised entry requirements. We typically do this in limited numbers in areas where places have not been fully filled by applicants who have met or exceeded the terms of their offers. In some areas we are subject to strict limits on recruitment, whether that be due to caps set externally or as a result of capacity constraints, and in areas such as these we may choose to aim to undershoot our intake targets and fill any remaining spaces with these ‘near miss’ applicants late in the cycle to reduce overshoot risk.
Many factors have an impact on an applicant receiving an offer of a place at the University. We recommend that you do not use the admission statistics as a guide to whether you might receive an offer. You can find more about how we make offers by:
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has also had an impact on university admissions.
The coronavirus pandemic has had a profound impact on both the 2020 and 2021 admissions cycles for all study levels, introducing new uncertainties that have made it exceptionally difficult to accurately forecast the admissions process as we typically would. In particular, the cancellation of summer exams for UK school leavers and the use of alternative mechanisms to award grades has dramatically changed the proportion of offer holders that meet the terms of their offer in a way that was especially hard to predict.
The majority of our UK-domiciled applicants are those who have taken or are due to take UK A-level qualifications. There have been two major changes to the awarding of A-levels in the past two years:
Whilst in the 2019 cycle the proportion of Home conditional firm offer holders that met the terms of their offer was approximately 45%, in the 2021 cycle this rate had risen to approximately 74%. This has led to a larger student body in 21/22 than in previous years.
Other factors that impeded forecasting efforts and materially affected the outcome of ouroffer-making in the 2020 and 2021 admissions cycles included:
For a number of years, we have operated a contextual offer scheme as one of a number of measures to meet the ambitious targets to diversify our student body as set out in our Access and Participation Plan. Our contextual offer is currently up to two grades below the standard entry requirements and is only given to applicants who meet the eligibility criteria.
These eligibility criteria have been revised and extended several times since the scheme’s initial rollout in 2009 so the pool of applicants eligible to receive a contextual offer will be different in different cycles.
