Selective schooling and social mobility in England

Franz Buscha, Emma Gorman and Patrick Sturgis

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We assess whether changing from an academically selective to a comprehensive schooling system promotes social mobility, using England as a case study. Over a period of two decades, the share of pupils in academically selective schools in England declined sharply and differentially by area. Using a sample of census records matched to data on selective schooling, we exploit temporal and geographic variation in the proportion of pupils attending selective schools to estimate the effects of schooling system on intergenerational social mobility. Our results provide no support for the contention that the move from selective to comprehensive schooling had a notable effect on social mobility in England. The findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity and robustness checks.

Keywords: social mobility; selective schooling; grammar schools; Grammar schools; Selective schooling; Intergenerational mobility; Social mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 J18 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Labour Economics, 1, April, 2023, 81. ISSN: 0927-5371

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/118341/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

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:ehl:lserod:118341

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().