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The concealed middle? An exploration of ordinary young people and school GCSE subject area attainment

The concealed middle? An exploration of ordinary young people and school GCSE subject area attainment
The concealed middle? An exploration of ordinary young people and school GCSE subject area attainment
In Britain school examination results are now an annual newsworthy item. This recurrent event illustrates, and reinforces, the importance of school level qualifications. The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is the standard qualification undertaken by pupils at the end of year 11 (age 15-16). GCSEs continue to play an important and central role in young people’s educational and employment pathways. Within the sociology of youth there has been recent interest in documenting the lives and educational experiences of ‘ordinary’ young people.

There are many analyses of agglomerate (i.e. overall) school GCSE attainment. More recently attention has been focused on individual GCSE subjects. In this paper we analyse school GCSE attainment at the subject area level. This is an innovative approach and our motivation is to explore substantively interesting patterns of attainment that might be concealed in analyses of overall attainment, or attainment within individual subjects.

We analyse data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales using a latent variable approach. The modelling process uncovered four distinctive latent educational groups. One latent group is characterised by high levels of overall attainment, whereas another latent group is characterised by poor GCSE performance. There are two latent groups with moderate or ‘middle’ levels of GCSE attainment. These two latent groups have similar levels of agglomerate attainment, but one group performs better in science and the other performs better in arts GCSEs.

Pupils study for multiple GCSEs which are drawn from a wide menu of choices. There is a large array of possible GCSE subject combinations, and results in individual GCSE subjects are highly correlated. The adoption of a latent variable approach is attractive because it handles the messy nature of the data whilst not trivialising its complexity. The paper demonstrates that a latent variable approach is practicable with large-scale social survey data, and is appealing for the analysis of more contemporaneous cohorts.
2042-4116
51
ESRC Centre for Population Change
Gayle, Vernon
6f166435-39d9-43a2-babd-f5daaf6ae898
Playford, Christopher James
c9b123ab-6597-434b-88b6-c07ff0ed7ce6
McGowan, Teresa
4524e894-04de-4822-8508-f4b966e12ae2
Gayle, Vernon
6f166435-39d9-43a2-babd-f5daaf6ae898
Playford, Christopher James
c9b123ab-6597-434b-88b6-c07ff0ed7ce6
McGowan, Teresa
4524e894-04de-4822-8508-f4b966e12ae2

Gayle, Vernon and Playford, Christopher James , McGowan, Teresa (ed.) (2014) The concealed middle? An exploration of ordinary young people and school GCSE subject area attainment (ESRC Centre for Population Change Working Paper, 51) Southampton, GB. ESRC Centre for Population Change 30pp.

Record type: Monograph (Working Paper)

Abstract

In Britain school examination results are now an annual newsworthy item. This recurrent event illustrates, and reinforces, the importance of school level qualifications. The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is the standard qualification undertaken by pupils at the end of year 11 (age 15-16). GCSEs continue to play an important and central role in young people’s educational and employment pathways. Within the sociology of youth there has been recent interest in documenting the lives and educational experiences of ‘ordinary’ young people.

There are many analyses of agglomerate (i.e. overall) school GCSE attainment. More recently attention has been focused on individual GCSE subjects. In this paper we analyse school GCSE attainment at the subject area level. This is an innovative approach and our motivation is to explore substantively interesting patterns of attainment that might be concealed in analyses of overall attainment, or attainment within individual subjects.

We analyse data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales using a latent variable approach. The modelling process uncovered four distinctive latent educational groups. One latent group is characterised by high levels of overall attainment, whereas another latent group is characterised by poor GCSE performance. There are two latent groups with moderate or ‘middle’ levels of GCSE attainment. These two latent groups have similar levels of agglomerate attainment, but one group performs better in science and the other performs better in arts GCSEs.

Pupils study for multiple GCSEs which are drawn from a wide menu of choices. There is a large array of possible GCSE subject combinations, and results in individual GCSE subjects are highly correlated. The adoption of a latent variable approach is attractive because it handles the messy nature of the data whilst not trivialising its complexity. The paper demonstrates that a latent variable approach is practicable with large-scale social survey data, and is appealing for the analysis of more contemporaneous cohorts.

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More information

Published date: 18 June 2014
Organisations: Social Statistics & Demography, Centre for Population Change

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 365897
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/365897
ISSN: 2042-4116
PURE UUID: 7b8eebff-4b0f-44dd-831f-69d7c5f0f637
ORCID for Teresa McGowan: ORCID iD orcid.org/0009-0002-9231-3743

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 18 Jun 2014 16:03
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:23

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Contributors

Author: Vernon Gayle
Author: Christopher James Playford
Editor: Teresa McGowan ORCID iD

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