The presence of detailed and widely understood benchmarked metrics for continuation, completion, and progression (with subject and student characteristic splits) gives providers a clear structure to put together the student outcomes section of the statement.
Within this, the memories of previous TEF iterations mean that language is often tailored very close to the metrics, rather than the more general narrative we saw in other sections.
So where provision was below benchmark for a given group of students – or for the whole institution – responses in the narrative took one of two forms: explain the reason, or explain the action.
For the former, institutions would provide the panel with context that they felt it needed – often around the pandemic or the wider labour market, or reasons why the data did not really tell the true story for methodological or statistical reasons (particularly with small groups or non-standard programmes).
