Student statistics
These statistics relate to the general student population, student admissions and current student attainment and are updated annually.
Admissions and attainment statistics
We are required by the independent regulator of higher education in England, the Office for Students, to publish the following ‘transparency return’ dataset.
Student population statistics
At a glance...
In the academic year 2023/24 the student population was made up of:
- 15,400 Undergraduates
- 3,735 Taught Postgraduates
- 1,345 Research Postgraduates
The Planning Office publishes statistics about the University's student population. A guide to how these statistics are created is available under the headers below.
Student headcount
In almost all student number reports we count individual students against the teaching unit that owns the programme the student is on. A teaching unit can be an academic department, a sub-section of a department, or a cross-department unit (such as the Centre for Medieval Studies, which has contributions from Archaeology, English, History, and History of Art). For simplicity, teaching units are usually labelled "Departments" in reports. Each programme has a single "owner" meaning that students taking jointly-provided courses are shown under a single teaching unit.
This means that no student is ever double-counted, ie the total of all teaching units equals the total number of students at the University.
Full-time Equivalence (FTE)
Some student number reports present student FTE as an alternative to Headcount. The calculation of FTE relates to the student's mode of attendance, ie full-time or part-time.
The FTE of a full-time student is always 1. If they are not full-time, FTE is a calculation of the student as a fraction of a full-time student, based on a weighting associated with their mode of study. A widely used rule of thumb is that a part-time student counts as 0.5 FTE. This is often the case, but modes of study with weightings of 0.33, 0.2 and 0.25 are also used.
Default Filters
The report is based on registered students on the first day of December each year, eg the snapshot taken on 1 December 2018 was used to populate the 2018/9 numbers.
Included
Level of study: the default is UG (Undergraduate), PGT (Postgraduate Taught, eg: Masters) and PGR (Postgraduate Research, eg: PhD). The option to add Foundation students is also available.
Mode of study: the default is full time and part time only. The option to add visiting students is also available.
Excluded from the statistics
The following are excluded from the statistics:
All postgraduate students on extended registration/writing up are excluded from the figures presented. All students, either undergraduate or postgraduate, who are on a leave of absence are also excluded from the figures.
