Beyond the Barracks: Progress Update

As described in our earlier blog post, HEAT are participating in a collaborative project which aims to improve access to higher education for students from Armed Forces families.

Our role in this project has three key strands, and we would like to update members on the progress made on each of these in the summaries below.

1. An Automated Comparator Group Tool on the HEAT system

We are developing new functionality to enable users to automatically generate comparator groups through the system. A new tool will semi-automate the identification of comparator groups through a process of identifying ‘similar’ students to a group of participants, matching on variables known to influence educational outcomes.

The tool will be embedded within the database, allowing all members to benefit from its capabilities and to support evaluation of any intervention, for any target group. Use of this tool by project partners will help us to improve the evidence for the impact of outreach for Service Children.

Following consultation with the HEAT Research Group and the wider membership, HEAT aims to complete the technical specification by December 2025, with a rollout planned for the Summer 2026 Update.

2. Hot and Cold Spot Mapping

Our ‘hot and cold spot’ analysis will enable the sector to identify gaps in outreach delivered to Service Children. This mapping combines school-level data from the Department for Education with enriched pupil census data, now including both the number and percentage of Service Children per institution.

By integrating this with Outreach Activity data from HEAT members, we will generate insights that rank institutions by Service Child representation and outreach engagement (using deciles). This will guide strategic planning and ensure support is directed where it’s most needed.

The final format of the data is still to be determined, but it will be shared with Beyond the Barracks partners first, and the sector and wider HEAT membership once a useful format has been agreed. To ensure accuracy, HEAT will wait for members to upload their 2024/25 data by November 2025, and the dataset will cover academic years 2022–2024.

HEAT is also exploring the use of the ‘Service Children flag’ in the HEAT database as a secondary data source. While not universally used or targeted, early scoping suggests it could be valuable. HEAT will encourage members to use the flag more consistently to strengthen this dataset.

3. Service Children Educational Transitions research

As part of our existing annual Contextualised Higher Education Entry dataset which interrogates Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5 and higher education entry data matched to HEAT Student cohorts, we have requested new fields to help identify Service Children and key characteristics.

These additional fields will enable us to investigate similarities and differences in attainment and transitions between Service Children and non-Service Children.

The application has now been approved by the Department for Education’s Data Sharing Committee and we expect to receive the data before December 2025. HEAT has met with bid partners to shape the research questions for analysis of the data we receive. The outcomes of this research will be made available to the sector and wider HEAT membership.