This isn’t the place to discuss a knighthood for a former Secretary of State for Education, except to say I haven’t been more surprised since the time when a Prime Minister knighted his raincoat maker.
I was almost as surprised to find the DfE publishing the February ITT applications data today. Well done for producing the data much faster than UCAS used to achieve. However, it is less helpful not to have a pre-announced timetable for these publications. If there is one, I haven’t seen it.
February marks the mid-point in the annual recruitment cycle, and is the month when it is normally possible to ‘read the runes’ and speculate on the final outcome of the recruitment round, and hence, the labour market for the following year.
At present, 2022 looks a lot like 2020 was at this point, but any predictions made that February turned out to be wide of the mark. I fear that with the war in Ukraine, any predictions this March based on the February data would only be on the basis of a ‘normal’ recruitment round. The remained of 2022 is not going to be anything like normal.
As a result, I am confining myself to saying that the indications to date are less interest from home students and that 10%+ of applications have come from applicants domiciled outside of England. This includes 482 applicants from Northern Ireland and 1,427 for the ‘rest of the world’ category. There have also been 318 applications from people in Wales to train in England.
An interesting piece of analysis made possible by the DfE dataset is the percentage of applicants offered a place, awaiting a decision and unsuccessful with their current application.
The offer category includes those shown as recruited; conditions pending; deferrals and received an offer.
| Subject | % offers | % unsuccessful | % awaiting offer |
| Classics | 26% | 49% | 26% |
| Music | 26% | 49% | 25% |
| Business studies | 15% | 59% | 25% |
| Design and technology | 26% | 53% | 21% |
| Religious education | 24% | 55% | 21% |
| Computing | 18% | 62% | 19% |
| Drama | 27% | 51% | 22% |
| Physics | 20% | 54% | 26% |
| Art and design | 25% | 52% | 24% |
| Geography | 26% | 52% | 22% |
| Other | 25% | 57% | 18% |
| Biology | 21% | 58% | 21% |
| Chemistry | 20% | 56% | 25% |
| Modern foreign languages | 20% | 52% | 28% |
| History | 25% | 56% | 18% |
| English | 24% | 58% | 18% |
| Mathematics | 20% | 58% | 22% |
| Physical education | 24% | 64% | 12% |
The table is ranked by the number of applications received, with the subject with the lowest applications at the top and physical education with 4,589 applicants at the bottom of the table. Interestingly, lots of applicants doesn’t always mean a high percentage of offers. Similarly, small numbers of applicants may also mean high percentage of unsuccessful applicants, as in physics (54%) and computing ((62%). Does this mean that quality is not being compromised, perhaps because of concerns over ofsted judgements? Perhaps, it means more and better applicants might come along later, so it is worth keeping places for them. Unsuccessful applicant percentages will increase as courses fill. Thus, physical education already has the highest percentage of unsuccessful applicants.
There are still lots of interesting data needed, such as ethnicity of applicants and their outcomes and outcomes by type of course. Perhaps providers could lobby for these changes?
John Howson 