Choose a student lifecycle stage and demographic area to see all institutions with APP targets addressing that gap.
A quick note before you dive in: targets and their descriptions are the institutions' own words, taken directly from published APPs. The OfS outcome data behind the charts is often based on multi-year averages and can lag the current position, with providers often holding richer internal data. This tool is here to support collaboration and shared learning – not to rank or judge institutions. Read more about this site and its methodology.
Open APP Explorer
Compare Access & Participation Plans across English universities
Each circle is an institution, placed at its registered address and sized by how many matching targets it has. A target sits with an institution, not necessarily where its students live. Hover for the name, click for its targets, or choose a region to summarise it.
Tip: click a stage below or a demographic area to drill in. Narrow to a single lifecycle stage and a single demographic area and a gap-over-time trend chart appears here, showing how the gap has changed for the institutions on the map above.
Targets by student lifecycle stage
Targets by demographic area
Gap trend
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About Open APP Explorer
Open APP Explorer is an independent tool designed to help UK higher education professionals explore and compare Access and Participation Plan (APP) targets across English universities.
What is an APP?
Access and Participation Plans are agreements between universities and the Office for Students (OfS) that set out how institutions will improve equality of opportunity for underrepresented groups - covering access, student success, and progression into employment or further study.
Where does the data come from?
Targets are extracted from publicly available APP documents published on the OfS. Extraction is carried out using AI, which reads the target sections of each PDF and structures the data into comparable fields. This means occasional errors or gaps are possible - if you spot something incorrect for your institution, please use the feedback form.
Demographic data (IMD, ethnicity, disability, and so on) is drawn from the OfS's own published student characteristic data, matched to each institution by UKPRN. Mission group data was taken from publicly available sources, but is also prone to error.
The Aim and Description shown for each target are the institution's own words, taken directly from their published APP. They are not summaries written or standardised by this tool, so wording and level of detail vary from one institution to another.
How to read the figures
Most targets describe a gap between two groups of students (for example the difference in completion rates between students from the most and least deprived areas). Where a target shows a baseline and a target figure, these usually refer to the size of that gap in percentage points – so a smaller number is the institution aiming to narrow the gap. A few targets instead describe an absolute rate for a single group. The charts let you switch between Gaps and Indicators (the underlying rates for each group) to see both perspectives.
OfS figures are often based on multi-year averages and can lag the current position by a year or more. Providers also hold richer internal data, and may have adjusted delivery since a plan was published, so a published APP is not always a perfectly up-to-date picture. This tool is intended to support collaboration and shared learning, not to judge or rank institutions.
OfS student characteristic data and equity gap data is published by the Office for Students and used here under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This tool displays and filters the data but does not alter the underlying figures. Some institutions show no equity gap data – this reflects suppression or rounding applied by OfS at source to meet data protection requirements, not a gap in our extraction.
How current is it?
The APP targets are taken from all 'currently active' APPs. Coverage is not complete - around 20-30% of institutions either had not yet published their APP at the time of extraction, or published it in a format that could not be read automatically.
Who built this?
This tool has been built by David Gilani as an independent project to support the UK higher education access and participation community, with feedback from that community constantly helping to drive it forward. This site is not affiliated with the Office for Students or any other regulatory body.
The hope is that it sparks ideas for better ways to organise public data about universities into the future to aid collaboration between providers and drive the sector towards addressing equity gaps faster than if we go alone.
If you have questions, suggestions, or spot any errors, please use the feedback form.