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The Central Statistics Office (CSO) and Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) hereby agree to a statistical collaboration to work on analysing trends in Higher Education Degree classifications. By utilising the CSO’s governance, IT infrastructure and legislation (the Statistics Act, 1993), the CSO aims to provide the opportunity to QQI to utilise the full potential of their data sources in order to further facilitate development of evidence-based policy and decision-making.
The purpose of this collaboration is to conduct a quantitative analysis of the variation in Honours Bachelor’s Degree grades over time which will determine the relevant associated factors such as changes in programme structures and changes in student profiles. The analysis will select up to six programmes from each higher education institution for graduation cohorts from 2011/12 to 2021/22. This quantitative analysis will complement a qualitative review being undertaken by each higher education institution.
The arrangements specific to this collaboration are:
The project will involve developing a dataset from a range of Education administrative data sources under the CSO’s Educational Longitudinal Database (ELD) framework to be used for the purpose of the agreed collaboration. Access to the dataset will be provided by the CSO Researcher Coordination Unit (RCU).
The collaboration will be for a period of six months, open to review by CSO and QQI.
The project will be conducted by CSO staff and named researchers from Quality and Qualifications Ireland.
The research team from Quality and Qualifications Ireland will be Officers of Statistics as per Section 20(b) of the Statistics Act for the purposes of this collaboration and will sign the declarations specified in Section 21 of the Statistics Act to conduct the analysis required for the project. Only these researchers will have access to the agreed microdata and must be physically located in the Republic of Ireland when accessing the datasets in question. Any discussion of the data by the research team (e.g., discussions of tables or analysis which could potentially disclose details of individual records) must be restricted to other Officers of Statistics appointed to the same statistical research project.
The legal basis for this collaboration is Section 11(1) of the Statistics Act, 1993. This project will be carried out in line with all relevant data protection regulations as well as all CSO data protocols and guidelines. It will be subject to the strict legal provisions on the protection of information contained in Part V of the Statistics Act, 1993. No directly identifiable data relating to individuals will be made available to the project analysis team, and no identifiable data will be made available to any stakeholders or other persons by the project team under conditions of Section 34 of the Statistics Act, 1993. The Act imposes heavy penalties for the misuse of information collected by the CSO including the use of data collected under the Act for reasons other than statistical compilation and analysis purposes.
The CSO reserves the right to place any analysis/outputs from this research into the public domain. CSO outputs will be in line with standard statistical releases and will focus on the provision of descriptive statistics with associated commentary.
Quality and Qualifications Ireland may decide to compile and publish a report from this research. Any statistical data/analysis included must comply with the requirements of the Statistics Act, 1993. Commentary of a policy focused nature is a matter entirely for Quality and Qualifications Ireland and can in no way be attributed to or be associated with the CSO. An explicit reference to this effect must be clearly and unambiguously made in any report/output. The project outputs will be reports/ aggregated tables released through the CSO research data output process.
Signatories
Padraig Dalton, Director General, Central Statistics Office
Date: 18/01/2024
Padraig Walsh, Chief Executive Officer, Quality and Qualifications Ireland
Date: 18/01/2024