The Annual Education Review (AER) forms a central component of the CSP’s quality assurance and enhancement arrangements for UK pre-registration physiotherapy education.
The AER reflects the CSP’s commitment to assuring good quality of programmes, but also programme innovation, workforce supply, learner diversity and continuous improvement across the pre-registration physiotherapy education.
What is the Annual Education Review?
The Annual Education Review (AER) formally known as the Annual Quality Review (AQR) is integral in the CSP’s role in accrediting pre-registration physiotherapy programmes.
The review draws on data collected through CSP-accredited programmes and now includes commissioned datasets including student records and graduate outcomes from Jisc and UCAS applicants data.
Together, these data sets highlight national trends across pre-registration physiotherapy education, including:
- Student demographics and learner profile
- Practice-based learning capacity at regional and national levels
- Staffing levels
- Programme sustainability and placement provision
While primarily for accreditation purposes, the review process has proved invaluable to programme teams by enabling them to benchmark their provision against national trends and profiles.
The information is made publicly available to support transparency and demonstrate due scrutiny of CSP’s quality assurance and enhancement processes.
Data dashboard
From 2026 onwards, the CSP will source student records and graduate outcomes data directly from Jisc and UCAS applicants data, which will enhance the CSP workforce data portal. This will provide a consistent and comprehensive national dataset across all UK pre-registration physiotherapy programmes, reducing duplication and reporting burden for programme teams.
The workforce data portal is an interactive Power BI visualisation dashboard which provides insights using the datasets to inform regional and national profiles, allowing users to:
- Explore trends over time
- View data at national and regional level
- Support benchmarking and internal quality enhancement activities
Innovation and best practice
A key focus of the review is highlighting innovative practice within programmes and sharing the successes. In previous years, this was formed around a specific quality enhancement theme relevant to the physiotherapy pre-registration education for that particular year.
Examples of themes included:
- public health,
- mental health,
- person-centred care,
- leadership,
- digital health,
- or cultural competence.
We now offer a wider opportunity to showcase examples and encourage programme teams to tell us of their successes. A thematic review of these examples are included in our reports.
Alongside this, featured examples are shared in our webinar series – Innovations and best practice in education.
Quality assurance and enhancement processes
CSP’s accreditation activity enables the CSP to monitor, assess, challenge and enhance the quality of pre-registration programmes – individually and collectively. The Annual Education Review is an important aspect of this activity to ensure programmes meet our high standards in between accreditation review.
The outcome of this activity does not feature within the AER reports and dashboard, but rather, the activity reports formally to the Quality assurance and enhancement network, professional committee and ultimately CSP Council. While we do not report it here, data found within the report is central to the CSP’s ability to help teams to continually improve and enhance their programmes.
Should you wish to know more about this activity, please refer to our pages about CSP accreditation and the accreditation process or contact the CSP Education team at (education@csp.org.uk).
Previous annual education review reports
- AER report 2015-16
- AER report 2016-17
- AER report 2017-18
- AER report 2018-19
- AER report 2019-20
- AER report 2020-21
- AER report 2021-22
- AER report 2022-23
Privacy notice
The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) has a role in the accreditation of pre-reg physiotherapy programmes offered by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
The CSP’s Annual Education Review (AER) collects data about staff, students and graduates as part of this accreditation process. The information is also used for quality assurance and enhancement activities and informs our work on workforce supply.
The CSP, as the trade union and professional body for physiotherapy, has a legitimate interest in ensuring the quality of physiotherapy education, understanding issues relating to workforce supply and promoting equality of opportunity.
Sources of data
- HEIs provide the names and contact details for key staff (as well as general information about their programmes).
- UCAS provides data on the pre-registration physiotherapy students
- Jisc provides data on physiotherapy students and graduates
The Jisc and UCAS datasets include student numbers, attrition rates, course outcomes and graduate destinations. Both datasets also include demographic information (ethnicity, health and sexual orientation) which is used for monitoring and promoting equality of opportunity and treatment.
Every effort is taken to ensure the data received from UCAS and Jisc does not allow identification of individual students or graduates. All reports and information published by the CSP will be aggregated and fully anonymised.
How we use the data
Data is shared with the HEI’s assigned educational consultant. The consultant or the CSP may use HEI staff details to contact them about the AER, accreditation or quality enhancement activities.
Data collected for the AER is also used to produce reports and dashboards to allow programme providers at HEIs to benchmark their programmes. Reports are made available to the public on our website. Only fully anonymised data is shared with HEIs or published.
Data is kept until the next round of accreditation (5-7 years).
Further information
If you have any questions about how your data will be used (or if you wish to withdraw information that relates to you) please contact education@csp.co.uk. For further details on how the CSP manages your data, including details of your data rights, our Data Protection Officer and how to make a complaint, please see our Privacy Notice or contact data.protection@csp.org.uk.