Education has the potential to reduce inequalities and promote social mobility. However, children from lower socio-economic backgrounds continue to do significantly worse at school than those from higher socio-economic backgrounds.
Our research seeks to understand the complex mechanisms behind the pronounced association between social and educational inequalities, by looking at how individual, household, neighbourhood characteristics and national institutional characteristics intersect with each other to reproduce inequalities.
We will analyse a variety of outcomes beyond educational attainment, such as cognitive development, the transitions to primary and secondary school and teacher assessments of children’s dispositions and skills. In addition, our research explores the life-courses of resilient individuals from less-advantaged social backgrounds. By conducting this latter study, we aim to identify potential enabling factors which allow certain people to break the vicious circle of the social reproduction of inequality.
Our current research projects on educational inequalities are listed below. These link closely with our research on Socio-Economic, Employment, Well-being, Gender and Age inequalities.
Despite the growing life expectancy witnessed in the last decades, in many western countries, socio-economic inequalities in health persist. A voluminous body of work describing social and economic determinants of health inequalities exists, but much less is known about the impact of social policies, and specifically educational reforms, on health. In this paper, we examine whether the introduction of comprehensive secondary education in Britain has led to any change in health inequalities measured by a variety of both objective and subjective indicators. Equalizing educational opportunities is an argument for a comprehensive school system. Given that education is an important social determinant of health, it is hypothesised that a more equitable comprehensive system could reduce health inequalities in adulthood. To test this hypothesis, we exploited the change from a largely selective to a largely comprehensive system that occurred in the UK from the mid-1960s onwards and compare inequalities in health outcomes of two birth cohorts (1958 and 1970) who attended either system.
Most research on social inequalities in higher education (HE) graduates’ labour market outcomes has analysed outcomes at one or two points in time, thus providing only snapshots of graduates’ occupational destinations. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the education and labour market trajectories of degree holders across their life course and how these trajectories vary by social class of origin. Using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, we assess the degree of social inequalities in the chance of following more or less advantaged pathways from age 16 up to the age of 42 and the extent to which these inequalities are explained by differences in higher education experiences. Three main questions are addressed in this study:
What are the typical education and labour market pathways followed by HE graduates?
How do these pathways vary by parental social class?
Do differences in graduates’ HE experiences (i.e. age of graduation, the field of study and institution attended, degree class achieved and postgraduate studies) explain class-of-origin differences?
Studies of residential mobility over the course of individual lives have documented that individuals are more mobile when they have young children. Given the high rate of residential mobility, and the importance of early life experiences for later outcomes, it is crucial to understand the implications of moving home for children development. A large body of research has shown that children who stay in the same home have better outcomes than their more mobile counterparts. However, a dichotomization of mobility experiences (movers versus non-movers) has limited explanatory power and calls for approaches that consider frequency, motivations, and characteristics of residential moves. Further, whereas more advantaged families often make intentional moves to better housing or neighbourhood, more disadvantaged families are at risk of deterioration of their housing contexts. Families might also differ in the resources they have to buffer the negative effects of a move.
This project addresses the following research questions:
The study focuses on the following research questions: (1) What is the overall effect of family of origin on children’s occupational status? (2) Does the importance of family effect differ by social class of origin and by other family characteristics? (3) How much of the total variance between families is explained by parental social class, parental education and other family-level characteristics? (4) To what extent do educational qualifications explain between- family and within-family differences in siblings’ occupational outcomes?
How has COVID-19 impacted on the lives of children and young people in terms of their family and peer relationships; formal and informal learning; physical and mental health and wellbeing; and transitions to further/higher education, training and the youth labour market?
Type(s) of inequality and how inequality is defined:
Inequality is defined as the differences in social class, education and/or household income across groups of children, young people and families.
This paper uses data from Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) and the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) for Scotland to explore the factors influencing inequalities in children’s skills on entry to primary school. The main research questions are:
• Are there social inequalities by parental background in cognitive skills on entry to primary school?
• To what extent do early childcare experiences and family environment explain the differences by parental background and what is their relative importance?
• Are there differences between Scotland and Ireland in the level of inequality and the processes shaping it?
Type of inequality
Previous research has generally focused on mother’s education or social class. Instead, the analyses adopt a multidimensional approach to inequality, focusing on differences in child outcomes by parental social class, mother’s education and household income.
This paper explores the impact of socio-economic and other inequalities on the risk of conduct disorder among a cohort of children aged 10 years in Scotland. Broadly defined, children with conduct disorder have a difficult time following rules and behaving in a socially acceptable way. In the UK, early onset conduct disorder is the main reason for referral to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. While there is an extensive literature on childhood conduct disorders, most research to date has focused on individual and family level factors, for example, child personality traits, family background and dysfunction, parenting styles and more recently, the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). A similar focus is reflected within policy, whereby the main emphasis is on parenting classes and child psychological therapies. For example, the Scottish Government Mental Health Strategy 2017-2027 aims to have completed a national roll-out of targeted parenting programmes for three and four-year olds with conduct disorder by 2019-2020.
We are interested in whether changes in the ethnic/ cultural mix of pupils in schools can affect education outcomes for pupils from different backgrounds. Previous research (Burgess, 2014) has shown that white children from deprived households are likely to perform better if they are in schools with children of mixed ethnic backgrounds rather than in an all-white school. We seek to establish whether such an effect holds true in Scotland, to understand whether there are threshold effects and whether there is an optimal level of social and ethnic mix for educational outcomes. More generally, we are interested in establishing the degree and nature of ethnic inequality in educational outcomes.
Fragmentation of traditional working class communities through decentralisation and changing spatial ordering of poverty combined with influx of new ethnicities opens up a range of questions about the impacts on different socio-ethnic groups.
Sibling designs are an important analytical strategy to capture the family environment as a global measure, providing a summary indicator of all measured and unmeasured characteristics shared by siblings at birth and during their upbringing, such as genes, social environment, siblings interactions and many others. This, in turn, allows us to assess the relative importance of shared family characteristics vs. individual characteristics and of different parental background measures within the total family shared environment. This paper will provide new and robust empirical evidence regarding social inequalities in HE graduation. Using new siblings’ data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), the paper addresses the following research questions:
(1) What is the share of between and within family variance in siblings’ HE outcomes?
(2) Does this differ by social class of origin and by other family characteristics?
(3) How much of the total variance between families is explained by parental social class, education and other family-level characteristics?
This research investigates the extent to which children from more disadvantaged backgrounds achieve cognitive outcomes higher than their peers and the factors which are behind their more successful outcomes from a life-course perspective. The aim is to identify and understand specific factors and turning points in children’s lives which can help children to overcome the negative influences of the social disadvantage they are born in and to shed light on the mechanisms at play. Thus, we ask the following questions:
1) To what extent do children from disadvantaged backgrounds attain successful cognitive outcomes?
2) What are the key enabling factors that distinguish successful children from disadvantaged backgrounds (the ‘resilient’) from their peers who attain less? And what is the interplay between the enabling factors analysed?
3) Are there turning points in the life-course of disadvantaged children which enable them to achieve better outcomes than expected?
A large body of literature has investigated the existence of social class differences in children’s school outcomes. However, relatively less is known about the possible mechanisms through which this relationship operates.
We address the following questions:
• Are there social class differences in children’s educational outcomes at age 10 in Scotland and the U.S.A?
• To what extent do differences in parenting practices explain the observed social class differences in children’s outcomes?
• Do different mechanisms operate within each national context?
Increasing scholarly attention has focused on the link between family demography and inequalities, and its implications for children’s life courses. Children born from more disadvantaged families are more likely to experience family changes and structures that are associated with a loss of resources, such as their parents’ early and non-marital family formation, union instability and weaker labour market attachment. These experiences have important repercussions on children’s well-being and chances in life.
Education has the potential to reduce inequalities and promote social mobility. However, children from lower socio-economic backgrounds continue to do significantly worse at school than those from higher socio-economic backgrounds.
Our research seeks to understand the complex mechanisms behind the pronounced association between social and educational inequalities, by looking at how individual, household, neighbourhood characteristics and national institutional characteristics intersect with each other to reproduce inequalities.
We will analyse a variety of outcomes beyond educational attainment, such as cognitive development, the transitions to primary and secondary school and teacher assessments of children’s dispositions and skills. In addition, our research explores the life-courses of resilient individuals from less-advantaged social backgrounds. By conducting this latter study, we aim to identify potential enabling factors which allow certain people to break the vicious circle of the social reproduction of inequality.
Our current research projects on educational inequalities are listed below. These link closely with our research on Socio-Economic, Employment, Well-being, Gender and Age inequalities.