Early socio-emotional skills and adolescent offending: evidence from administrative data

This paper examines how early socio-emotional skills shape adolescent offending in England and the school pathways through which they operate. I use administrative data linking teacher-reported child development assessments at age five to school and criminal justice records through age 17. Factor analysis of these assessments reveals two underlying domains of early difficulty, cognitive and socio-emotional. Both raise the probability of a caution or conviction between ages 11 and 17 by around 15%, but through distinct channels. Cognitive difficulties act primarily through academic attainment, while socio-emotional difficulties operate largely through school exclusions yet retain a substantial direct effect, accounting for around 40% of the total effect. The socio-emotional effect is robust to unobserved school and family heterogeneity and shapes both the type and frequency of offending. Statutory support for learning difficulties and social care services attenuates the associations between early skill deficits and offending. These findings suggest that differentiated support is needed based on the type of difficulty.