IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ifs/ifsewp/10-15.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The role of attitudes and behaviours in explaining socio-economic differences in attainment at age 16

Author

Listed:
  • Haroon Chowdry

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies)

  • Claire Crawford

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University of Birmingham)

  • Alissa Goodman

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London)

Abstract

It is well known that children growing up in poor families leave school with considerably lower qualifications than children from better off backgrounds. Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for by long-run family background characteristics and prior ability, suggesting that circumstances and investments made considerably earlier in the child's life explain the majority of the gap in test scores between young people from rich and poor families. However, we also find that differences in the attitudes and behaviours of young people and their parents during the teenage years play a key role in explaining the rich-poor gap in GCSE attainment: together, they explain a further quarter of the gap at age 16, and the majority of the small increase in this gap between ages 11 and 16. On this basis, our results suggest that while the most effective policies in terms of raising the attainment of young people from poor families are likely to be those enacted before children reach secondary school, policies that aim to reduce differences in attitudes and behaviours between the poorest children and those from better-off backgrounds during the teenage years may also make a significant contribution towards lowering the gap in achievement between young people from the richest and poorest families at age 16.

Suggested Citation

  • Haroon Chowdry & Claire Crawford & Alissa Goodman, 2010. "The role of attitudes and behaviours in explaining socio-economic differences in attainment at age 16," IFS Working Papers W10/15, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
  • Handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:10/15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp1015.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Class and confidence
      by chris dillow in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2011-11-24 20:44:42

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Gladwell & Gurleen Popli & Aki Tsuchiya, 2015. "A Dynamic Analysis of Skill Formation and NEET status," Working Papers 2015016, The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics.
    2. Jake Anders & John Micklewright, 2013. "Teenagers' expectations of applying to university: how do they change?," DoQSS Working Papers 13-13, Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:10/15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Emma Hyman (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifsssuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.