Young people and school General Certificate of Secondary Education attainment: looking for the ‘missing middle’

Abstract

In Britain, educational qualifications gained at school continue to play an important and central role in young people’s educational and employment pathways. Recently there has been growing interest in documenting the lives of ‘ordinary’ young people. In this paper we analyse the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales in order to better document the experiences of those with ‘middle’ levels of school General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) attainment. The overall pattern of school GCSE attainment is one of increasing levels of performance. GCSE attainment is still highly stratified. Girls performed better than boys, and there were some marked differences in attainment for pupils from the main minority ethnic groups. Most notably, parental socio-economic positions are the most important factor. The analyses fail to persuade us that there are clear boundaries that demark a ‘middle’ category of school GCSE attainment. We conclude that sociologists should study ‘ordinary’ young people; however, school GCSE attainment is best understood as a continuum, and measures such as the number of GCSEs or point scores are preferable.

Keywords:

• youth transitions
• sociology of youth
• educational attainment
• General Certificate of Secondary Education
• missing middle
• Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales

Notes

1. Sociological Research Online, 2013, volume 18. An introduction to this special issue is provided by Roberts and MacDonald (2013).

2. This point is made clearly on the Edexel website:

http://www.edexcel.com/i-am-a/student/qualifications/Pages/GCSEs.aspx.

3. The National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) scheme is the official UK measure. A thorough methodological description of this measure is provided by Rose and Pevalin (2005). A practical guide to the use of this measure is available online (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/classifications/current-standard-classifications/soc2010/soc2010-volume-3-ns-sec--rebased-on-soc2010--user-manual/index.html). The following is a list of examples of an occupation for each of the NS-SEC categories to assist a reader that is unfamiliar with this classification scheme: 1.1 Large Employers and Higher Managerial Occupations – General Managers; 1.2 Higher Professional Occupations – University Teachers; 2 Lower Managerial and Professional Occupations – Secondary School Teachers; 3 Intermediate Occupations – Medical Secretaries; 4 Small Employers and Own Account Workers – Builders / Building Contractors; 5 Lower Supervisory and Technical Occupations – Bricklayers; 6 Semi-routine Occupations – Store Keepers; 7 Routine Occupations – Cleaners.

4. We do not report the full output of this model, which contains identical explanatory variables to the multinomial logistic regression models reported above. The full output is available from the authors upon request.

5. See http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/performance/secondary_11/PointsScoreAllocation2011.pdf.

6. More recently, some official statistics are capped at the level of the best eight GCSEs. Other alternative approaches have been employed; for example, Haque and Bell (2001) convert GCSE attainment into numerical scores (grade A* = 8, grade A = 7 … grade U = 0) and calculate a mean GCSE score for each pupil. They chose this approach because they believe this helps to prevent discrimination against pupils who have taken fewer GCSEs as a result of their school’s internal policy. Similarly we can envisage the use of other summary measures of overall attainment; for example, median scores. Ideally, we would pursue sensitivity analyses of additional alternative GCSE attainment measures, but such measures cannot be derived from data deposited with the SN5765 dataset.

7. General Certificate of Education Ordinary Levels, and Certificates of Secondary Education.