Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) from Universities: 2019/20: Scotland

Methodology

Background methodology

Further detailed information is available in the Department for Education releases: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-higher-education-graduate-employment-and-earnings

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)

This publication covers graduates from HEIs. The corresponding DfE publication (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-higher-education-graduate-employment-and-earnings) includes Higher Education delivered at English Further Education Colleges.

Suppression and rounding

In line with disclosure control rules, information based on fewer than 11 graduates has been supressed. This follows HESA’s suppression methodology.

All counts have been rounded to the nearest five, percentages to one decimal place and earnings to the nearest £100.

Data Quality Users should be aware of some limitations around the data included in this publication;

Mode: The employment data covers those with records submitted through the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system and the Self-Assessed system. Neither systems collect information on the number of hours worked; therefore, whether an individual is working full-time or part-time cannot be ascertained. Work is underway to link the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) to the LEO data, which will allow for a subset of the LEO data to contain information on full-time and part-time work patterns.

Career Path: Different subjects will lead to different career paths, with some careers requiring further learning and training after the completion of their first-degree. This in turn may result in fluctuations in median earnings from one cohort of graduates to another.

Subject groupings and intake: The subject groupings reported can cover a wide range of courses, some of which may yield higher median earnings than others. The selection of courses available at HEIs will vary as will the student intake to each course. As different courses can yield different median earnings, care should be taken when comparing subjects across different HEIs. This release uses the Common Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH) v1.3.4 (level 2) for the subject groupings.

More information on the CAH can be found on HESA’s website: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/support/documentation/hecos/cah

Open University: HESA made changes in the way they record Open University (OU) graduates by country of national centre in the 2014/15 academic year. Prior to 2014/15, all OU enrolments and qualifications were counted within England, where the OU has its administrative centre. Since figures in this release relate to graduates in 2013/14 from Scottish HEIs, graduates from OU are not included in this release.

More information on this change can be found on HESA’s website: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/support/data-intelligence/national-centre-201415-publication-onwards

Attainment: Prior attainment bands are not provided for Scottish HEIs. No prior attainment is recorded for Scotland as the National Pupil Database (NPD) only records those who completed A levels at an English school. Coverage at HEIs in Scotland would therefore be limited to graduates who completed their A-levels in England before pursuing higher education in Scotland. The NPD also only covers qualifications obtained since 2002, meaning the majority of mature students are not expected to have an A level record on the NPD. Therefore mature students are not included in prior attainment calculations.

POLAR: HESA do not publish POLAR figures for Scotland, as Scotland’s relatively high participation rate and the high proportion of higher education students in further education colleges could misrepresent Scottish contributions to widening participation. Given this, this release does not include POLAR. Time period

The time period for which employment and earnings data is reported in this publication is five years year after graduation. This refers to the full tax year five years after graduation. So, for the 2013/14 graduation cohort the figures five year after graduation refer to employment and earnings outcomes in the 2019/20 tax year.

Sustained employment only Graduates are considered to be in sustained employment only if: i) They were employed for at least one day for five out of the six months between October and March of the tax year in question or if they had a self-employment record in that tax year. ii) They have no valid higher education study record at any UK HEI on the HESA database in the relevant tax year

Only graduates whose activity is recorded as “Sustained employment only” are included in this release.

Total earnings

Total earnings figures are included for graduates who have a valid earnings record (P14 or SA), and who are recorded as being in sustained employment in the 2019/20 tax year. Those in further study are excluded, as their earnings would be more likely to relate to part-time jobs.

For each graduate, the PAYE earnings reported for them on the HMRC P14 data for a given tax year are divided by the number of days recorded in employment across that same tax year. This provides an average daily wage that is then multiplied by the number of days in the tax year to calculate their annualised earnings.

This calculation has been used to maintain consistency with figures reported for further education learners after study. It provides students with an indication of the earnings they might receive once in stable and sustained employment.

The annualised earnings calculated are slightly higher than the raw earnings reported in the tax year. This is because the earnings of those who did not work for the entire tax year will be higher when annualised, however this difference decreases as time elapses after graduation. All earnings presented are nominal. They represent the cash amount an individual was paid and are not adjusted for inflation (the general increase in the price of goods and services).

The annualised PAYE earnings and raw self-assessment earnings are then added together to calculate the total earnings. If an individual has earnings only through PAYE or self-assessment, then their total earnings will be equal to their PAYE or self-assessment earnings.

These self-assessment earnings only includes profits from partnership enterprises and profit from sole-trader enterprises. As the self-assessment data does not include any information on the number of days worked for a tax year, the earnings cannot be annualised.

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) The SIMD ranks small areas (data zones) in Scotland from most deprived to least deprived. The SIMD overall rank is calculated from the individual ranks of seven domains: Income, Employment, Health, Education/skills, Housing, Geographic access, and Crime. The quintiles represent 5 equal groups of the SIMD ranks, with quintile 1 representing the 20% most deprived areas, and quintile 5 representing the 20% least deprived areas.

We have used SIMD 2012 as this was the index available during the 2013/14 academic year, which aligns with the graduation cohort for this publication.

Further detailed information is available on the SIMD website: https://www.gov.scot/collections/scottish-index-of-multiple-deprivation-2020/

Disability status Disability status is collected by HESA in the student records, and based on the graduates own self-assessment. For this release, we have included both a detailed breakdown of disability by impairment group, and a high-level breakdown of disability by sex given the small cohort sizes when looking at further breakdowns by sex.

The high-level breakdown has two levels, those with no known disability and those with any type of disability. The detailed breakdown separates disability into four more detailed categories, which were produced by accessing cohort sizes of each individual disability type/impairment and liasing with equalities colleagues to ensure the disabilities were grouped together reasonably while maintaining a robust cohort size.

Further detail is available at HESA’s website: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/collection/c13051/a/disable

Ethnicity

Ethnicity is collected by HESA in the student records, and based on the graduates own self-assessment. For this release, we have included both a detailed breakdown of ethnicity, and a high-level breakdown of ethnicity by sex given the small cohort sizes when looking at further breakdowns by sex.

The high-level breakdown has two levels, those from white backgrounds and those from non-white backgrounds. The detailed breakdown separates the above high-level categories into seven more detailed categories, which were produced by accessing cohort sizes of each ethnic background and liasing with equalities colleagues to ensure the ethnicities were grouped together reasonably while maintaining a robust cohort size.

Further detail is available at HESA’s website: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/collection/c13051/a/ethnic

Sex

Sex is collected by HESA in the student records. In this release, the data is filtered to only include graduates who are recorded as ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ to avoid the risk of disclosure for graduates whose sex is recorded as ‘Other’, as often cohort sizes can be small.

Further detail is available at HESA’s website: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/collection/c13051/a/sexid