Relationships between the Welsh Baccalaureate Advanced Diploma (WBQ) and Higher Education (HE)

The evaluation uses a mixed methods design, incorporating a quantitative element based on existing large-scale datasets.

The evaluation reports two key, but interrelated, findings. The first is that there is strong evidence to suggest that the WBQ is enormously valuable in helping students to enter higher education. This benefit would appear to be largely due to the weighting given to the Core component of the WBQ as the equivalent of an additional A-level qualification (at grade A) for (some) university admissions.

However, the evaluation also finds evidence to suggest that students with the WBQ Core find they are less likely to achieve a ‘good’ degree result than equivalent students without the WBQ Core, once they are at university.