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Today the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published Local Authority District Case Studies of Student populations in DPM Pilot areas.
Highly mobile populations, such as students, are traditionally difficult to measure. Where students make up a larger proportion of the population, for some local authorities this can result in lower levels of accuracy measuring the total population.
The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) carried out a review of population estimates and projections in 2021. They recommended ensuring that future population statistics are based on sound methods and suitable data, and to complete detailed case studies on cities with large student populations. We set out our plan to meet these recommendations in our update on research and plans for population estimates and projections.
In November 2021, we published an update on our latest research into how the student population of England and Wales appears in administrative data. Our analyses of administrative data on health and higher education aimed to find out how well the data highlights student moves in and out of student accommodation. This review mainly focused on Personal Demographics Service (PDS) and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data. The analysis revealed that 57% of students in England and Wales were registered with healthcare services in their term-time LA. Furthermore, there is variation in the timings of when students choose to update administrative data records upon the start of the academic year and following graduation, making it challenging to identify student households.
This article builds on these findings by providing case studies for 14 LAs comparing different sources of data relating to students for ages 18 to 30 years. They are part of our work in transforming population statistics for England and Wales. Also published today are our Census 2021 estimates of students by single year of age for all LAs for users to conduct their own comparisons. The official Census 2021 estimates of students by LA are also available within our Labour Market topic summary. The estimates released alongside this article are by single year of age between the ages of 18 and 30 years and are not directly comparable with the estimates depicted in the Labour Market topic summary due to differences in data routing and definitions of student.
Also published today are our Census 2021 estimates of students by single year of age for all LAs for users to conduct their own comparisons.
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