Is household income a reliable measure when assessing educational outcomes? A Jigsaw of two datasets (Next Steps and National Pupil Database) for understanding indicators of disadvantage

ABSTRACT

Robust indicators are important for identifying disadvantaged pupils in education, and for ensuring that they are rightly receiving relevant state-funded assistance. This paper compares the quality and completeness of data from England on student eligibility for free school meals (FSM) based on an administrative census, with more all-encompassing household income measures, from a smaller sample of young people. The first measure comes from the National Pupil Database (NPD), and the second from Next Steps (NS). The two datasets are linked at the individual student level. In this restricted group, FSM data is more complete (97%) than household income (47%). The bias created by missing data on income in NS calls into question its more general usefulness for analysts. FSM cannot be read neatly from income, such as referring to an income below a certain level, and vice versa. Many reportedly low-income children are not listed as FSM-eligible. However, the two values are linked, while each also provides unique information. Both measures predict attainment at school, to some extent. The paper concludes that FSM is the more practical measure at present, but also considers how access to limited income data could be made more widespread while maintaining individual data rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Free school meals
• household income
• disadvantage
• administrative data
• Next Steps

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support in accessing the data from UK Data Service. The use of these data does not imply the endorsement of the data owner or the UK Data Service at the UK Data Archive in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the data. This work uses research datasets which may not exactly reproduce National Statistics aggregates.

Disclosure statement

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

Data citation

Centre for Longitudinal Studies. (2018). Next Steps: Sweeps 1–8, 2004–2016: Secure Access. 4th Edition. UK Data Service. SN: 7104, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7104-4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, grant number ES/N012046/1.