Child welfare clients’ first step away from higher education. The influence of school performances, educational aspirations and background factors on choosing the vocational track after compulsory school

Abstract

This article addresses the concern that the educational attainment of child welfare clients (CWCs) is generally poor. Drawing upon previous research showing that former CWCs lack higher education, this study argues that it is necessary to examine the first educational transition that directs students away from higher education. In Norway, this first transition point occurs in the transition from lower secondary school to the vocational track in upper secondary school. This educational transition is studied by means of analysis of longitudinal survey data on youths in Oslo. The sample consists of 1500 teenagers in Grade 10 in lower secondary school and in the second year of upper secondary school, of whom about 5% had had contact with child welfare services. The results show that CWCs’ high enrolment on the vocational track – and consequently away from higher education – cannot be understood only from the characteristics that previous research has reported as general explanations for the differences in educational transitions. Even though the results show that school performances, educational aspirations and background factors like parental education and sex had an impact on the probability of vocational secondary education, the probability of CWCs choosing the vocational track was still higher than with their peers. Consequently, to increase the transitions of CWCs to the academic track in upper secondary school, and thereby hopefully to higher education, specific measures for the CWCs are required. This article also discusses whether professionals should advise CWCs against the vocational track.

Keywords:

• child welfare clients
• higher education
• vocational education
• school performances
• educational aspirations

Acknowledgements

This article is part of the project qualification and social inclusion in upper secondary VET – longitudinal studies on gendered education and marginalized groups (Safety-VET) founded by the Research Council of Norway. I thank my colleagues at NOVA (the Department of Childhood, Family and Child Welfare Research and the Department of Youth Research) for useful comments on earlier drafts and the two anonymous reviewer of this journal for their constructive comments.

Notes

1. About one-third of vocational students choose to take the supplementary course of study. Recent research shows that only 56 per cent of these students completed the supplementary course, seven per cent dropped out and 37 per cent did not pass the exams (Markussen and Gloppen 2012).

2. Higher education in Norway is divided into universities, university colleges and private schools.

3. In the original first wave, about 4000 students were invited to participate and 59 per cent of them did so.

4. ‘Other’ parental education includes probably unknown parental education and education taken abroad, which the respondents find difficult to translate into the Norwegian educational system. In addition, ‘other’ includes parents with primary school (two per cent of the respondents’ had parents with primary school).

5. It is, however, necessary to emphasise that the descriptive statistics in Table 1 record the characteristics of the youths who had (thus far) succeeded in upper secondary school. The drop-outs (from lower secondary to upper secondary school or during the first year of upper secondary school) were excluded from Table 1. Analyses (table not shown) showed that the CWCs who only participated in the first wave (in the final year, Grade 10) and consequently most likely dropped out from school, aspired less to higher education, had poorer school grades and fewer originated from families with high parental education than the CWCs who also participated in the second wave. In the non-CWCs, the analyses showed minor and not statistically significant differences between youths who participated in only the first wave compared with youths who participated in both waves.

6. The logistic constant coefficient in Model 2 is −0.75 and the CWC coefficient is 0.82. The percentages in vocational studies for the two student groups are estimated by the following equation: e^x/1 + e^x, which gives: e^−0.75/1 + e^−0.75 = 0.32 (i.e. 32 per cent) and e^0.82−0.75/1 + e^0.82−0.75 = 0.52 (i.e. 52 per cent).