Social class and sex differences in absolute and relative educational attainment in England, Scotland and Wales since the middle of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

Changes over time in social-class inequality of educational attainment have been shown by previous research to depend on whether attainment is measured absolutely or relatively. The pioneering work in this respect by Bukodi and Goldthorpe found that inequality has fallen when attainment is measured absolutely (for example, as the percentage completing full secondary schooling) but has changed less when a relative measure is used (for example, reaching the top quarter of the distribution of attainment). Although absolute measures remain intrinsically interesting, insofar as they represent cognitive or cultural accomplishment, relative measures are more relevant for understanding the role of education in allocating people competitively to employment. Implicit in this previous research, as in much research on the connection between education and social mobility, is that the society over which the relative standing of qualifications is measured is the same as that in which they are used to gain social rewards, such as a job. When labour markets operate across educational borders, this assumption might be open to question. The present analysis investigates the interpretation of absolute and relative educational inequality by comparing England, Scotland and Wales, which have distinct education systems but a common labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Social class
• social mobility
• relative educational attainment
• home international comparison

Acknowledgments

The research was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (grant number MRF-2017-002). I am grateful to Professor Ian J. Deary, director of the Lothian Birth Cohorts, University of Edinburgh, for data from the 1936 birth-cohort survey, to the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing, University College London, and the principal investigators of the MRC National Survey of Health and Development (doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q101) for data from the 1946 birth-cohort survey, and to the UK Data Archive for data from the 1958 and 1970 birth-cohort surveys and for the data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethics statement

The paper is entirely based on secondary data. The participants in the surveys gave their informed consent, as detailed in the original reports of the surveys noted in the Methods section. The analysis on which the paper is based was given ethical clearance by the research ethics committee of the School of Social and Political Science, Edinburgh University, on 27 March 2017.

Data availability

The analysis uses secondary data, available from the sources noted in the Data section.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2022.2089213

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Leverhulme Trust [MRF-2017-002].

Notes on contributors

Lindsay Paterson

Lindsay Paterson is professor of education policy at Edinburgh University. His main academic interests are in education policy, social mobility, civic engagement and political attitudes, and most of his research uses large-scale social surveys to investigate these topics.