External returns and data standards

External returns and data standards

The University has a responsibility to provide student data to various external bodies. These include the Office for Students (OfS), Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), Education and Skills Funding Agency (EFSA), and the Department for Education and Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA).

The External Returns and Data Standards team manages all University data and submits relevant information to these bodies.

We break the work we do into 2 key areas:

1. External returns — we validate and submit all student-related statutory returns to external bodies.
2. Data standards — we make sure all the external returns data the University manages is accurate, up to date, and meets the expectations of our staff and the external bodies we work with.

Data we submit

These are some of the examples of the data we submit to external bodies:

• Higher Education Students Early Statistics survey — this gives an early indication of actual and forecasted student numbers for the next academic year
• Student Record — this has information about all our registered students on courses that lead to the award of a qualification or provider credit
• Initial Teacher Training in-year record — this includes students registered on our courses leading to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS)
• Provider Profile — this shows how our teaching in academic subject areas is divided across our departments and faculties
• Unistats — this provides information on the undergraduate courses we advertise to help prospective students to make a decision about what to study and where
• Aggregate Offshore Record — this reports overall student numbers by country, level of study, and type of study for our students who are studying their course entirely overseas.
• Individual Learner Record — this tells the ESFA which of our students are doing degree apprenticeships
• Transparency Return — this reports information about how many applications we've received, how many offers of places we made, and how many of those were accepted (available below)

Transparency Return 2021

Office for Students Transparency Return

We are committed to providing clear information to potential applicants to assist them in deciding which course to study. This Transparency Return provides insights into the number of degrees awarded in the 2019–20 academic year.

It focuses on student’s socioeconomic backgrounds and the characteristics they have that are protected under the Equality Act 2010 (such as age, race and gender).

The information published on this page shows:

The number of students who attained a particular degree or other academic award, or a particular level of such an award, on completion of their course with us.

It shows these numbers by reference to:

• The gender of the individuals to which they relate 
• Their ethnicity
• Their socioeconomic background (using Index of Multiple Deprivation or IMD)

The data contained in the tables in this workbook have been rounded and suppressed as follows:

Numerators and denominators have been rounded to the nearest 10. Where the numerator or denominator rounds to 20 or less, the data are suppressed with an "N".

Percentages are rounded according to the smallest, unsuppressed denominator in a given mode and characteristic. If the denominator rounds to:

- 50 or less: percentages are rounded to 5%
- 1000 or less: percentages are rounded to 1%
- More than 1000: percentages are rounded to 0.1%

"N/A" is displayed where there is no provision in a given mode or level

"DP" indicates suppression for data protection reasons. This is applied where the numerator is two or less, or differs from the denominator by no more than two students. 

Contextual information about the University of Portsmouth

Portsmouth is a large University with over 17,000 Home/EU full-time undergraduate students in 2020/21 and over 28,000 students overall. Portsmouth is home to over 5,000 international and EU students from around 160 countries. The University’s mission states that ‘We delight in creating, sharing and applying knowledge to make a difference to individuals and society’. We are proud of our longstanding success in widening access to HE and we work in partnership with our students to provide transformational, high-quality educational experiences. Our gold rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2017 confirms our success in this.

Thanks to our active aspiration raising and outreach programme, supported by £3.3 million investment each year in student bursaries and financial support, we are successful in widening access into higher education. The proportion of Portsmouth students undergraduates from more deprived neighbourhoods (IMD Q1) has increased over the last five years and is higher than the proportion of the population living in IMD Q1 neighbourhoods. Similarly, we have a higher proportion of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students than the average in our region.

In common with most English Universities, there is a gap between the proportion of our BAME and white students achieving a 1st or 2.1 class degree. We have been piloting ways to address this through two OfS supported projects. One project, Raising Awareness Raising Attainment, focused on ways in which Personal Tutoring can help address the attainment gap. The outcomes from this project fed into our new Personal Tutoring and Development Framework implemented in September 2019. The other project, Changing Mindsets, focused on closing the attainment gap of BME and working class students. It is a student and staff workshop-based intervention that builds a growth mindset: the belief that intelligence is not a fixed characteristic and can be increased through effort, and eroding stereotype threat and implicit bias as barriers to learning. Our Access and Participation Plan, developed in partnership with our students, sets out our plans to make attainment / gaps a thing of the past.

Table 1a: Percentage of classified first degrees at grade 2:1 or above by characteristic for 2019–20 qualifiers

Table 1b: Detailed information on attainment for 2019–20 qualifiers.