Exploring the ‘middle’: School GCSE attainment and ordinary young people

Abstract

In Britain educational qualifications gained at school continue to play an important and central role in young people’s educational and employment trajectories. Recently there has been a growing interest in documenting the lives of ordinary young people. In this paper we analyse the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales in order to better document the experiences of those with ‘middle’, or moderate, levels of school GCSE attainment. We find that the overall pattern of school GCSE attainment is one of increasing levels of performance over time. In general girls performed better than boys, and there were some marked differences in attainment for pupils from the main minority ethnic groups. A striking result is the impact of parental socio-economic positions and other variables associated with the young person’s home background. We conclude that sociologists of youth should study ‘ordinary’ young people and moderate, or unspectacular, levels of educational attainment. The analyses suggest that school GCSE attainment is best understood as a continuum. There was no persuasive evidence that there is a distinctive ‘middle’ group of young people with moderate levels of school GCSE attainment. This concurs with our earlier analysis of data from the British Household Panel Survey.

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ORCID for Teresa McGowan: orcid.org/0009-0002-9231-3743

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