Parental social class and school GCSE outcomes: two decades of evidence from UK household panel surveys

Sarah Stopforth, Vernon Gayle and Ellen Boeren

Contemporary Social Science, 2021, vol. 16, issue 3, 309-324

Abstract: This paper investigates social class inequalities in English school qualifications. The analytical focus is pupils’ outcomes in General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs). The original aspect of this paper is the operationalisation of data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), which facilitates analyses from 1991 to 2013. We observe a general trend of improved educational outcomes in more recent cohorts of school pupils, which is consistent with national results. The central empirical finding is that there is a persistent social class gradient. Pupils growing up in families in less advantaged social classes have less favourable school GCSE outcomes. This is especially concerning, because having fewer good GCSEs is likely to limit children’s participation in more advanced education and restrict their options in the labour market. Changes in the structure and content of GCSEs lead us to conjecture that sociological analyses of social class inequalities in school qualifications will continue to be important. We highlight the limitations of using administrative educational data, and we outline the data resources that would better facilitate the study of social class inequalities.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21582041.2020.1792967 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rsocxx:v:16:y:2021:i:3:p:309-324

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rsoc21

DOI: 10.1080/21582041.2020.1792967

Access Statistics for this article

Contemporary Social Science is currently edited by Professor David Canter

More articles in Contemporary Social Science from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().