The Longitudinal Education Outcome (LEO) dataset was officially launched in a blaze of publicity in Jo Johnson’s 2016 White Paper (Success as a knowledge economy), and the sector’s wonks were quick to spot policy implications.
The ability to mash together tax and benefits data with individual student records offered a new way to examine student outcomes many years after graduation, and allowed us to map these to subject of study, mode of study, and provider. Previously such insight was limited to the triennial longer term DLHE survey – this was an in-depth look at the real, individual, benefits of higher education.
Though we know LEO as a public data release – the real benefit has been felt by the lucky few approved to analyse the raw data. Most notably, a number of influential Institute for Fiscal Studies reports on the longer-term benefits of a degree (and the longer-term costs to the government) draw on a combination of LEO data and cohort studies.
However, I think many of us were expecting LEO to play a much bigger role in regulation. If we ignore (as most people do) the Discover Uni resources, we look in vain for LEO data in Office for Students publications or dashboards (you can, if you wish, use it contextually in TEF submissions and APPs, it’s also one of the 8 million things OfS could decide to also look at when making a decision to investigate based on B3).
