The Augar review: a word analysis

Here’s our look at the words which build the narrative^* of the Augar review.

While a word analysis cannot paint an entire picture, it can throw interesting light on the make-up of a document. For example, in a review of post-18 education, is it odd that higher education is mentioned four times as often as further education? Maybe, maybe not.

We’ve crunched the words behind the Augar review, and share some highlights below. But first some context: the review is almost 100,000 words long. This figure and ours includes titles and references.

‘BTECs’ (36) is used just over seven times more than ‘A-Levels’ (5) while ‘T-Levels’ are not mentioned.
‘Loan’ (382) is more than twice as popular as ‘contributions’ (169).
Of the top 15 words noted, six refer to finance.
The concepts of ‘diversity’ (9), ‘equality’ (2) and ‘widening participation’ (4), or ‘wellbeing’ (2) and ‘mental health’ (3) do not feature highly. But ‘disadvantaged’ appears 101 times with ‘social mobility’ appearing 22 times.
Whole recommendations focus on ‘lifelong learning’, yet the words only appear 11 times, while ‘mature learners’ are mentioned seven times.
The ‘Industrial Strategy’ gets a healthy 28 mentions.
‘Business’ gets a strong recognition with 82 uses of the words associated.
Clearly technical skills are of importance, with the word ‘technical’ used 154 times, while ‘soft skills’ are not mentioned once.
‘Higher education’ is used 424 times. ‘Further education’ is used 97 times. ‘Apprenticeships’ are mentioned 372 times.
There is a recognition of the impact of and on the sector, as the word ‘government’ is used 289 times and the word ‘economy’ 211 times.

Below are the graphs and metrics on the words within the Augar report:

Related content:

*The Augar review is almost 100,000 words long. This is not a comprehensive study of every word used repeatedly, but of those we noted and expected to see in the content.

Words which tie in count are ordered alphabetically.

Please note: for the sake of simplicity we collated words to their common form. For example ‘businesses’ included ‘business’, ‘employer(s)’, ‘industry’ etc, while ‘higher education’ included ‘university’ and ‘universities’.