REFERENCE No.
End of Award Report
The Formation and Transmission of Educational Values and
Orientations
R000239963
1. Background
The research is concerned with the way in which young people develop their
orientations to education through the five years of compulsory secondary schooling
and how these orientations result in the outcomes of public examinations taken at the
end of compulsory schooling and the decision whether or not to remain in education
post-16. One context for the research is the inter-generational transmission of
social, economic and educational characteristics. All studies of social structure and
social change, in the UK and elsewhere in the developed world, show very
considerable patterns of continuity between the socio-economic situation of parents
and their adult children. In particular, patterns of advantage and disadvantage
associated with employment status and educational qualifications tend to be
predictable across generations. (Eg. Halsey, Heath and Ridge, 1980; Marshall,
Rose, Newby and Vogler, 1997). The study is therefore concerned with the family
location of the young people studied and the relationship between various
characteristics of parents and the attitudes, attainments and choices of their children.
In common with other studies in the sociology of education the research reported
here is concerned with the continuity in relative patterns of advantage and
disadvantage. However, it is also important to recognize the extent of the change in
absolute levels of educational participation and desirable employment outcomes. It
can be argued (eg. Goldthorpe, 1996) that explanations of the continuation of relative
advantage fail to take account of the substantial shift in overall outcomes. The
research was, therefore, also concerned to study the trajectories into educational
success and educational participation of young people from all kinds of backgrounds.
A particular focus in this context is the very considerable change in the educational
situation of young women over the past quarter century. The increase in participation
and achievement of young people generally has been particularly dramatic in the
case of females
A further context for the study is the concern that a minority of young people become
progressively disenchanted with and disengaged from schooling during the years of
secondary school and that these negative attitudes to schooling are reflected in a
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failure to remain in education post-16. Early exits from the education system are
typically associated with limited career prospects and other restricted life chances.
At the extreme are young people who are not in education, training or employment
post-16 for whom virtually all social and economic indicators show long-term
negative outcomes (Social Exclusion Unit, 1999).
2. Objectives
The objectives in the proposal were as follows:
1. To use the British Household Panel Survey to analyse the educational trajectories
of young people in terms of their educational values and orientations and
qualifications and other outcomes at 16 and beyond. This has remained a central
objective and has been addressed through longitudinal analysis of the young people
year by year as they move through the secondary school and then into postcompulsory education or non-educational outcomes. The results section gives
details of these trajectories and shows the value of a longitudinal analysis in
demonstrating that trends at aggregate level are sometimes made up of very varied
patterns for individual young people.
2. To use the BHPS to study the family and household in terms of a typology (homeeducation environments) of their educationally relevant characteristics within which
the young people are located. This objective was achieved through analysis of the
main survey data on the parents of the young people in the survey. Family
environments could be characterized in terms of occupational characteristics (eg. the
Goldthorpe scale of social class), educational characteristics (levels of parental
qualifications) and various measures of within family and extra-family social capital.
Analysis showed the considerable variety of family characteristics both in terms of
characteristics of different family members and the inter-relationship of different
variables for the family as a whole. It was therefore not appropriate to construct a
typology in the sense of categories in which families could be located and the
analysis has focused on continua of educationally relevant characteristics relating to
economic, cultural and social capital within families.
3. To analyse the educational and employment outcomes of different trajectories and
to relate these to different home-education environments. This objective was
achieved through linking the parental data from the main survey to their children’s
data from the young person survey and also linking the young person interviews to
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the post-16 data when they join the main survey. The analysis shows the
relationship between family characteristics and educational outcomes and patterns of
continuities in which socio-economic advantage and disadvantage are reproduced.
However, they also show the variety of educational outcomes for people from all
social circumstance and the absolute upward shift in educational aspirations and
performance. The superior performance of young women is was almost as strong an
explanatory factor for educational performance as social background.
4. To focus on young people who disengage with education both pre and post 16 and
to analyse the consequences of such disengagement and its relationship to
educational trajectories and home environments. This objective was achieved
though the analysis of the sub-set of data from young people who had left education
at 16 and a comparison of these young people and others. The sub-set of ‘leavers’
was a diverse one and the distinction between those who had left school for
employment and those who were unemployed was at least as strong as the
distinction between leavers and those still in education.
5. To engage with wider social science concerns about the reproduction of social
and educational status and the interactions of social and familial constraints and
personal choice in social and educational outcomes. The results of this study repeat
the well-established continuity of relative advantage in social reproduction. However,
they also show the increased extent of desirable outcomes for young people of all
backgrounds, the way that many young people make choices that could not have
been predicted from their family circumstances and the substantial change in the
participation and achievement of women, which means that gender can be seen to
exert almost as strong an influence on educational outcomes as traditional measures
of social class. These results show that the effects of individual agency cannot be
discounted, while recognising that such agency is exercised in circumstances not of
the individual’s choosing.
3. Methods
The research is based on secondary analysis of the British Household Panel Survey,
an extensive research resource which has gathered information on the same 5500
households containing 10,000 people over the age of 16 every year since 1991.
Since 1994 the survey has also gathered information on a sample of young people
aged between 11 and 15 in these households. This makes it possible to relate the
views and experiences of young people to characteristics of the families in which
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they grow up. The analysis here uses as its original data sources:
a) Seven waves of the Young Person Survey conducted from 1994 to 2000. Sample
sizes ranged from 773 to 749 and 1832 young people were interviewed on at least
one occasion.
b) The equivalent seven waves of the main survey containing information on the
parents of the young people in the Youth Survey.
c) Seven waves of the main survey from 1995 to 2001 providing information on the
young people immediately after they had left the Youth Survey and joined the main
survey at the age of 16.
These data files in the Survey Archive were then re-constituted by the research team
as follows:
a) A single file of all the 5278 interviews conducted over the seven years of the
Youth Survey with data matched from the main survey interviews with the mothers
and fathers of the young people. This is a pooled file in which a particular individual
may be present up to five times. Within this file there are two sets of sub-files, one
based on the Wave and including individuals interviewed at a particular point in time,
and the other based on school year and including individuals interviewed at the same
point in their school career. Each young person can only appear once in each subfile.
b) A file containing the data from (a) above for the 763 young people who came to
the end of compulsory schooling while part of the survey and joined the main survey
at the age of 16. Data on qualifications and education or employment status have
been matched from their first (or in some cases second) adult interview.
c) A file of the 1832 young people who were interviewed at last once over the seven
waves of the survey. Each case contains data for selected variables on each
occasion the young person was interviewed. This is the file used to identify change
at an individual level and to plot the trajectories of individual young people.
Secondary analysis is an efficient use of research resources but also involves certain
difficulties. These were partly technical issues connected with the size and
complexity and the data set and the need to re-constitute the data set around
families, school years and individual trajectories.
Much more important than these technical issues, however, were issues of data
coverage and of the conceptualization of variables. Inevitably in secondary survey
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analysis there were questions we should have liked to be asked and questions which
were only asked in a small number of waves. In particular, there is no coverage of
young people’s feelings about the curriculum and there were no questions to parents
about their educational and other aspirations for their children.
4. Results
4.1 Young people’s attitudes to school
One of the major issues to be addressed in the study was that of the nature of young
people’s attitudes to school, the relationship between these attitudes and educational
outcomes and the way in which these attitudes develop over time. Early analysis
showed no substantial or systematic differences across the different waves of the
survey and the discussion here will focus on changes associated with age and with
individual development. A fuller account of some of this analysis is given by Croll
and Moses (2004).
We focus her on three aspects of attitudes to school: the value they place on school
(‘How much does it mean to you to do well at school?’), their relationships with
teachers (‘Teachers are always getting at me’) and their intentions with regard to
post-compulsory education (Do you want to leave school when you are 16?’).
A central finding from this analysis is that young people are overwhelmingly positive
about the value of school. Over 95% of the young people gave positive answers to
this question with little change as the young people moved through school. As with
most studies of young people and schooling girls were more positive than boys but
this difference was small. When the analysis considered the trajectories of individual
children it was apparent that, while a positive value for school tended to be stable,
negative responses to the value of school were much more changeable over time
with very little, if any, evidence of young people becoming progressively locked into
negative attitudes. Of the 535 young people interviewed on at least four occasions,
none failed to give at least one positive response and less than three per cent failed
to give at least three positive responses. There was also a lack of continuity in
negative responses among the older respondents who are at a point in their school
careers when anti-school sub-cultures are sometimes thought to develop.
These results match those of other large scale surveys of attitudes to school such as
that of Keys and Fernandes (1993) and give little support to the concern that a
‘substantial minority’ of young people lack interest in education (National Commission
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on Education, 1993) or the very negative account of young people’s experience of
secondary education given by Cullingford (2002).
Although young people are positive about the value of school, they are not as
uniformly positive about their teachers and negative feelings increase as the young
people get older. In their first year in secondary school 17% agreed that ‘Teachers
are always getting at me.’, and this figure increased to 24% when they were in Years
10 and 11. Unlike responses to the value of school, analysis of individual trajectories
shows some evidence of the development of poor relations with teachers which
become persistent, especially in the later years of compulsory schooling. Of the 240
young people who were asked this question on four occasions only two per cent
were always negative but 10% were negative on three or more occasions. Amongst
older respondents, 58% of those who were negative in Year 10 were also negative in
Year 11. The way that negative attitudes towards teachers are more extensive and
more consistent than negative attitudes to the value of school and education is
consistent with the findings of Attwood, Croll and Hamilton’s (2003) study of young
people who had disengaged from school.
One of the key contexts in which the research is located is the concern over the early
exit of a substantial minority of young people from the education system. Of the
young people who came to the end of compulsory schooling during their participation
in the survey, 28% moved out of education at 16. At an individual level young people
have much firmer intentions with regard to staying on than leaving. Of the 666 young
people asked about staying in education on at least four occasions over half always
said they would stay while only two per cent always said that they would leave.
However, early intentions have a considerable predictive power with regard to actual
behaviour. Of the young people who said they planned to stay on when they were in
their first term of secondary schooling nearly four-fifths actually did so. Of those who
said they planned to leave two-thirds actually did so.
A sense of the prevalence of positive and negative trajectories with regard to
education can be found in the co-occurrence of responses to the questions about
leaving school and valuing education during the last two or three years of compulsory
schooling. Of the 480 young people interviewed in Years 9, 10 and 11, 43% gave
positive answers to both questions on all three occasions. Of the 622 young people
interviewed in Years 10 and 11 this figure was 50%. The equivalent figures for
young people giving uniformly negative responses (ie. not valuing education and
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planning to leave) were 0.4% and 1.4%. This suggests that between 40% and 50%
of young people can be seen as on a very positive educational trajectory while the
remainder are on a continuum of more mixed feelings about education and their
educational futures. Virtually none of the young people are on an unambiguously
anti-education path.
4.2 Young people’s feelings about their lives
In addition to information about school and education the young people in the survey
were asked a variety of questions about many aspects of their lives including
relationships with parents and friends, aspects of leisure pursuits and feelings about
themselves and their lives. Only the family-related variables, which are particularly
relevant to this study will be discussed here.
An important feature of the survey data is the way they show the centrality of families
to young people’s lives and the value they place on family relationships. This is
significant both with regard to the way the current analysis is concerned with the
transmission of family characteristics and also in relation to wider social science
debates over individualization and the relationship between the individual and wider
social groupings. Beck’s assertion that ‘the individual is becoming the basic unit of
social reproduction for the first time in history’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, xxii)
may have a resonance with regard to larger social groupings such as classes but the
evidence in this study is that individual have certainly not lost family attachments and
families continue to be a crucial agent of social reproduction.
Families were usually very important to young people, are their main source of
support and were generally experienced very positively. Well over ninety per cent
were positive when asked how happy they were with their family and almost sixty per
cent described themselves as ‘completely happy’. This parallels other UK evidence
such as that of Ball, Maguire and Macrae (2000) who noted how important families
were to young people, including young people who were in some respects at odds
with their families. It is also similar to evidence from the USA that,
‘Teenagers…perceive their parents in a more positive light than the literature on
adolescence suggests.’ (Schneider and Stevenson, 1999, 142).
4.3 The Family as a social and educational environment
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The family has always had a central place in the sociology of education. Early
studies of the relationship between socio-economic origins and educational and
employment destinations focused on the family as the source of social background,
usually determined by the occupation of the male head of household (eg. Halsey et
al, 1980). More recent studies have focused more only families as actors and have
been concerned with attitudes and behaviour of families as well as occupational
status. Such behaviours include rational decision making (Breen and Goldthorpe,
1995) and the extensive studies by Ball and his colleagues of families in London as
they act as educational strategists negotiating their paths through the minefields of
educational choices and deploying a range of resources on their children’s behalf
(eg. Ball, 2003). These studies of strategy and decision making are heavily focused
on social class differences. In contrast, a number of studies in the United States
focus more on the internal dynamics of the family than on structural issues and show
parents acting as mentors to guide and support their children’s educational careers
(eg. Schneider and Stevenson, 1999). A fuller discussion of families and education
is given by Croll (2004a).
In this report we are concerned with three aspects of the family as an educationally
relevant environment and as a potential source of orientations to education and
influences on attainment and participation. These can be characterized as economic
capital as measured by occupation and income, cultural capital as measured by
educational qualifications and social capital as measured by different kinds of social
relationships [1].
A long standing issue in class analysis is that of whether the individual or the family
should be the unit of analysis and, related to this, which family member should be
seen as determining the family’s social class. Clearly, in a study of young people of
school age, the young person cannot have a socio-economic status based on their
occupation and some determinant has to be found of the socio-economic status of
their families. The study used what is now a generally accepted procedure of the
‘dominance’ approach whereby the parent in the higher class category provides the
measure of family class or socio-economic circumstances. Of course this procedure
results in an upward bias in social location. Where data are available for both
parents there is a considerable measure of diversity in the occupational locations of
different household members. Only in 44% of cases were the father and mother in
the same category of the Goldthorpe scheme and in eight per cent of cases one was
in the service class and the other in the working class. A further difficulty is with
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regard to the classification of the 16% of young people for whom there was no family
occupational data, usually because neither parent was in employment. These figures
show that, while it is possible to locate most families on the Goldthorpe Scale, to do
so disguises considerable variation in the occupational situation of family members.
As would be expected, both measures of socio-economic status are associated with
income. The average household income of service class families was almost double
that of working class families. If only those families which can be classified on the
Goldthorpe scale are included in the analysis then 47 per cent of families are service
class, 37 per cent intermediate class and 16 per cent working class. The very high
service class figure and the low working class figure reflect both the upward shift
which the dominance approach to class categorization involves and the way that the
Goldthorpe scheme cannot classify families where no one is in employment. If we
assume that such families are very likely to be disadvantaged and include them in
the working class category the figures become: service class, 40%; intermediate
class, 31%; and working class, 29%.
A key element of the family as an educational environment is the level of education
attained by other family members. The dominance approach was again used and
the level of family education was taken to be that of the best qualified parent. As with
the socio-economic classification, the comparison of qualification levels within a
family showed considerable variation. In 40% of cases where data from both parents
were available they had the same qualification level. But in 23% of cases there was
a gap of two or more qualification levels. About a quarter of young people were in a
family with at least one higher education qualification, a fifth were in a family with at
least one A level type of qualification and a third were in a family with a 16 year old
qualification. One in five were in families where no one held an educational
qualification.
The third aspect of the family environment to be considered is that of social capital:
patterns of relationships both within and outside the family. The within family
variables used as a measure of social capital were parental monitoring of homework
and both the parents’ and the child’s account of how often they talked about
‘something that mattered to them’. The outside family indicators were membership of
and involvement in voluntary organizations, voting in the last election and
participation in religious activities. A fuller discussion of social capital and the social
capital measures is given by Croll (2004a).
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Parents reported high levels of monitoring homework (71% regularly, 26%
occasionally) and talking (59% most days, 25% more than once a week). The young
people were less sure that they communicated with their parents but nevertheless
half said that they talked about something that mattered to them more than once a
week. Organisational and religious involvement was more varied. Over a third of
parents were not active in any organsisations while 14% were active in three or
more. Less than a quarter of parents attended religious services once a month or
more.
What was apparent was that the within family measures were inter-related and the
outside family factors were inter-related but that the two sets of variables did not
relate to one another (Croll, 2004a). Monitoring homework, parents reporting talking
to the young person and the young person reporting talking to parents were all
positively associated. Membership of organizations, activity within them, religious
involvement and voting were all positively related. Moreover the outside family social
networks were related to trusting other people in the way predicted by Putnam and
Coleman. They were also positively related to parental socio-economic status,
income and qualifications. In contrast the within-family indicators did not relate to
other measures of family background: monitoring homework and parent-child
communication occurred at similar levels in all sorts of families.
4.4 Family background and educational outcomes
A starting point for the analysis of family background and educational outcomes is
the comparison of GCSE results and staying on rates for different groups of young
people. In Table 2 (Appendix) young people have been classified as coming from
families of middle class (service class in the Goldthorpe scheme), intermediate and
working class occupational categories. The more advantaged the class position the
more favourable the outcomes, with, for example, a gap of 28 percentage points
between working class and service class young people with regard to gaining five or
more GCSE passes at C or above and a gap of 26 percentage points for these two
groups in staying on rates. Similar differences occur with regard to families with
different levels of educational qualifications (Croll and Moses, 2004). Measures of
social capital were also found to be related to educational outcomes. Young people
from families where parents monitored homework closely and with higher levels of
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parent-child communication had more favourable outcomes. Young people from
families who were members of voluntary organizations and took part in community
activities such as attending religious services also had more favourable outcomes
(Croll, 2004a). Organisational and community participation were related to
occupational class and education but these relationships did not entirely explain the
association with achievement and participation. In contrast, the within family social
capital measures are not related to parental qualifications or occupational categories
but are also associated with higher rates of GCSE passes and staying on (Croll,
2004a).
Although social class is strongly related to educational outcomes, this relationship is
considerably modified by the effects of gender presented in Table 3 (Appendix).
In line with current trends in gender differences in education, outcomes for females
were much more positive than those for males and transcended social class
differences. Both with regard to examination results and staying in education,
intermediate class females had better outcomes than service class males and
working class females had better outcomes than intermediate class males.
It is also apparent that there is an overall upward shift in qualifications between
generations. Nearly 40% of young people from working class families achieved five
or more good GCSE scores and nearly 60% stayed in education. Among young
people from families where neither parent had any qualifications, a half passed at
least one GCSE with a good grade and the same proportion stayed in education
post-16.
4.5 Characteristics of early leavers
Twenty-eight per cent of the young people left school at the age of 16. Nearly 60%
of these young people left with no GCSE grades of C of better although 14% had five
or more GCSEs. Some characteristics of these young people compared with the
majority who stayed in education are presented in Table 3 (Appendix). As would be
expected from the earlier analysis the early leavers were disproportionately male
(66%), and disproportionately from less advantaged backgrounds (eg. only 10% from
the top income quartile). They were also less positive about school than the young
people who stayed on. However, it should also be noted that the early leavers were
not an extreme or uniformly disadvantaged sub-set of the sample. Over a fifth were
of service class origins and the lowest income quartile is only slightly overrepresented. When they were interviewed in their final year at school almost 90 per
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cent said that doing well at school was important to them and almost half said that
they planned to stay on post-16. They were, though, a good deal more negative
about their teachers than other pupils and were more likely to have truanted,
although only 10% had done so often. They were also three times as likely to smoke
as those who stayed in education.
Table 3 also compares the characteristics of young people who left education for
employment with those who were unemployed. The unemployed young people are
the group most unlike the rest of the sample. They are particularly unlikely to be from
service class backgrounds, families from the lowest income quartile are heavily overrepresented, and they are particularly likely to have been truants (they are twice as
likely as those in employment and twenty times as likely as those who stayed on to
have often truanted in years 10 and 11).
The data on income quartiles reflects another result from the research relating to
family income and the decision to stay in education (Croll, 2004b). The average
family income of the young people staying in education is a good deal higher than
that of those leaving. This raises the possibility that it is financial pressure and the
need to contribute to family income that pushes some young people out of education.
However, perhaps surprisingly, among working class and intermediate class families
there is no difference in average family income between those staying in education
and those leaving. It is only within the service class that there is an income
differential with lower incomes among the leavers. The data on unemployed young
people shows that they are disproportionately from the poorest families in the study,
but they have not left school for paid employment.
4.6 Summary and implications
Key findings of the study include:
a) Negative educational trajectories are very much less consistent than positive ones:
while almost half the young people are uniformly positive virtually none are uniformly
negative.
b) Young people are more positive about the value of school than they are about
relationships within it, in particular relationships with teachers.
c) Families are a central and mostly very satisfactory aspect of young people’s lives
and offer them a variety of economic, cultural and social resources.
d) Although class differences continue to be an influence on educational outcomes,
this is qualified by the way in which young women from less advantaged groups out-
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performed young men from more advantaged ones and the fact that young people
from all groups had more positive outcomes on average than their parents.
These results show the value of this unique longitudinal and inter-generational
analysis. It also shows that less satisfactory educational trajectories are highly
changeable and may therefore be susceptible to educational interventions to make
successful outcomes available to all young people. They also show that the effects
of the socio-economic situation of families is only one of the factors influencing
outcomes and that educational success has been achieved by young people from all
kinds of backgrounds, especially young women, and including young people whose
families are in disadvantaged educational and occupational situations.
5. Activities
Papers were given at conferences of ISER, BERA, ECER and AERA. Professor
Croll has contributed sessions on panel studies and longitudinal analysis to the
training programme of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programe
Research Capacity Building Network and an ESRC / BERA Multidisciplinary
Research Workshop. Recently we have been holding meetings with the DfEE
Improving Behaviour and Attendance Division where those aspects of the study
concerned with disaffection and truancy are proving valuable.
6. Outputs
Publication will be mainly through a book, Educational Trajectories to be published by
Sage and through journal articles. No new data have been created by the project but
the re-constituted data files could be used by other researchers to facilitate analysis
of BHPS.
7. Impact
The research will impact on the study of young people and education through a
better understanding of the nature of orientations to school, the many different ways
that families can make a difference to educational outcomes and the circumstances
in which young people make their educational decisions. Of particular interest are a)
the relative uncertainty and inconsistency of negative educational trajectories in
contrast to more positive ones; b) the very high level of value placed on school by
young people contrasted with the more varied and sometimes negative accounts of
relationships with teachers. These results have implications for educational
interventions to improve attainment and participation.
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It is also hoped that the study will contribute to the work of the DfEE Improving
Behaviour and Attendance Division through incorporation of some of the insights
from the research into training materials.
8. Future Research Priorities
A number of the outcomes of the study should be pursued using a longer term
perspective to consider the experience of early adulthood and any re-engagement
with learning of the young people who have followed the different trajectories
described here. A further priority for study is the nature and consequences of the
secondary school curriculum. It has not been possible to consider curriculum issues
in the research reported here because of the limitations of BHPS. The response of
young people to the curriculum, their perceptions of its aims and value and the extent
to which different aspects of the curriculum act to engage or disengage different
young people are key questions for current concerns over 14-19 educational
provision.
Notes
1. a) The analysis presented here has used the three category version of the
Goldthorpe Scale which categorises occupations into service, intermediate and
working class and is probably the most widely used scheme used in sociological
analysis. It has been used here, in part, to facilitate comparisons with other research.
The complexity of family socio-economic situations revealed here has raised some
doubts about the continuing relevance of categorical schemes and their labels.
Further analysis, outwith the project reported here is considering the implications of
different approaches to socio-economic classification (for a preliminary discussion
see Croll, 2004a).
b) Data from the parent interviews give the highest level of educational qualification
attained by each parent. These have been categorised into: higher education
qualifications, qualifications generally taken at around the age of 18 (mostly A levels),
qualifications generally taken at the age of 16 and no qualifications.
c) The idea of social capital is complex and contested but depends on the idea that
social relationships and the personal networks they create are a resource which can
be used to create outcomes that are valued. In this way they parallel other forms of
capital in having productive capacity. For Coleman, one of the key authors of this
concept (eg. 1988, 1990), the most educationally relevant form of social capital is
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within-family relationships and relationships closely associated with the family.
However, Coleman also writes of a wider notion of social capital which involves
community involvement and community relationships; sets of ideas which are also
associated with the work of Putnam (2000) who has shown how, at aggregate level
within the United States, high levels of community involvement are associated with,
inter alia, desirable educational outcomes. A further conceptualization of social
capital is that of Bourdieu (eg. 1980). Unlike Coleman and Putnam who see social
capital as conceptually distinct from other forms of capital Bourdieu sees it as
intrinsically related to other forms of capital and as part of the mechanism by which
the advantages conferred by economic and cultural capital are accessed and
amplified. An important feature of the social capital as described by Coleman and
Putnam is that it is democratic. It is, at least potentially, much more widely spread
than other forms of capital: strong family relationships, involvement in organizations,
religious participation and so on are available to all. Moreover it is entirely non –zero
sum: one person’s social capital is not at the expense of others but enhances that of
others. (See the discussion in Croll, 2004a)
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Croll, P. and Moses, D. (2004) Young People’s Trajectories into Post-compulsory
Education and Training. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, San Diego.
Cullingford, C. (2002) The Best Years of their Lives? Pupils’ Experience of School.
London: Kogan Page.
Goldthorpe, J. (1996) Class Analysis and the Re-orientation of Class. British Journal
of Sociology 47. 3 481-505.
Halsey, A. H., Heath, A. and Ridge, J. (1980) Origins and Destinations: Family, Class
and Education in Modern Britain Oxford: Clarendon Press
16
REFERENCE No.
Keys, W. and Fernandes, C. (1993) What do students think about school? Slough:
NFER.
Marshall G, Rose, D, Newby H and Vogler C. (1997) Social Class in Modern Britain
London: Hutchison.
National Commission on Education (1993) Learning to Succeed, London:
Heinneman.
Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American
community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Schneider, B and Stevenson, D. (1999) The Ambitious Generation New Haven:
Yale University Press
Social Exclusion Unit (1999) Bridging the Gap, London: Stationary Office.
TABLE 1
YOUNG PEOPLE’S FEELINGS ABOUT SCHOOL BY AGE
AND GENDER : SUMMARY TABLE
Year 7
Year 8
Year 9
Boy Girls All
Boy Girls All
Boy Girls All
Boy
s
s
s
s
94.8 98.1 96.4 96.1 97.3 96.7 95.8 96.6 96.2 93.0
How much does
it mean to you to
do well at
school?
% Positive
N=
461
465
926
464
452
916
472
416
888
454
How happy are
you with your
school work?
% Positive
76.6
85.8
81.2
78.7
84.6
81.6
79.6
84.5
81.9
80.7
N=
538
543
544
514
498
82.8
88.5
68.8
75.6
67.4
71.1
104
6
69.1
550
% Positive
105
8
72.2
548
I like most of my
teachers
108
1
85.8
66.0
N=
302
323
625
304
315
619
316
277
563
300
% Positive*
83.1
93.5
88.5
80.3
87.6
84.0
75.2
81.5
78.1
72.3
N=
301
323
624
305
314
619
314
276
590
300
Don’t know
22.1
22.0
22.0
21.5
18.6
20.1
19.2
14.7
17.0
16.9
Leave
14.1
7.7
10.9
11.4
7.9
9.7
13.0
7.1
10.2
13.8
Stay on
63.8
70.3
67.1
67.1
73.4
70.2
67.9
78.2
72.8
69.2
N=
539
542
108
1
544
516
106
0
548
496
104
4
549
Teachers are
always getting at
me
Plans Post 16
17
REFERENCE No.
* Positive here means disagreeing with the statement.
TABLE 2. Educational Outcomes, Socio-Economic Status and Gender
a)
% 5 or more GCSE grades A - C
SES
Service
Gender
b)
Male
58
Intermediat
e
30
Working
All
N
28
41
320
Female
74
62
46
60
312
All
66
46
38
50
632
N
299
231
102
% Staying on post - 16
SES
Service
Gender
Male
77
Intermediat
e
58
Female
92
80
73
81
312
All
84
69
58
72
632
N
299
231
102
18
Workin
g
39
All
N
64
320
REFERENCE No.
TABLE 3.
Characteristics of Early Leavers in and out of Employment
(Figures are percentages)
Gender
SES
Income
Intention in
Year 11
Male
Female
Service
Working
Top
quartile
Bottom
quartile
Stay
Leave
All Students
Stay PostLeave Post16
16
45
66
55
34
46
22
11
20
29
10
21
30
Leavers
Employe Unemploye
d
d
70
67
30
33
22
17
19
25
16
2
28
42
89
4
48
33
51
24
38
50
Value School
Positive
Negative
98
3
87
13
89
11
80
20
Worry about
bullying
A lot
A bit
4
27
5
17
6
12
2
24
Like Teachers
Agree
75
57
57
63
Teachers are
always getting
on at me
Agree
16
43
38
52
Truancy
Often
1
10
6
21
3
12
8
21
Smoking
Sometime
s
Regularly
11
30
31
38
548
214
N
19
128
48