FOI_25-189 Students on supplementary years
Date of response: 18 July 2025
We have now considered your request of 07 July 2025, for the following information:
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act to request the following information about undergraduate students at your institution:
Question 1. How many students for the last three academic years (2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25) were on a supplementary year of study?
Please break this down by year and by whether students were paying fees for this supplementary year or not.
Clarification received 03 July 2025:
‘By supplementary year I mean an additional year of study where undergraduate students are able to retake eligible units for reassessment to either progress to the next year or achieve their degrees, not including years in industry or abroad.
I did state undergraduate students at the beginning of the request, but to clarify this too, I mean any undergraduate students, both home and international.
Please could you count them by academic year as that year being the one in which the second supplementary year occurred.’
Clarification received 07 July 2024:
‘I am only interested in years where students have paid a fee or partial fee that are considered supplementary years.’
Our response:
| 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Students paying fees for supplementary year | 304 | 245 | 196 |
| Student NOT paying fees for supplementary year | 240 | 195 | 163 |
Question 2. For the last three academic years, what was the total amount of tuition fees charged to students on supplementary years of study? Please break this down by academic year.
Our response:
| 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total amount of tuition fees charged to students on supplementary years | £2,701,309.00 | £2,267,125.00 | £1,752,125.00 |
Question 3. How many undergraduate students have paid for more than one supplementary year in the past three academic years?
Our response:
| 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| No. of students who paid for more than one supplementary year | 22 | 16 | 15 |
Please note the following:
For question 1 we have determined ‘supplementary year’ as any student in the academic year stated, who was still at the same stage of their course as the year before. The reasons for students paying fees or not paying fees will include, but are not limited to, the following circumstances:
Students Paying for a supplementary year
• A full or partial repeat year of study, where the student would incur an additional fee.
• A partial year, where the student has returned to complete their course stage having interrupted their studies in previous year. Where the student incurred a fee which was simply the balance, they had not paid from the previous academic year therefore not an additional fee.
Students not Paying for a supplementary year
• Final Year re-assessments
• Extensions to end date for final coursework submissions
• Placement delays or repeats
For question 3 we reviewed the length of study of all UG students and then looked for those whose duration exceeded two years beyond their course length. Of those students, we reviewed the number of annual charges they had received during their total study length and any with more than one annual charge greater than the length of their course was recorded in this table. As explained in question, there will be a mixture of additional charges and split year charges. There are also two students who feature in more than one of the years 2022-23 to 2024-25, in the numbers for question 3.