Accredited official statistics

National Statistics (Northern Ireland)

Published 28 November 2024

Applies to Northern Ireland

© Crown copyright 2024

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: psi@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/student-support-for-higher-education-in-northern-ireland-2024/national-statistics-northern-ireland

National Statistics are produced to high professional standards set out in the National Statistics Code of Practice. They undergo regular quality assurance reviews to ensure they meet customer needs. They are produced free from any political interference.

This publication series (publications for England, Wales & Northern Ireland) was awarded National Statistics status in October 2011 following a full assessment against their Code of Practice.

Since the assessments by the Office for Statistics Regulation we have continued to comply with the Code of Practice for Statistics, and have made a number of improvements to the Northern Ireland publication including the following:

  • Part-time and postgraduate Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) added.
  • Additional tables added to show DSA payments breakdown by type.
  • Sections restructured, bringing loans more to the fore and clearly separating out full-time undergraduate, part-time undergraduate and postgraduate students. The ’early-in-year’ focus changed to actual students and amounts paid rather than applications and amounts awarded.
  • Introduced cross-country comparison of average Maintenance Loan paid.
  • Introduced cross-country comparison of average Tuition Fee Loan paid.
  • Introduction of Table 7C (ii) - a new table reporting the early-in-year figures (from Table 7C (i) (formerly Table 7C) - by ‘new’ students (those who have not previously received student finance from Student Loans Company (SLC) and ‘returning’ students (those who have previously received student finance from SLC).
  • Removed the ‘Summary of policy changes’ and the ‘Overview of full-time undergraduate student funding package’ sections from the pdf document and replaced with a link to the Student Finance Northern Ireland website. This allows the user to access more detailed information than previous provided.
  • To improve accessibility, all documents are now provided in HTML.
  • Introduced an Executive Summary which links to the corresponding section in the document.
  • Improved Accessibility - including descriptive information of the full time-series for each graph within the main body of the statistics publication, providing data used to form each graph in accessible/downloadable tables; and changing the way we present charts and graphs to be more accessible, including changes to colour, labels and legends.
  • Table restructure – As the tables are becoming increasingly difficult to view on one screen/page (except for Table 4B and 5B), tables have been separated into sections below one another i.e. the number of applicants/students, followed by the amount awarded/paid, then the average paid.
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