The concealed middle? An exploration of ordinary young people and school GCSE subject area attainment

Abstract

The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is the standard qualification undertaken by pupils in England and Wales at the end of year 11 (age 15–16). GCSEs continue to play an important and central role in young people's educational and employment pathways. Within the sociology of youth, there has been recent interest in documenting the lives and educational experiences of ‘ordinary’ young people. In this paper, we analyse school GCSE attainment at the subject area level. This is an innovative approach and our motivation is to explore substantively interesting patterns of attainment that might be concealed in analyses of overall attainment or attainment within individual subjects. We analyse data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales using a latent variable approach. The modelling process uncovered four distinctive latent educational groups. One latent group is characterised by high levels of overall attainment, whereas another latent group is characterised by poor GCSE performance. There are two latent groups with moderate or ‘middle’ levels of GCSE attainment. These two latent groups have similar levels of agglomerate attainment, but one group performs better in science and the other performs better in arts GCSEs.

Keywords:

• educational attainment
• GCSE
• missing middle
• sociology of youth
• youth cohort study of England and Wales
• latent class models

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christopher Playford http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6069-4898

Vernon Gayle http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1929-5983

Notes

1. See http://www.education.gov.uk/childrenandyoungpeople/youngpeople/qandlearning/a0074953/review-of-vocational-education-the-wolf-report.

2. Volume 18(1) 2013.

3. Hansen and Vignoles (2005), UCAS (2014) and Kogan (2015) provide an extended account of British qualifications in an international context which some readers may find informative.

4. See also http://www.educationuk.org/global/articles/16-and-under-subjects-qualifications/

5. More recently, School league tables have included the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) which is a performance indicator linked to GCSEs and measures the percentage of pupils in a school who achieve grades A*–C in English, Mathematics, sciences, a foreign language and either history or geography (see https://www.gov.uk/english-baccalaureate-information-for-schools).

6. The A* grade was introduced after the pupils in YCS 6 completed their Year 11 GCSEs. When constructing a measure of GCSE attainment that spanned the introduction of the A* grade Yang and Woodhouse (2001) adopt the strategy of awarding 7 points to both grades A* and A.

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

8. We also note that Meyer (2011) provides evidence that a large proportion of pupils achieve results spanning at most two grades regardless of the number of GCSEs that they undertake. This further persuades us that a binary measure is appropriate for the analysis.

9. For a full discussion of this measure see Edwards and Edwards (1984).

10. The models were estimated using LEM (Vermunt 1997).

11. See Payne, Payne, and Heath (1994).

12. The results of this model are available on request.

13. 1–4 GCSEs at A–C grades p = .10; No GCSE passes p = .73. The full results of this model are available on request.

14. See Written Statement to Parliament 9th April 2014 Education Secretary Michael Gove's statement about the publication of reformed GCSE and A’ level content (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/gcse-and-a-level-reform?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=statement-to-parliament-gcse-and-a-level-reform) and Department for Education (2010).

15. See http://www.aqa.org.uk/supporting-education/policy/gcse-and-a-level-changes/structure-of-new-gcsesandexamchange.org.uk.