DfE: Early identification of young people at risk of poor educational and labour market outcomes: the role of educational institutions

This study attempts to answer the following questions:
1. How do things like truancy, coming from a less affluent background, family breakdown and a range of other factors that pupils experience at school; lead to poor educational and labour market (employment and earnings) outcomes?
2. Do we see different impacts (for instance on the likelihood of securing good wages) when similar students attend different post-16 educational institutions, such as Further Education, Sixth Form College or School Sixth Form? Does it make any difference to a young person's prospects if they achieve the same level of qualification in these different institutions; and do we see children from rich and poor backgrounds making very different decisions from age 16 and above?
3. How accurately are we able to predict the employment and earnings outcomes for different students, using all the information on their background, learning and achievement in schools and colleges?

At its heart the project seeks to analyse and assess the educational and labour market pathways followed by the half of young people who do not pursue university level education, and therefore contributes to the government's social mobility agenda; emphasised by David Cameron as a key priority for government in his Oct 2015 conference speech. The research proposed here will be of key interest to government and the Social Mobility Commission charged by the government to address Britain's poor record on social mobility.

When we talk of social mobility, we are interested in the extent to which children born to poorer families can make the journey to high paid jobs and professional careers. More generally, a lack of social mobility is a situation where being born to poverty, riches or somewhere in between, means that you are likely to find yourself in the same position as your parents, no matter how hard you try and whatever your talents. Unfortunately, the evidence over recent decades has been that there is less social mobility in the UK than in other similar countries.

The administrative data we will use to carry out this study is routinely collected by the parts of government that collect taxes (HMRC), deal with unemployment support (DWP), are responsible for Further Education (BIS) and learning in schools (DfE). This is a very important and useful resource, as it has the potential to overcome some of the limitations we face when using surveys (not least that we observe all people in the relevant populations, not just a relatively small sample). However, it is a complicated process to link these datasets and a large part of this project will be taken up with this process of linking.

As well as finding out what impact truancy has on a young person's performance at school, up to the age of 15 when they get their GCSE results (and results from other equivalent qualifications); we will try to find out if this truancy continues to have an impact even when they leave school. Consider another example: we will shed new light on the extent to which disadvantaged young people, with a good set of educational choices facing them at age 15, are seen to make 'bad' choices; when compared to their more advantaged peers, facing the same choice sets. Similarly, the study will shed light on the choices made by young people from age 16+ who are from more advantaged backgrounds, who we see facing a more limited set of educational choices at 15; and how these differ to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds facing the same limited choices.

Pathways to Policy Impact: As the current study develops, Prof. Urwin and Prof. Gregg will use their continuous engagement with policy colleagues across BIS, DWP and DfE to ensure the work described in this submission remains policy relevant; and that the findings are disseminated widely across policy communities. More specifically, over the lifetime of the project, the accompanying letters of support suggest access to relevant policy colleagues, who we would engage with, to feed into the research questions being tackled. We would expect to begin production of outputs around five months into the project, following initial matching of NPD-ILR-HESA data. We will receive support in the form of organisation and hosting of cross-departmental events, as outputs are developed. During the initial 5 months of the project we will discuss the work with Resolution Foundation colleagues; and then design events and outputs that would be supported by the foundation over the remaining months and beyond.

Pathways to Practice Impact: The work described in this submission will benefit from Prof. Urwin's continual engagement with practitioner bodies, such as the 157 Group, Federation of Awarding Bodies, CIPD and Holex. In addition to these bodies, we would additionally attempt to engage with colleagues from the Association of Colleges, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, the Learning and Work Institute, the Education and Training Foundation, the Headteachers' Roundtable, the Career Development Institute, OFSTED and the main teaching unions - possibly in the first instance, via invitations to an event hosted by the Resolution Foundation.

Prof Urwin is currently advising Skills Development Scotland on how Scottish educational datasets might be used to carry out the sort of analysis we have carried out for England; and Dave Thomson has worked on production of post-16 value added indicators for schools and FE in Wales. We will use these links to ensure that our research findings have impact beyond the geographical focus of data analysis, which will be NPD cohorts of young people in England. In addition, Prof. Urwin and Prof. Gregg have presented at OECD Global Forums in recent years; colleagues at Westminster are currently working on parts of the European Qualifications Framework; and Prof Gregg has written on issues of unemployment for the OECD and EU. As the work develops we will engage with our various contacts in these international bodies to ensure that the work has impact beyond the UK.

A key aim of the research is identification of impacts from pupil background characteristics on performance, but also choices made through the post-compulsory education system. As well as alerting policy and practice communities to the results of this research, we will communicate messages to young people and their families, via a range of media.

Administrative data communities: DfE, in partnership with DWP and BIS, are currently undertaking a process of data matching across the datasets that form the focus of this study; and our programme of work takes this into account. Datalab currently host the NPD User Group and Dave Thomson is the UK's recognised NPD expert; Thomson developed the ILR-WPLS matched database currently used by BIS [developing the majority of underpinning scripts]; and also the ILR-WPLS-NPD-LMS data held by DWP. As the work on data matching progresses, we will engage with a variety of data users and the team would aim to create an ILR User Group, that would consider issues across these various datasets (also feeding into DWP's WPLS user group).