For this Equality Impact Assessment, a decision was taken to concentrate on applicants via UCAS, and on full-time students on bachelor's degree programmes. Details of exactly which applicants and students are included in the analyses, and why, are given in sections 3 and 4 below.

A hierarchy of subdivisions is used with results given for the whole sample, each faculty, and subdivisions within each faculty, subdivisions which differ somewhat between the sections on applications and students. Details are given in the relevant sections below.

In some cases numbers in subgroups become too small for meaningful analysis, so only the higher levels of the hierarchy are used.

Figure 1 shows four major transitions, from enquirer to applicant, from applicant to confirmed place holder, from confirmed place holder to student, and from student to successfully completing student. Each of these is considered further in the sections below, and consideration is given to stages that would be amenable to equality impact analysis.

Records are kept on some 25000 enquirers each year, and around 2000 of these later apply for a place. In principle it could be possible to examine whether subgroups of enquirers are equally likely to apply, but details of the personal characteristics listed above are not currently recorded for enquirers, so such an analysis is not yet possible.

Students arrive at Edge Hill by several different routes:

Applicants through the first three routes above are ultimately `successes' if they firmly accept an unconditional offer from the University, and `losses' if they do not. It is also possible to look separately at the various stages at which applicants are lost.

More detail of the applicant analysis, and the findings, appear in Section 3 below.

Applicants become successful applicants when they confirm their acceptance of an unconditional offer of a place at EHU. Most such offer holders subsequently enrol at the University, but a small proportion fail to appear at enrolment. An analysis could be done of the absentees, by personal characteristics, but the numbers involved are almost certainly too small for any meaningful conclusions to be drawn, so this option will not be pursued.

Once students enrol on a programme of study, they may withdraw or fail, or they may achieve their target award. Some students eventually achieve the target award, but not in the target time scale, for example taking 4 years to complete an undergraduate degree, after intercalating or repeating a year. For the purposes of this analysis, a `success' is achieving the target award in the target time; a `loss' is failing, withdrawing, being awarded a lower award, or failing to complete in the target time. The process used here is to track a cohort of students through their entire programme, looking at the most recent intake whose final results are available.

For programmes lasting more than one year, it is possible to go further, and to look at the success/loss rate at the end of each year of the programme. Students who are still on course to succeed in the target time scale are `successes', and those who are not are `losses'.

More detail of the student analysis, and the findings, appear in Section 4 below.

Applicants through the UCAS, GTTR, and direct routes are dealt with differently, but essentially all applicants pass through the process illustrated in Figure 2, which shows a six-stage decision process. Each of the stages is discussed below.

A complication is that UCAS and GTTR do not release to EHU details of some personal characteristics of applicants, including ethnicity, until the applicant accepts an unconditional offer. The details of applicants who do not get this far in the process are normally released to EHU only in summary form. However, it is possible to purchase the required data from UCAS; ethnicity data on applicants has been purchased to enable this analysis.

The following sections examine the progress of the 11448 applications (from 10025 different applicants) made to EHU in the UCAS 2008 cycle. These are applications submitted in the main UCAS scheme (not Extra or Clearing) from September 2007 until June 2008. Most of these applications were for entry in Autumn 2008, but some were for Spring 2008, or for later years.

A benefit of choosing this definition for the cohort was that totals could be checked against the UCAS management statistics provided each year to the University.

An alternative method would be to consider all the applications for entry in a particular year; this would have the benefit that it would be possible to follow the cohort through the application process and into their courses. However, it is much more difficult to isolate these applications from the database.

Applications were classified by `Department' using the UCAS course code applied for, and using the set of `Departments' used in Admissions data (with a small number of changes), which don't correspond exactly to actual EHU departments.

The initial analysis looks at the proportions of various groups in each department who, having applied, receive an offer. However, about 5% of applications result in an offer for a course other than the one that was applied for. This raises the issue of how the proportion of offers is counted. Two methods were considered; either counting only offers for the course applied for, or counting any offer in response to the application. It is not clear which is more meaningful; in some ways an offer for an alternative course is like a rejection from the original course chosen, but in other situations, the alternative offer might be seen by the applicant as an improvement on the original choice. For the analysis of gender both methods were tried to see whether any differences were apparent in the results; they were similar.

Counting only offers that were for the course applied for has the effect of reducing all of the percentages; this is likely to mean that any differences between subgroups of applications should be slightly more visible. Hence this definition was chosen; the columns below headed `Offers' show the percentage of applications that received a conditional or unconditional offer from Edge Hill. The columns headed `Accepts' show the percentage of offers that resulted in a firm or insurance response from the applicant.

Note that these measures should not be interpreted as a `success rate' of any kind, nor should they be used to compare departments or faculties. The calculations below are only to compare the treatment of subgroups of the applicants.

Simpson's Paradox is a statistical effect that occurs occasionally when taking averages of items that differ significantly in a number of ways - the average can be misleading. This effect occurs rather strikingly in several places in the data below; this is because Edge Hill has a number of programmes that are very oversubscribed, and thus make offers to only a small fraction of applications. This includes programmes in Health, Education, Performing Arts, and Social Work. At the same time many of these programmes attract applicants who, compared to the University average, are disproportionately female, and more likely to be older.

In such circumstances, looking just at the headline figures for the applications to the University overall, can be very misleading (for example, see section 3.2 below). In fact any average could be affected, and all of the figures given in this report are averages of results for a number of courses. Hence care has been taken to separate out courses that might otherwise give misleading averages - in particular, Social Work is listed separately from the rest of the SPS department, as the profile of applications is very different, and it is also much more oversubscribed that the department's other programmes.

Ethnicity data on applicants is not normally provided to the HEI until an offer has been firmly accepted; the ethnicity of applicants who don't become `firm accepts' is not usually released to the HEI at all. For the purposes of this analysis, data on the ethnicity of all of the applicants in the cohort was purchased from UCAS.

Because numbers for each separate ethnic group are too small for meaningful analysis, they have been grouped into `White' and `BME'. `Unknown' includes those who refused the information, about 1% of the total.

The data indicates that applications from BME applicants in Education, and in the `selecting' departments in FAS (Performing Arts, Media, Social Work), appear less likely to receive an offer than their white counterparts. No difference is evident in FoH. There is no evidence of any differences in whether offers were accepted.

It is difficult to do further analysis of this data to explore the reasons for these findings, as the application forms and some details of the processes followed, have now been destroyed in accordance with Data Protection policies. However, more detailed analysis of the 2009 data will be possible.

Figure 3 illustrates the successes and losses for full-time three year degree students (on programmes starting in September).

Figure 3 - Successes and losses during a three year degree programme

The following analysis looks at the 1718 students who began three-year full-time degree programmes in September 2005. The students are tracked for three years, and the percentages who successfully completed each year and re-enrolled (or graduated) by September 2006, 2007, and 2008 have been calculated for each Faculty and Department.

Note that this is a particularly severe criterion for `success' - for example some of those `lost' on this measure will in fact graduate later, having taken an extra year for a variety of reasons. The measure used here should not be regarded as a `#success rate' for Edge Hill students; and should not be used to compare departments, as circumstances differ. It's use here is to compare the performance of different subgroups within departments; a severe measure is used as it shows any differences more clearly.

Ethnicity was assessed from the ethnicity codes stored in the student record, most of which come from UCAS application forms. Of the 1718, 21 refused to give information, and 5 are unknown (and omitted from the table). Because numbers for each separate ethnic group are too small for meaningful analysis, they have been grouped into `White' and `BME'.

Just 72 (4.2%) of the cohort were BME, so at the departmental level numbers are too small to draw conclusions. Data is presented at Faculty level.

There seems to be no reason to suspect that white and BME students from this cohort performed differently.

For information, the table below shows the percentages of white and BME students in each department in this cohort.