Parental Social Class and Filial School Level Educational Outcomes in Contemporary Britain: Analysis of Understanding Society and Administrative Data
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Sch of Social and Political Science
Abstract
Despite changes in the education system, children from less advantaged social classes (for example those with parents in routine, semi-routine and manual occupations) still have far less favourable educational outcomes. The proposed research project will build on existing research to develop the sociological understanding of the relationship between parent's social class and their children's school level educational attainment through a secondary analysis of Understanding Society (the UK Household Longitudinal Study) and administrative educational data.
There are a number of notable data limitations for studying the relationship between social class and educational outcomes. The discontinuation of large-scale studies such as the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales leaves a gap in the data portfolio. The Longitudinal Study of Young People in England is a single cohort of children born in the early 1990s and therefore the data on school educational outcomes is dated. The participants in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) are moving towards the end of their school-based education and the emerging data will be valuable. The MCS is also a single cohort of children born between 2000/2 and at the current time there are no concrete plans to collect another birth cohort.
An increasing amount of administrative data is becoming available for social science research, for example school examination results. The levels of accuracy and the breadth of coverage in these data resources is advantageous. A limitation of administrative educational datasets is that important background measures relating to the pupil and their family are usually absent. Researchers will routinely rely on very simplistic measures of social background such as free school meals, or area based indicators of social deprivation. Whilst these measures are associated with poverty they are very poor proxies for social class, and they are a long way from providing a sophisticated representation of the social class structure in contemporary Britain.
The proposed research directly addresses the existing data related limitations. We will undertake a secondary analysis of Understanding Society. These data include detailed information on children, their parents and their households. This will be combined with official administrative data (from the National Pupil Database) to investigate the contemporary relationship between social class and school educational outcomes. Understanding Society data includes a wealth of detailed measures on the child's mother and father, and on the wider household. The design of Understanding Society is special because information on step-parents and non-resident parents is also collected. This is unique and is likely to make a distinctive contribution to better understanding children's circumstances in contemporary Britain.
There are a number of approaches to measuring social class and Understanding Society contains the information required to produce a wide array of measures. The most established measures used in the study of educational inequalities in the UK are occupation based measures, and occupations have long been considered as the most important single indicators of economic and social positions. Recently this perspective has been questioned, and a new measure of social class has been developed that is based on measures of individuals' economic, cultural and social resources. The detailed study of these resources has the potential to offer new insights into the processes which lead to educational inequalities. In this study we propose to use the rich data within Understanding Society to evaluate capital and resources based approaches to social class alongside existing occupation based social class measures. This will provide an innovative analysis of the relationship between parental social class and children's school level educational attainment in contemporary Britain.
There are a number of notable data limitations for studying the relationship between social class and educational outcomes. The discontinuation of large-scale studies such as the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales leaves a gap in the data portfolio. The Longitudinal Study of Young People in England is a single cohort of children born in the early 1990s and therefore the data on school educational outcomes is dated. The participants in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) are moving towards the end of their school-based education and the emerging data will be valuable. The MCS is also a single cohort of children born between 2000/2 and at the current time there are no concrete plans to collect another birth cohort.
An increasing amount of administrative data is becoming available for social science research, for example school examination results. The levels of accuracy and the breadth of coverage in these data resources is advantageous. A limitation of administrative educational datasets is that important background measures relating to the pupil and their family are usually absent. Researchers will routinely rely on very simplistic measures of social background such as free school meals, or area based indicators of social deprivation. Whilst these measures are associated with poverty they are very poor proxies for social class, and they are a long way from providing a sophisticated representation of the social class structure in contemporary Britain.
The proposed research directly addresses the existing data related limitations. We will undertake a secondary analysis of Understanding Society. These data include detailed information on children, their parents and their households. This will be combined with official administrative data (from the National Pupil Database) to investigate the contemporary relationship between social class and school educational outcomes. Understanding Society data includes a wealth of detailed measures on the child's mother and father, and on the wider household. The design of Understanding Society is special because information on step-parents and non-resident parents is also collected. This is unique and is likely to make a distinctive contribution to better understanding children's circumstances in contemporary Britain.
There are a number of approaches to measuring social class and Understanding Society contains the information required to produce a wide array of measures. The most established measures used in the study of educational inequalities in the UK are occupation based measures, and occupations have long been considered as the most important single indicators of economic and social positions. Recently this perspective has been questioned, and a new measure of social class has been developed that is based on measures of individuals' economic, cultural and social resources. The detailed study of these resources has the potential to offer new insights into the processes which lead to educational inequalities. In this study we propose to use the rich data within Understanding Society to evaluate capital and resources based approaches to social class alongside existing occupation based social class measures. This will provide an innovative analysis of the relationship between parental social class and children's school level educational attainment in contemporary Britain.
Planned Impact
We are confident that this project can achieve both social science excellence and high impact outside of academia. The proposed project will deliver benefits to non-academic knowledge users and non-academic researchers.
The substantive aim of the proposed research is to provide an informed evidence base addressing the influence of parental social class on filial educational outcomes. This new evidence on educational inequalities will be of interest to policy makers, the third sector, the media and the general public. The dissemination of the substantive outputs of this research will result in conceptual impact by increasing awareness of the nature of educational inequalities.
Policy Makers and Third Sector Organisations
In the 2017 Green Paper 'Building Our Industrial Strategy', the government highlights the need to build a stronger, fairer Britain that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. Central to the Industrial Strategy is increasing levels of economic competitiveness through improving education. The proposed research will make a distinctive and impactful contribution to better understanding the relationships between family background and school educational outcomes, and speaks directly to a number of strands within the Industrial Strategy.
The proposed research will provide evidence on the extent to which different elements of parent's lives and jobs influence their children's educational attainment. This will be relevant to those seeking to build evidence based policies to tackle educational inequalities. The new empirical evidence provided by the proposed project will make an important contribution by providing information that is directly relevant to our understanding of social inequalities, the processes of social stratification, and social mobility. Potential knowledge users who will benefit from this new substantive evidence include third sector organisations concerned with social inequalities (e.g. the Social Mobility Foundation, the Sutton Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation). This new evidence will also be relevant to government researchers and policy makers for compiling evidence reviews and policy documents relating to education, inequalities and social mobility.
Schools, Teachers and Young People
The proposed research will be of value to teachers working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. This research will inform teaching professionals by highlighting those factors which contribute to improved educational outcomes amongst disadvantaged young people. This will benefit schools in the pursuit of improving the educational outcomes of disadvantaged young people. The outputs of this project, particularly the graphical illustrations of our key findings, can also be used as novel teaching aids to facilitate the discussion social inequality with young people themselves.
The General Public
Through sharing the substantive outputs of this project with the general public we will make a contribution to the conceptual understanding of educational inequalities in contemporary Britain.
Non-Academic Social Science Researchers
Non-academic researchers will benefit from our training workshop in the use of Understanding Society data for research in the fields of education, families and social inequality. Understanding Society data has a complex design and sampling strategy, which enables a range of specialised analyses. The challenge of using Understanding Society data is that standard data analysis techniques do not take into account the complexity of the design and selection strategy. This presents an obstacle for many non-academic social science researchers. Complex survey designs are increasingly common, for example the Millennium Cohort Study is also a complex sample. Therefore providing training to non-academic researchers through the proposed workshop will have wider applications and will broaden the user base of Understanding Society and other ESRC data investments.
The substantive aim of the proposed research is to provide an informed evidence base addressing the influence of parental social class on filial educational outcomes. This new evidence on educational inequalities will be of interest to policy makers, the third sector, the media and the general public. The dissemination of the substantive outputs of this research will result in conceptual impact by increasing awareness of the nature of educational inequalities.
Policy Makers and Third Sector Organisations
In the 2017 Green Paper 'Building Our Industrial Strategy', the government highlights the need to build a stronger, fairer Britain that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. Central to the Industrial Strategy is increasing levels of economic competitiveness through improving education. The proposed research will make a distinctive and impactful contribution to better understanding the relationships between family background and school educational outcomes, and speaks directly to a number of strands within the Industrial Strategy.
The proposed research will provide evidence on the extent to which different elements of parent's lives and jobs influence their children's educational attainment. This will be relevant to those seeking to build evidence based policies to tackle educational inequalities. The new empirical evidence provided by the proposed project will make an important contribution by providing information that is directly relevant to our understanding of social inequalities, the processes of social stratification, and social mobility. Potential knowledge users who will benefit from this new substantive evidence include third sector organisations concerned with social inequalities (e.g. the Social Mobility Foundation, the Sutton Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation). This new evidence will also be relevant to government researchers and policy makers for compiling evidence reviews and policy documents relating to education, inequalities and social mobility.
Schools, Teachers and Young People
The proposed research will be of value to teachers working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. This research will inform teaching professionals by highlighting those factors which contribute to improved educational outcomes amongst disadvantaged young people. This will benefit schools in the pursuit of improving the educational outcomes of disadvantaged young people. The outputs of this project, particularly the graphical illustrations of our key findings, can also be used as novel teaching aids to facilitate the discussion social inequality with young people themselves.
The General Public
Through sharing the substantive outputs of this project with the general public we will make a contribution to the conceptual understanding of educational inequalities in contemporary Britain.
Non-Academic Social Science Researchers
Non-academic researchers will benefit from our training workshop in the use of Understanding Society data for research in the fields of education, families and social inequality. Understanding Society data has a complex design and sampling strategy, which enables a range of specialised analyses. The challenge of using Understanding Society data is that standard data analysis techniques do not take into account the complexity of the design and selection strategy. This presents an obstacle for many non-academic social science researchers. Complex survey designs are increasingly common, for example the Millennium Cohort Study is also a complex sample. Therefore providing training to non-academic researchers through the proposed workshop will have wider applications and will broaden the user base of Understanding Society and other ESRC data investments.
Organisations
| Description | This project is ongoing and there are seven months left until its completion. The key findings described below are preliminary and will develop over the next months. The overall research objective of the project is to deepen the sociological understanding of the relationship between parental social class and children's school educational outcomes in contemporary Britain using Understanding Society (the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study) and linked administrative educational data. We have undertaken analysis of social class inequalities in GCSE attainment using this data resource. 1) Historically, occupations and the occupational structure have been central to the sociological conception of class. However, more recently, an alternative theoretical basis for the measurement of social class has been popularized, largely influenced by Bourdieusian theory. We have applied a Bourdieusian approach to the study of social class inequalities in GCSE attainment using a rich source of linked administrative data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study. Our main conclusions were that there are a range of unresolved methodological issues when attempting to operationalise social class from a Bourdieusian perspective. When we compare the conclusions that can be drawn concerning educational inequalities using traditional occupation-based measures of parental social class and the new measures of social class we find that these measures largely overlap. There were no new additional insights evident when using the Bourdieusian measure. 2) Whilst analysing the linked UKHLS and administrative education data we have developed a deeper understanding of the nature of these data and its drawbacks. The linked individuals provide a relatively small sample size spanning multiple school year cohorts, and there are large amount of missing data. We have therefore augmented our analyses with research using additional large scale social survey and administrative data resources. 3) Our main substantive findings is that there are persistent inequalities in GCSE attainment. We have developed work which examines subject level inequalities in GCSE attainment and we propose a new approach to measuring GCSE outcomes which uses latent class analysis. We have also used administrative education data from Scotland to consider school level educational inequalities in comparative perspective. 4) Throughout the project we have also attempted to ensure that we produce and share our research in an open and transparent manner. We have shared our project materials openly using the Open Science Framework. We have also held several training workshops which have sought to share good practice in producing transparent social science research. This work uses existing social survey data as well as administrative data accessed via a secure lab. This presents unique challenges when undertaking transparent research. We have therefore sought to share these insights widely through our training events. The training events have been attended by postgraduate students, academics, third sector and government researchers. These events have led to requests for further information, and invitations to provide further training events on this methodological topic. |
| Exploitation Route | Substantively our findings document the persistent nature of social class inequalities in GCSE attainment. These findings should be useful to policy makers, third sector organisations and the general public. Re-asserting the continued relevance of occupation based measures of social class in the study of educational inequalities should be informative to policy makers and third sector organisations. The robust nature of social class inequalities despite the methods used to investigate the inequalities and the operationalisation of parental social class emphasise the intractable nature of this inequality. Methodologically, the work of this project will be of value to non-academic researchers. The research code used to produce the analyses in this project will be made freely available online. This will serve as a useful resource which will aid other researchers working in this field. We have provided workshops in research transparency and reproducibility which focus specifically on the analysis of Understanding Society data and linked administrative data. These workshops will be of value for developing the research practice of researchers working with these data resources. All of our training materials have been made accessible online and can be accessed widely by government, third sector and academic researchers, as well as students. We continue to develop these resources and continue to offer training and seminars to colleagues in academia and beyond based on the methodological developments of this project. |
| Sectors | Education,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| URL | https://osf.io/vgfnr/ |
| Title | Full Analytical Code for: Social class inequalities in educational attainment: measuring social class using capitals, assets and resources |
| Description | The full analytical code for the paper 'Social class inequalities in educational attainment: measuring social class using capitals, assets and resources' has been made available for the research community. This code involves many complex operations in data management and data analysis. This code will allow researchers to fully duplicate and replicate this work. It could also be developed to allow further analysis on educational inequalities using the UKHLS linked administrative data. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | One researcher has contacted me concerning this analysis. This resource has also been used as a teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students. |
| URL | https://osf.io/gyn57/ |
| Title | Skill Levels from SOC2000 |
| Description | A file has been made available to allow researchers to easily derive SKILL LEVELS FROM SOC2000 "SOC is designed as a classification applicable to all paid jobs performed by economically active persons in the United Kingdom. Defined as a set of tasks or duties to be carried out by one person, the notion of a job represents a basic element in the employment relationship. Jobs are usually structured by employers (or by the worker in the case of self-employment) and others, including professional bodies, employer and/or worker organisations and governments, may regulate their definition. Jobs are recognised primarily by the associated job title. They are classified into groups according to the concept of 'skill level' and 'skill specialisation'." (ONS 2000, p:4) There are four skills levels: Low, Lower Middle, Upper Middle, High In SOC2000, and its predecessor SOC90, skill level is defined with respect to the duration of training and/or work experience recognised in the field of employment concerned as being normally required in order to perform the activities related to a job in a competent and efficient manner. This derivation of skill levels for SOC2000 is based on the documentation provided by ONS (2000) Office for National Statistics (2000). Standard Occupational Classification Volume 1: Structure and Descriptions of Unit Groups. London: Office for National Statistics. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Two researchers have contacted me about this resource and the skill measure. They have been provided with the reference. |
| URL | https://osf.io/yrb3k/ |
| Description | The social class position of complex modern families in Understanding Society. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The social class position of complex modern families in Understanding Society March 22, 2021 An enduring issue when measuring parental social class is how best to represent households (see Erikson, 1984). Dual earner families are now widespread and non-traditional family structures are common. A distinctive advantage of the household focus of Understanding Society is that it collects data from non-resident parents and from adults who join the household (e.g. new partners and step-parents). The purpose of this research is to explore whether information from a wider range of parental figures can be used to more effectively represent the social class position of children and young people in contemporary families. In this paper, we examine a synthetic cohort based on Understanding Society household members those who completed the youth questionnaire in the first wave of the study. We explore the patterns of response among non-resident and newly resident parents. Based on this exploratory analysis we consider the potential for including additional parental figures in household measures of social class to be used in studies of inequalities in childhood and youth. This paper will also demonstrate the use of tools (e.g. Jupyter Notebooks) and principles (e.g. literate programming) which offer the opportunity to maximise the transparency and reproducibility of research using Understanding Society. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/2021/02/11/changing-families-conference-registration-now-open |
| Description | Youth Data, Past, Present and Future |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | University of Edinburgh Childhood and Youth Studies Research Group Seminar This seminar series will bring together researchers from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences- University of Edinburgh, who are researching with children and young people. The seminar series welcomes all researchers interested in the field. In alignment with participatory methods, our intention is that these seminars will be lively, interactive events, with opportunities for group discussion and connecting with other researchers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.ed.ac.uk/education/rke/our-research/children-young-people/childhood-and-youth-studies-re... |