Parental Social Class and Filial School Level Educational Outcomes in Contemporary Britain: Analysis of Understanding Society and Administrative Data

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Despite changes in the education system, children from less advantaged social classes (for example those with parents in routine, semi-routine and manual occupations) still have far less favourable educational outcomes. The proposed research project will build on existing research to develop the sociological understanding of the relationship between parent's social class and their children's school level educational attainment through a secondary analysis of Understanding Society (the UK Household Longitudinal Study) and administrative educational data.There are a number of notable data limitations for studying the relationship between social class and educational outcomes. The discontinuation of large-scale studies such as the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales leaves a gap in the data portfolio. The Longitudinal Study of Young People in England is a single cohort of children born in the early 1990s and therefore the data on school educational outcomes is dated. The participants in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) are moving towards the end of their school-based education and the emerging data will be valuable. The MCS is also a single cohort of children born between 2000/2 and at the current time there are no concrete plans to collect another birth cohort.An increasing amount of administrative data is becoming available for social science research, for example school examination results. The levels of accuracy and the breadth of coverage in these data resources is advantageous. A limitation of administrative educational datasets is that important background measures relating to the pupil and their family are usually absent. Researchers will routinely rely on very simplistic measures of social background such as free school meals, or area based indicators of social deprivation. Whilst these measures are associated with poverty they are very poor proxies for social class, and they are a long way from providing a sophisticated representation of the social class structure in contemporary Britain.The proposed research directly addresses the existing data related limitations. We will undertake a secondary analysis of Understanding Society. These data include detailed information on children, their parents and their households. This will be combined with official administrative data (from the National Pupil Database) to investigate the contemporary relationship between social class and school educational outcomes. Understanding Society data includes a wealth of detailed measures on the child's mother and father, and on the wider household. The design of Understanding Society is special because information on step-parents and non-resident parents is also collected. This is unique and is likely to make a distinctive contribution to better understanding children's circumstances in contemporary Britain.There are a number of approaches to measuring social class and Understanding Society contains the information required to produce a wide array of measures. The most established measures used in the study of educational inequalities in the UK are occupation based measures, and occupations have long been considered as the most important single indicators of economic and social positions. Recently this perspective has been questioned, and a new measure of social class has been developed that is based on measures of individuals' economic, cultural and social resources. The detailed study of these resources has the potential to offer new insights into the processes which lead to educational inequalities. In this study we propose to use the rich data within Understanding Society to evaluate capital and resources based approaches to social class alongside existing occupation based social class measures. This will provide an innovative analysis of the relationship between parental social class and children's school level educational attainment in contemporary Britain.