Session: Skills, Learning, and Educational Trajectories
Lost learning, lasting consequences? COVID-19 educational disruption and attainment at A level (Jake Anders, UCL Institute of Education)
COVID-19 disruption to young people’s education is well documented. Pupils in Year 10 in March 2020 experienced extended school closures and remote learning during their GCSE years before sitting the first externally examined qualifications at A level. Using data from the COVID Social Mobility & Opportunities study linked to England’s National Pupil Database, we examine whether the intensity of educational disruption during the GCSE years predicts attainment at A level, conditional on prior attainment. We construct a composite disruption index spanning Lockdown 1 to Year 12, finding that greater disruption is associated with lower A-level attainment, with stronger associations among pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and evidence of mediation through psychological distress. COVID learning losses persisted into post-16 qualifications with implications for widening inequalities.
Childhood Aspirations and Adult Outcomes (Irina Merkurieva, University of St Andrews)
This paper extracts aspirations from texts written in childhood by members of a British longitudinal cohort, and explores how these relate to later life outcomes. Applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to short essays collected at age 11, we identify four aspiration themes: family, hobbies, financial success, and career. The weight of these four themes varies substantially across respondents, with girls on average placing more weight on family, and boys on financial success. Aspirations extracted using our method are strongly predictive of later life outcomes, even when controlling for detailed measures of early life environment, ability, and family background. These associations are highly heterogenous by gender; for example, family-related aspirations are associated with higher educational attainment for men, but lower educational attainment for women.
Impact of cognitive skills at school entry on adolescent educational attainment and health outcomes: evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (Zaheen Umar, Centre for Health Economics, University of York)
Early childhood development is a key policy target in the UK, yet its long-term associations with adolescent outcomes are unclear. Using the Millennium Cohort Study, we estimate the magnitude of the effect of age-5 cognitive skills on seven age-17 human capital outcomes. Poisson models with multiple imputation and survey weights were used to estimate risk ratios. Oster bounds and E-values were calculated for robustness checks. A one SD increase in cognitive skills was associated with a 27.7% lower risk of poor GCSE attainment and an 11.9% lower risk of poor/fair health. Conduct problems and emotional symptoms were 14.2% and 12.7% lower, respectively. No associations were found for obesity, psychological distress or mental wellbeing at age-17. Moderation effects of income were found for poor GCSE attainment only.
A Deep Dive into School Qualifications: Examining (In)Consistencies in General Certificates of Secondary Education Results in the Millennium Cohort Study and Linked National Pupil Database (Sarah Stopforth, University of York)
General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) are the main qualifications undertaken by most school pupils in England at the age of 16. The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) collected self-reported GCSE data in sweep 7 (age 17). GCSE data is inherently complex because pupils undertake a selection of individual subjects and each subject is awarded a separate grade. Members of the MCS undertook GCSEs when two different grading systems were in operation, adding to the complexity of the data. In this study we take a deep dive into the self-reported data and assess its reliability. Using linked data from the National Pupil Database (NPD) we explore the consistency and discrepancies between the self-reported survey data and administrative records. We offer some practicable methodological advice for social researchers analysing the MCS self-reported data and administrative data in the NPD.
