Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) from Modern Apprenticeships: 2020/21: Scotland

Foreword

In September 2019, the first release of LEO MA data was published, focusing on the 2011/12 cohort of MA completers in the 2016/17 tax year. During 2020 and 2021, analytical work on LEO was mostly paused due to resourcing demands resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, work was restarted to clean, analyse and quality assure the LEO data from newly available tax years.

During this time, LEO MA data was also used by analysts seconded into the Scottish Government as part of the Education and Skills Impact Framework (ESIF) project, leading to further and more extensive quality assurance of the data. Throughout this project, more confidence and knowledge was built up around the LEO MA data.

As the data presented in this release overlaps with the COVID-19 pandemic, earnings data is likely to be impacted by COVID health protection measures such as the furlough scheme. More details on the potential impact of COVID-19 on earnings is available in the data quality section on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) and the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS).

Since the previous release of this publication in September 2019, given the further quality assurance and confidence built around the LEO MA data, this release is being published as Official Statistics, rather than Experimental Statistics.

For this release, exploratory analysis was carried out to determine if additional data breakdowns for disability and ethnicity could be included, with the following findings.

• Disability: The number of those self-declaring a disability was very low both in the 2015/16 MA cohort and historically, with a suspected under reporting of those with a disability. However, substantial data quality improvements to disability reporting have been seen in the 2016/17 MA cohort.
• Ethnicity: Similarly, there is consistently a large number of individuals who prefer not to disclose their ethnicity, or their ethnicity is not known, with some data quality improvement seen in the 2016/17 MA cohort.

Given the data quality for the 2015/16 MA cohort and the known improvements for the 2016/17 MA cohort, disability and ethnicity data have not been included in this release, but will be included in the next LEO MA release.