Cristina Iannelli

Mapping gender and social background differences in education and youth transitions across Europe

This paper uses data drawn from the European Union Labour Force Survey 2000 Ad Hoc Module on School to Work Transitions to explore the influence of gender and social background (measured in terms of parental education) on young peoples educational and early labour market outcomes across 12 European countries. Our results show that social background is strongly related to the level of education achieved while gender is found to have a stronger effect on the field of study selected. Countries vary in the extent to which gender and social background affect young peoples outcomes. Gender differentiation in labour market outcomes reflects the nature of the welfare regime, being more pronounced in familial and conservative systems. Social inequality in educational attainment and early labour market outcomes are less marked in Finland and Sweden, reflecting the combination of less differentiated educational systems, mass higher education and social–democratic welfare regimes. In contrast, social inequality is more marked in the Eastern European countries, due partly to their highly differentiated educational systems but more notably to rapid changes taking place in post-communist systems.

Social class and educational attainment: a comparative study of England, Wales and Scotland

This article examines variations among England, Wales, and Scotland in the association between social origin and educational attainment and the role that different national educational policies may have played in shaping these variations. The findings show that country variation in the association between origins and attainment was mostly or entirely due to variations in overall levels of attainment. Moreover, inequality was the highest where the proportions attaining a particular threshold were the highest—upper secondary school or higher in Scotland. The authors propose a refinement of Raftery and Houts theory of maximally maintained inequality that takes into account that the trajectory of inequality is not linear: inequality can widen in the initial phase of expanding opportunity, en route to an eventual contraction, because the most advantaged groups are the first to exploit any new opportunities that policy changes offer. The results show that country differences in educational policy have not yielded different changes over time in the association between origin and educational attainment.

The role of the school curriculum in social mobility

This paper focuses on the role of curricular content on social mobility, an issue largely neglected by social mobility studies. Using data from the National Child Development Study we investigate the extent to which secondary school curricula account for social class differences in the chances of entering into the service class and avoiding a low-skilled occupation. The results show that curriculum matters in the acquisition of different social classes of destination but it matters more for children from advantaged social backgrounds than for children from lower classes of origin. This is because of their higher propensity to choose subjects such as languages, English, mathematics and science, which were found to be highly valued in the labour market. Moreover, net of the effect of origin class and individual ability, all or most of the advantage associated with attendance at selective schools is accounted for by the curriculum studied there.

Scottish higher education, 1987–2001: expansion through diversion

A pressing question about the expansion of higher education is whether it tends to be inclusive, in the sense of bringing in larger proportions of persons from disadvantaged backgrounds, or diversifying, in that higher education tends to differentiate as it expands, or both, by bringing more persons into an increasingly stratified system of higher education. This paper addresses the question with evidence on higher education expansion in Scotland. Data are drawn from six waves of the Scottish School Leavers Survey from the late 1980s to the start of the new millennium. Binary and multinomial logit models are estimated to examine changes in inequality during this period, which was characterised by substantial expansion in both secondary qualifications and postsecondary enrolment. The results show that, in contrast to the general pattern of stable inequality observed in most nations, overall social inequalities in Scottish higher education enrolment declined over time. However, this decline did not occur in all sectors but was limited to the lowest-status institutions. These findings illustrate how expansion can serve both inclusive and diversifying ends.

Trends in participation and attainment of Chinese students in UK higher education

The UK higher education system receives the second largest number of Chinese overseas students in the world. The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data used in this study show that the total number of Chinese graduates (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels) increased from around 6000 at the beginning of the twenty-first century to more than 20,000 in 2009. This paper addresses the issues of whether and how patterns of participation and attainment of Chinese graduates have changed over the last decade. The findings show that (1) increasing proportions of Chinese students graduate from the Russell Group universities; (2) alongside subjects such as science, engineering and business, a growing popularity of social science among Chinese students is emerging; (3) compared to home students and other international students, Chinese first-degree graduates persistently achieve lower attainment levels. The conclusions highlight possible explanations for these patterns and directions for future research.

Patterns of Absolute and Relative Social Mobility: a Comparative Study of England, Wales and Scotland

We use the British Household Panel Study to analyse change over birth cohorts in patterns of social mobility in England, Scotland and Wales. In several respects, our conclusions are similar to those reached by other authors on the basis of wider comparisons. There has been a large growth in non-manual employment since the middle of the twentieth century. This led first to a rise in upward mobility, but, as parents of younger people have now themselves benefited from that, has more recently forced people downward from their middle-class origins. These changes have largely not been a growth in relative social mobility: it is change induced by the occupational structure. The conclusions apply both to current class and to the class which people entered when they first entered the labour market. The patterns of relative mobility could not be explained statistically by measures of the respondents’ educational attainment. The conclusions were broadly the same for the three countries, but there was some evidence that in the youngest cohort (people born between 1967 and 1976) experience of people from Wales was diverging from that of people from England and Scotland, with rather greater amounts of downward mobility. There were two methodological conclusions. Out-migration from country of birth within the UK did not seem to make any important difference to our results. That is encouraging for analysis of surveys confined to one of the three countries, because it suggests that losing track of out-migrants would not distort the results. The second methodological conclusion is that the comparative study of social mobility can find interesting topics to investigate at social levels lower than that of the state, here the comparison of the three countries which make up Britain.

Social mobility in Scotland since the middle of the twentieth century

Extensive mobility between class of origin and class of destination has been a characteristic feature of societies in Europe and North America since the middle of the twentieth century. Most mobility has been upward, and most of that has been explicable by occupational change – by the rise in the proportion of the labour force which works in service-class jobs and the decline in the proportion in manual jobs. This pattern may now be changing, because parents of younger cohorts (people born since the 1960s) have themselves benefited from upward mobility and so there is less scope for further up ward movement by their off spring. The paper uses a large new data source for Scotland to investigate these topics. It finds that there is still a great deal of mobility, and that, although upward mobility still predominates, its amount is lower in younger cohorts than in older. Nevertheless, relative mobility has not changed as upward mobility has declined, just as in earlier studies it was found not to have changed as upward mobility rose. These patterns are similar for men and women.

Educational Expansion and Social Mobility: The Scottish Case

For over a century, the goal of reducing class inequalities in educational attainment has been based at least in part on the belief that this would help to equalise life chances. Drawing upon the main findings of three ESRC-funded projects, this paper reviews the empirical evidence on trends in social class inequalities in educational attainment and the role of education in promoting social mobility in Scotland. The findings show that in the second half of the twentieth century, despite the increase in overall levels of attainment, class differences in educational attainment persisted. Educational policies in Scotland supported educational expansion which allowed larger numbers of working-class children to climb the social class ladder than in the past. However, these did not translate into any break with the patterns of social inequalities in the chances of entering the top-level occupations. The conclusions highlight that educational policies on their own are not powerful enough to change patterns of social mobility which are mainly driven by labour market and social class structures.

Expansion and social selection in education in England and Scotland

This paper examines trends in social class inequalities in young people’s educational attainment and HE entry between the mid‐1980s and the end of the 1990s in England and Scotland. Using time‐series data derived from the Scottish School Leavers Surveys and the England (and Wales) Youth Cohort Study, changes in both absolute and relative social class differences within and across the two countries were analysed through the use of a series of ordered logits. The results show that Scotland has higher educational attainment rates but also higher social class inequalities than England. Moreover, while in England social class inequalities at upper‐secondary and tertiary level have declined over time, in Scotland no evidence of such trend has been found. The conclusions highlight that possible explanations for these patterns reside in the different features of the two education systems and in the remarkable educational success of the Scottish middle class.

Inequalities in school leavers’ labour market outcomes: do school subject choices matter?

Abstract Despite a wide international literature on the effect of vocational and general education on school-to-work transition, relatively little is known about the role of having studied specific subjects in explaining inequalities in young people’s labour market outcomes. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining differences in employment chances of young people who left education early, either at the end of compulsory schooling or at the end of secondary school. Using data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study, a large-scale linkage study created using data from administrative and statistical sources, we found little gender differences but strong parental background differences in school leavers’ employment status and type of occupation entered. Social inequalities in labour market outcomes were only partly explained by curriculum choices. Moreover, after controlling for social origin and grades, only history and business for lower-secondary leavers and maths for upper-secondary leavers were associated with a reduction in the chances of being unemployed/inactive.