AQRiE Seminar - Examining social inequalities in GCSE results: comparing administrative and survey data
Join us for the first AQRiE Hub seminar of the academic year! Professor Vernon Gayle (University of Edinburgh) will discuss social inequalities in English schools.
Abstract: The talk examines pupils’ GCSE outcomes using recent data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study and the National Pupil Database (joint work with Dr Sarah Stopforth and Dr Roxanne Connelly). The study models social inequalities in GCSE outcomes and compares sociological social class measures collected by the survey data with socio-economic proxy measures from the administrative data. The central empirical finding is that there are marked social class inequalities in school GCSE outcomes. Pupils growing up in families in the less advantaged social classes have less favourable school GCSE outcomes. The proxy socio-economic measures from the NPD are indicators of poverty and they have less explanatory power than the sociological social class measures that are collected by the MCS survey. Therefore we conclude that inequalities in GCSE outcomes are not simply the result of poverty or deprivation. We advocate that sociological measures of social class should be used in analyses because they are better at capturing the nuanced nature of social inequalities in school GCSE results.
Speaker: Professor Vernon Gayle is Chair of Sociology and Social Statistics in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His research uses large-scale survey and administrative datasets, especially longitudinal data, to study social stratification.
Location: Hybrid — Charteris Land 5.02 & Microsoft Teams (login details will be sent once your registration is complete.)
In case of enquiries, please contact: kristina.lindemann@ed.ac.uk.
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