The effect of schools on school leavers’ university participation

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the role that schools have in determining whether school leavers participate in higher education or not. It examines the association between schools and university participation using a unique dataset of 3 cohorts of all young people leaving maintained schools in Wales. School “effects” are identified, even after controlling for individual-level factors, such as their prior attainment, socioeconomic circumstances, ethnicity, and special educational needs. Schools appear to have a particular “effect” on the likelihood that a young person enters an elite university. However, the findings suggest the concept of a school “effect” on higher education participation is not straightforward – schools appear to have different levels of effectiveness depending on the gender of the young people and the nature of their higher education participation. These findings are considered within the policy contexts of school effectiveness and widening access to higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• participation
• school effects
• multilevel model

Notes

1. Communities First areas have also had their own programme of activities, designed to tackle poverty in Wales.

2. It also included an important focus on looked-after children and care leavers, although the numbers of these have been considerably smaller than those from Communities First areas.

3. Using Bernstein’s (1975) theories of educational transmission.

4. This approximates 97.5% of all 15-year-olds in Wales, and excludes the 2.5% of 15-year-olds who attend an independent school.

5. Of these 110,535 students, 38,726 (35%) entered HE between 2007 and 2010 and 31,636 (29%) to do degrees.

6. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, there is a national qualifications framework for general and vocational qualifications. Qualifications are divided into Levels, indicating their relative size and difficulty. The higher the Level, the more difficult the qualification. General school-leaving qualifications in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland are Level 1 (e.g., GCSE grades D to G) or Level 2 (e.g., GCSE grades A* to C).

7. The membership of Russell Group universities can be found at: http://russellgroup.ac.uk/

8. This includes pupils with a Statement of special educational needs and pupils who have “school action” or “school action plus” (i.e., any pupil who receives additional support due to their learning difficulties).

9. We did not use the participation of local areas (POLAR) classifications because it was felt between the individual-level SES measures (FSM) and the neighbourhood-level SES measure (WIMD) this aspect of influence had been captured.

10. Data were available for Level 3 points scores (e.g., A Levels), but only for the HE participating population. As such, these can only be used in a limited way. We explored the association between Level 2 and Level 3 qualifications and higher education participation and found Level 2 points to be a better predictor of university entry, and that Level 3 qualifications have little additional relationship once Level 2 qualifications are used.

11. There is only one maintained sixth form college in Wales, so to maintain anonymity this is included with FE colleges.

12. The main alternative approach, using fixed effects models (and as used by Chowdry et al., 2013), is useful for controlling for cluster effects (such as schools) but may result in unstable estimates unless all cluster sizes are large, and does not provide the basis for further exploration of particular schools’ effects.

13. Cohort year is also included in the model, but the odds ratios are not presented in Table 3 or discussed. This is because earlier cohorts were more likely to have entered higher education by age 21 within the timescale of the analysis, which makes interpretation of these results meaningless.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under Grant [ES/K004247/1]; and with additional funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. We are also grateful for the support of the Welsh Government and the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for providing the data. The work was also undertaken with the support of The Centre for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement (DECIPHer), a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence [Grant MR/KO232331/1].

Notes on contributors

Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor is Professor of Education at Cardiff University and is the Cardiff Co-Director of the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods. Chris has published extensively on a wide range of educational issues and has undertaken research across all education sectors, from early years to higher education.

Caroline Wright

Caroline Wright is a Research Associate in the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol. Caroline is currently undertaking a programme of research concerned with engagement in multiple risk behaviours (MRBs) amongst adolescents using linked data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents & Children (ALSPAC).

Rhys Davies

Rhys Davies is a Research Fellow in the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods at Cardiff University. Rhys has undertaken a variety of research projects examining a variety of issues related to employment and the labour market. He is currently the Associate Director of the ESRC Wales Administrative Data Research Centre.

Gareth Rees

Gareth Rees is an Emeritus Professor in Cardiff University and was formerly the Director of the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods. Gareth has published extensively on sociological analyses of higher education and the social organisation of lifelong learning.

Ceryn Evans

Ceryn Evans is a Research Associate in the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods at Cardiff University. Ceryn has published on how social class and geographical place bear upon young people’s educational transitions. Ceryn is currently working on a research project exploring the role that graduates play in local civil society.

Stephen Drinkwater

Stephen Drinkwater is Professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Roehampton, London. He was previously a Reader in Economics at Swansea University, working closely with the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods. Stephen’s main research interests lie in applied micro-economics, particularly within the labour market.