Annual Participation Measure

The Scottish Government’s Opportunities for All commitment offers a place in learning or training to every 16-19 year old who is not in employment, education or training.

SDS worked with the Scottish Government to develop a measure of participation which allows us to identify the participation status of the wider 16-19 cohort.

The latest report (published August 2024) marks the tenth release of statistics on the participation of 16-19 year olds at a national and local authority level.

As agreed by Scottish Ministers the Annual Participation Measure (APM) has been adopted in the Scottish Government’s National Performance Framework as the measure of young people’s participation.  This has replaced the school leaver destination follow up as the source of the national indicator, “Percentage of young adults (16-19 year olds) participating in education, training or employment”.

The measure is drawn from records on our Customer Support System (CSS), which are updated by SDS and by partners (including local authorities/schools, colleges, SAAS, DWP).  It allows all partners to better understand the impact of interventions and the outcomes they deliver at every transition point for 16-19 year olds.  Although the APM publication is annual, local authorities and colleges can access their own data via the 16+ Data Hub at any time.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) data was included within the APM statistical data set for the first time in 2023. SDS and the Scottish Government continue to work with HMRC to explore methodologies to further improve the quality of the participation measure data, including options for onward sharing with other partners to better target support services for young people. Whilst this work is ongoing, SDS and the Scottish Government have agreed with HMRC to pause the current data sharing. Therefore, HMRC data has not been included in the 2024 APM data set and to ensure comparability across publications we have revised the 2023 data set by removing updates resulting from HMRC data. This revision allows for comparisons between different years to be made on a like for like basis, as the datasets were prepared using the same methodology.

The disability breakdown within the Annual Participation Measure for 2016, 2017, and 2018 was revised on 27/11/2018.

Please see background notes for an overview of the Annual Participation Measure methodology and definitions.

Annual Participation Measure

The interactive report below provides an overview of the annual participation measure, at a national and local authority level.

A short video tutorial is available to support the use of this interactive report. 

The data used for the interactive report is also available in the supplementary tables.