Guidance and resources
Note: The Data insights guide was previously known as the Data infrastructure guide. We updated the title in November 2025 to more accurately reflect its purpose of demonstrating how to use institutional data to identify equality gaps and for evaluation.
This Data insights guide (hosted on GitHub) is a practical guide on using institutional data to address several key areas. It was developed as part of the ‘Institutional data use’ project.
It aims to help enable higher education providers to:
- identify equality gaps in higher education
- identify where those equality gaps may be particularly acute, to enable effective design of post-entry student success activities
- help generate robust Type 3 (causal) evidence of the success of student support interventions.
Additionally, this guide provides considerations for:
- planning an evaluation of student success interventions
- obtaining ethical approval to carry out an evaluation and publish the results of an intervention