How is post-16 subject provision measured?

The source

Two data sets from the DfE’s A level and other 16 to 18 results release for academic year 2024/25, both marked Final: Schools and colleges — subject entries and grades (686,396 rows) and Schools and colleges — institution information (2,792 rows). They are joined on school URN, never on institution name.

The filter

• Rows are restricted to the four qualification families the Explorer covers: A level (GCE A level only, excluding AS), Applied General, Tech Level and Other academic.
• Only the grade category Total exam entries is used. Individual grade rows are never summed — doing so would multiply every count several times over.
• The aggregate subject label All subjects is excluded from subject-level figures, and kept only to check that institution totals reconcile.

The denominator

This is the choice that matters most. An active institution for a qualification family is one with at least one recorded entry in that family. There are 2,626 for A-level, 2,084 for Applied General, 855 for Tech Level and 2,223 for Other academic, out of the 2,711 institutions with entries in at least one of these four families.

Every percentage in the Explorer uses the relevant family’s base — nationally, or the equivalent base within a region, local authority, institution type, admissions policy, sex policy or rurality band. This is why the denominator is printed next to every percentage, and why it changes when you switch qualification.

The alternative — using all 2,792 establishments in the institution file — would silently count institutions with no post-16 entries at all as institutions without provision. They are excluded instead.

Sixth-form consortia are excluded from the figures

Thirteen institutions in the source are sixth-form consortia and partnership centres — collaborative arrangements such as LaSWAP, Harrow Collegiate and Harris Federation Post 16, rather than single schools or colleges.

DfE excludes them from its national subject-entry totals, and this Explorer does the same. Including them put our totals 1.43% above DfE’s published national figures; excluding them brings every one of the four qualification families within 0.16%.

They are not hidden. All thirteen remain listed and searchable, keep their full institution profiles, and are flagged wherever they appear — so their provision is still visible without inflating any total, denominator or percentage.

Institutions are not students

Every coverage percentage in this Explorer counts institutions. A college entering 2,000 students counts exactly the same as a sixth form entering 40.

That makes these figures a good measure of how widespread observed provision is across institutions. It does not make them a measure of student access. A subject present in 60% of institutions was not necessarily within reach of 60% of students, because institutions differ enormously in size. A student-weighted access measure would need institution-level student counts, which this build does not yet include.

Checks that were run

• In all four families, every institution’s subject entries sum exactly to its published family total. Maximum difference: zero.
• The England A-level total of 787,688 entries reconciles with the DfE national comparator to within 0.16%, and the four families together to within 0.15%.
• No DfE suppression affects the entry totals used. Suppressed values elsewhere in the source are preserved exactly and never inferred.
• Every institution in the entries data matches the characteristics file. No unmatched URNs.

Known limitations

• Regions come from the institution file and differ from DfE’s published regional tables by up to 3.7%; the differences offset nationally.
• Entries in less-common languages run about 11% lower here than in DfE’s national tables, because they are disproportionately entered at centres not published individually.
• Coverage is limited to institutions reported in 16-18 performance tables in England, so totals are not comparable with a JCQ all-ages count.
• T Levels do not appear in this release at all. They are handled from a separate DfE collection, on the Explorer’s own T Levels tab, and are never added to any entry total here.