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dc.contributor.authorGayle, V
dc.contributor.authorPlayford, CJ
dc.coverage.spatialUKen_GB
dc.date.accessioned2017-06-22T13:49:05Z
dc.date.issued2014
dc.description.abstractIn 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.en_GB
dc.description.sponsorshipThe ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) is a joint initiative between the Universities of Southampton, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Stirling, Strathclyde, in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the General Register Office Scotland (GROS). The Centre is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant numbers RES-625-28-0001 and ES/K007394/1.en_GB
dc.identifier.citationCPC Working Papers; No. 51, 2014.en_GB
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10871/28143
dc.language.isoenen_GB
dc.publisherESRC Centre for Population Changeen_GB
dc.relation.urlhttp://www.cpc.ac.uk/en_GB
dc.rights© Vernon Gayle and Christopher James Playford all rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the sourceen_GB
dc.subjectEducational attainmenten_GB
dc.subjectGCSE.en_GB
dc.subjectMissing middleen_GB
dc.subjectYouth transitionsen_GB
dc.subjectSociology of youthen_GB
dc.subjectYouth Cohort Study of England and Walesen_GB
dc.subjectLatent Class Modelsen_GB
dc.titleThe concealed middle? An exploration of ordinary young people and school GCSE subject area attainmenten_GB
dc.typeWorking Paperen_GB
dc.date.available2014-06-01en_GB
dc.date.available2017-06-22T13:49:05Z
dc.languageEnglishen_GB
dc.descriptionThis is the final version of the article. Available from ESRC Centre for Population Change via the link in this record.en_GB
dc.identifier.eissn2042-4116


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