What the indicator shows

The ‘qualification completion’ indicator shows the proportion of students that complete a qualification in a given year. It demonstrates how successful TEOs are in helping their students to complete qualifications. It also gives a good indication of longer-term educational performance, as many qualifications will take several years for students to complete.

Qualification vs course

Students who complete a qualification tend to earn significantly more than those who complete a number of courses instead. However, some students will enrol at a TEO to acquire certain skills, rather than completing a full qualification.

In general, the proportion of those completing a qualification will be lower than the proportion completing a single course.

Factors affecting completion rates

The qualification completion rate can be affected by factors that do not reflect the performance of a TEO, such as:

• embedded qualifications (ie, where students are awarded a qualification or qualifications as part of completing a larger qualification)
• changes in enrolments across years, particularly when there is a change in enrolments in qualifications that typically take more than one year to complete. For example, a group of 100 students start a three-year qualification in 2014 and complete it in 2016 but only 50 start the same qualification in 2016. This lower number of enrolments would result in a higher 2016 qualification completion rate. Conversely, if there is an increase in a TEO's enrolments at levels 7–8, this would result in a decrease in the qualification completion rate even if the TEO's performance has stayed the same.
• qualifications with strands. These are qualifications that allow a student to specialise in a particular area of a subject. Sometimes these strands can have different credit values, and this can affect the qualification completion rate.

These factors, as well as the calculation methods used, mean that a high course completion rate does not automatically translate into a high qualification completion rate.

Overall performance

The following tables show the qualification completion rate by level of qualification between 2014 and 2016. The rates are for Student Achievement Component (SAC) and Youth Guarantee (YG) funded students. These qualification completion rates have been calculated using our previous educational performance indicator (EPI) methodologies.

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