The effects of school social mix: unpacking the differences

Abstract

Whether school composition makes a difference for student outcomes has been the subject of much controversy. This article draws on Growing Up in Ireland data, a rich source of information on nine-year-old children along with the characteristics of their school and classroom teacher. In contrast to many studies which rely on a single measure of social background, the use of a range of measures (including social class, parental education and income) allows us to provide precise estimates of differences in performance between schools designated as disadvantaged and other schools. The analyses also provide new insights into the processes underlying such differences. Only the most disadvantaged schools, those in Urban Band 1, are found to have a contextual effect for both reading and mathematics. This achievement gap is found to reflect differences in teacher experience and turnover, the concentration of additional learning needs, absenteeism levels and children's engagement in school.

Keywords:

• school social mix
• primary education
• academic performance

Notes

1. The three categories of disadvantaged schools are Urban Band 1, Urban Band 2 schools and rural disadvantaged schools. Urban Band 1 schools have higher concentrations of disadvantage than Urban Band 2 schools, and the former receive greater resources.

2. There are over 3500 primary schools in Ireland.

3. The issue of weighting multivariate analyses or not has been the subject of much debate. We follow Solon, Haider, and Wooldridge (2013) in not using weighting in the multilevel modelling since we control for the factors (location, social background etc.) which are associated with differential non-response.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: Growing up in Ireland has been funded by the Government of Ireland through the Department of Children and Youth Affairs; have been collected in accordance with the Statistics Act, 1993. The DCYA, CSO and DSP take no responsibility for the views expressed in this article. The project has been designed and implemented by the joint ESRI-TCD Growing Up in Ireland Study Team. © Department of Children and Youth Affairs.