Academic achievement gaps by migration background at school starting age in Ireland

ABSTRACT

In today’s increasingly diverse societies, a key question is how to foster the structural integration of immigrants and their descendants. While research indicates that migrant educational underachievement is a serious issue, relatively little is known about achievement gaps at younger ages and in relatively new immigration countries. The current study sets out to estimate the size of disparities by migration background at age five (i.e. when they start school) and explores the causes of these gaps. It does so in a context that offers a compelling but under-researched case: the Republic of Ireland. It draws on the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) data, a national longitudinal study of children in Ireland. The results suggest that some disparities by migration background already existed at the start of primary school, but also that gaps were limited to verbal skills and differed widely across groups. Moreover, social background only played a relatively minor role in explaining the differences, whereas the child’s first language was a powerful predictor of disadvantages by migration background in verbal skills.

EDITED BY:

• Mathieu Ichou

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood
• achievement gaps
• migration background
• Growing Up in Ireland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While Irish and English are both official languages of Ireland, English is by far the most commonly spoken language. Moreover, the test assessing the study child’s verbal skills is conducted in English. Therefore, we have included Irish in other language spoken at home.

2 Because this is an important finding, which is at odds with much of the existing literature, we must be confident in it and make sure it is not driven by our choice to operationalise parental educational as a binary variable. Thus, we ran two additional models: One with a more detailed measure of parental education, and one with a measure of social class in addition to the more detailed parental education measure. Results were very similar to the results from the main analyses and can be found in the Supplementary Materials (Table S1a and S1b).

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) under the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme [Project ID: GOIPG/2019/4418]. The data used come from the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI). GUI is funded by the DCEDIY. It is managed by DCEDIY in association with the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Results in this report are based on analyses of data from Research Microdata Files provided by the CSO. Neither the CSO nor DCEDIY take any responsibility for the views expressed or the outputs generated from these analyses.

Notes on contributors

Stefanie Sprong

Stefanie Sprong is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her primary research interests lie in the field of interdisciplinary and comparative studies of the integration of immigrants and their descendants.

Jan Skopek

Dr. Jan Skopek is assistant professor at the Department of Sociology of Trinity College Dublin. His research activities are located in social stratification research, family research, social demography, quantitative social research methodology, longitudinal and cross-national research, as well as digital social research.