Where are the Gaps on Completion?
By Dr Morag Duffin, Director of Student Success, The University of Law
Why is Completion important?
As a professional in the higher education space involved in Office for Students equality and quality regulation, I am no stranger to the key on-course success metrics of Continuation, Completion and Attainment. From my perspective, Completion seems to be the one that until recently was overlooked.
Completion was included for the first time in the data provided to institutions by the Office for Students for the writing of the 2024/25 to 2027/28 Access and Participation Plans (APPs). This to me was well overdue. Now that completion is one of the key success metrics for the APP and is used as an indicator for regulating student outcomes through the B3 condition of registration, it is getting the focus it deserves.
Completion, you could argue, is the most important measure of success. Students sign up to a degree programme with the intention to finish it and pass it. Continuation only provides an interim measure of this, and attainment indicates whether they complete their degree at a ‘good’ level.
There is a lot of (arguably quite right) focus on attainment in the sector, but focusing on this solely as a measure of success can often hide gaps for certain groups. You could for instance have an institution which has a small Black/White awarding gap, which is great news for that institution and its students. That same institution could, however, have a very low Black completion rate. So, the Black students who are completing are doing well, but what’s worrying is that not many are completing.
So where are the gaps on Completion across the sector?
Across the English Higher Education sector, the gaps in completion are sadly where we also see gaps in all other areas of the student lifecycle. Taking 2018-19 as the most recent year of published data in Access and Participation for undergraduate home students, the lowest completion rates using a single characteristic are those of students living in an area of high relative deprivation (IMD Quintile 1), students over 21 years of age and Black students. When trying to understand the impact of the intersection of characteristics by using the Office for Students’ Associations between characteristics of students (ABCS) set of measures, completion rates are even lower for students in quintile 1, and the gap between quintile 1 and quintile 5 is the largest. This shows us that students with certain sets of characteristics are much less likely to complete their degree programmes successfully.
Postgraduate data mirrors the undergraduate trends: for PG Taught Masters, PG Research and Other PG (entrants 2015-16 to 2018-19), the lowest completion rates for a single characteristic are students living in an area of high relative deprivation (IMD Quintile 1 or 2), students over 31 years of age and Black students.
So why are these particular groups of students less likely to complete? We can only speculate but there are some key experiences common to the groups highlighted: cost of living, the requirement to work alongside studies, and family/caring commitments. These impact on the total workload of our students, which for many is unmanageable and unsustainable, and has a negative impact on their mental health.
And what are we doing about it at The University of Law?
At ULaw we are focusing on completion for two key groups in our APP: mature students (students aged 21 and over) and Black students. Our approach to this work isn’t to deliver specific ‘completion’ strategies, but rather to reflect on what we can do as an institution to address our risks that lead to lower completion rates. Three key risks were identified: replication of the inequalities of the professions (as most of our students will progress into a specific professional sector), barriers to student engagement and cost pressures. The activity that we deliver to mitigate these risks is across the student lifecycle, from access through to progression into employment. It doesn’t separate completion out as student experience is inherently linked.
Some of the key activities address the experiences common to all student groups affected, for instance supporting students with time management, better institutional identification of at-risk students, staff training to raise their awareness of the lived experience of our students. Improving the communication of the support we have available is also a key activity for us to be able to engage with and support our time-poor students who may not actively reach out for help because of the barriers we as an institution inadvertently have in place. We are focusing on removing these barriers, for instance by improving or our systems and processes, and raising awareness of the assumptions we may make about our students.
What should and could we be doing a sector to address gaps on completion?
We need to ensure that with a focus on attainment we don’t ignore completion.
We need to view completion holistically and not separate it out from other areas of the lifecycle.
We need to address the one issue that we believe and that students are telling us (Student Academic Experience Survey 2023) is impacting on their engagement at university: life workload i.e. balancing demands alongside their studies, which could include the likes of paid work, caring and family responsibilities etc. For many of our students, their studies are not their priority as other aspects of their life at that point are more important. They have to deal with the here and now and don’t have the privilege or luxury of working towards their future. We have little control over much of the life workload our students face. We can, however, change our systems and processes to make them easier and quicker to navigate for our students, to reduce administration and burden. We can also ensure that the support we provide our students is appropriate, easy to access and we communicate about it and offer it proactively by identifying students who are at risk.
