Report
31 March 2021
Summary
The Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) Service is a national non-profit-making collaboration between higher education outreach providers. HEAT provides a monitoring and evaluation service, at the heart of which is an extensive system of outreach participant data collection and tracking.
HEAT has collected an impressive dataset from across its membership, comprising outreach participant details and information about their involvement in outreach activities. The HEAT dataset is annually linked to government data on education outcomes, including attainment and information on whether and where participants enter higher education. This data linking makes the HEAT database a potentially powerful resource to help us explore questions about the relative efficacy of different outreach approaches.
This report sets out the results of an analysis of HEAT data to explore the relationship between outreach participation and:
- Key Stage 4 attainment
- higher education progression
- progression to ‘top third’ higher education providers (i.e. those with the highest entry requirements in terms of entry qualifications)
The Key Stage 4 analysis focused on approximately 117,500 individuals and the higher education progression analysis focused on approximately 165,500 individuals.
The summary report provides an overview of the findings. More detail on the methodology and findings are given in accompanying technical reports.