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While the health risks of COVID-19 for young people are low, they have borne a heavy cost of the pandemic through intense disruption to their education and social lives. These effects have not been experienced equally across social and demographic groups. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 4,000 young people in England linked to their education records, we study inequalities in late adolescents' experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find particularly stark inequalities by socio-economic status, with those from poorer families facing disadvantage on multiple fronts, particularly in their experiences of home learning, returning to school, and exam cancellations compared to their more advantaged peers. Gender and ethnic inequalities were more mixed, though young females reported significantly lower wellbeing scores than males. This evidence suggests that the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities, meaning policymakers concerned with increasing equity and social mobility now face an even bigger task than before.

Students in the UK apply to university with teacher-predicted examination grades, rather than actual results. These predictions have been shown to be inaccurate, and to favour certain groups, leading to concerns about teacher bias. We ask whether it is possible to improve on the accuracy of teachers' predictions by predicting pupil achievement using prior attainment data and machine learning techniques. While our models do lead to a quantitative improvement on teacher predictions, substantial inaccuracies remain. Our models also underpredict high-achieving state school pupils and low socio-economic status pupils, suggesting they have more volatile education trajectories. This raises questions about the use of predictions in the UK system.

Social adjustment is critical to educational and occupational attainment. Yet little research has considered how the school's socioeconomic context is associated with social adjustment. In a longitudinal sample of Australian 4- to 8-year-olds (N = 9369; 51% boys) we tested the association between school average socioeconomic status and social skills (parent and teacher reported). Models controlled for age 4 social adjustment and additional covariates. Results showed that children from more advantaged schools are more likely to have better prosocial behavior and fewer peer and conduct problems. An interaction between family and school average socioeconomic status (SES) suggested that this association was mainly present for children from lower SES backgrounds.

Previous research has shown that the UK has low levels of financial literacy by international standards, particularly among those in lower socio-economic groups. This may have an impact upon young people, with social inequalities in financial attitudes, behaviours and skills perpetuating across generations. Using parent-child linked survey data from 3,745 UK families, we find sizeable socio-economic inequalities in young people's financial capabilities, aspects of their mindset, and their financial behaviours. Sizeable differences are also observed in the financial education that socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged children receive at school, and how they interact with their parents about money. Parental interactions can account for part of the socio-economic gap in money confidence, money management, financial connections, and financial behaviours, but less so in boosting financial abilities. However, we find no evidence of differences in financial education in schools driving differences in young people's financial capabilities.

Randomized controlled trials have proliferated in education, in part because they provide an unbiased estimator for the causal impact of interventions. It is increasingly recognized that many such trials in education have low power to detect an effect if indeed there is one. However, it is less well known that low powered trials tend to systematically exaggerate effect sizes among the subset of interventions that show promising results (p < [alpha]) We conduct a retrospective design analysis to quantify this bias across 22 such promising trials, finding that the estimated effect sizes are exaggerated by an average of 52% or more. Promising trial bias can be reduced ex-ante by increasing the power of the trials that are commissioned and guarded against ex-post by including estimates of the exaggeration ratio when reporting trial findings. Our results also suggest that challenges around implementation fidelity are not the only reason that apparently successful interventions often fail to subsequently scale up. Instead, the effect from the initial promising trial may simply be exaggerated.

Comparative interrupted time series (CITS) designs evaluate impact by modeling the relative deviation from trends among a treatment and comparison group after an intervention. The broad applicability of the design means it is widely used in education research. Like all non-experimental evaluation methods however, the internal validity of a given CITS evaluation depends on assumptions that cannot be directly verified. We provide an empirical test of the internal validity of CITS by conducting four within-study comparisons of school-level interventions previously evaluated using randomized controlled trials. Our estimate of bias across these four studies is 0.03 school-level (or 0.01 pupil-level) standard deviations. The results suggest well-conducted CITS evaluations of similar school-level education interventions are likely to display limited bias.

Evidence suggests that adapting teaching responsively to pupil assessment can be effective in improving students' learning. However, existing studies tend to be small-scale, leaving unanswered the question of how such formative assessment can operate when embedded as standard practice. In this study, we present the results of a randomized trial conducted in 140 English secondary schools. The intervention uses light-touch training and support, with most of the work done by teacher-led teaching and learning communities within schools. It is, therefore, well-suited to widespread adoption. In our pre-registered primary analysis, we estimate an effect size of 0.09 on general academic attainment in national, externally assessed examinations. Sensitivity analysis, excluding schools participating in a similar program at baseline, and complier analysis both suggest a larger effect size of 0.11. These results are encouraging for this approach to improving the implementation of formative assessment and, hence, academic attainment. Our findings also suggest that the intervention may help to narrow the gap between high and low prior attainment pupils, although not the gap between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and the rest of the cohort.

Previous research has shown that there is a small but significant cumulative private school advantage in terms of educational attainment in Britain. However, research on how school type influences non-educational outcomes is more scarcer. This paper aims to identify the extent to which school type influences satisfaction with life and mental health from adolescence to early adulthood. Using Next Steps, a longitudinal study of young people in England born in 1989/90, the authors use multiple variable regression analyses to address the research questions. They find that for this cohort there is no evidence of a difference for mental health and life satisfaction by school type for either men or women in adolescence or early adulthood.

The purpose of large-scale international assessments is to compare educational achievement across countries. For such cross-national comparisons to be meaningful, the participating students must be representative of the target population. In this paper, we consider whether this is the case for Canada, a country widely recognised as high performing in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Our analysis illustrates how the PISA 2015 sample for Canada only covers around half of the 15-year-old population, compared to over 90% in countries like Finland, Estonia, Japan and South Korea. We discuss how this emerges from differences in how children with special educational needs are defined and rules for their inclusion in the study, variation in school participation rates and the comparatively high rates of pupils' absence in Canada during the PISA study. The paper concludes by investigating how Canada's PISA 2015 rank would change under different assumptions about how the non-participating students would have performed were they to have taken the PISA test.

Access to Britain's highly-resourced private schools matters because of concerns surrounding social mobility. Using the UK Family Resources Survey, we document a high and mostly stable income concentration of private school access since 1997. Nevertheless, some low-income participation persists. Bursaries are income-progressive but cannot account for this participation. Housing wealth is, however, found to be greater for private school participants. We estimate that a 10 per cent rise of family income and home value raises private school participation by 0.9 points, respectively. Neither effect changes over time. The income effect, however, falls sharply outside the top income decile.

In a representative longitudinal sample of 2,602 Australian children (52% boys; 2% Indigenous; 13% language other than English background; 22% of Mothers born overseas; and 65% Urban) and their mothers (first surveyed in 2003), this article examined if maternal judgments of numeracy and reading ability varied by child demographics and influenced achievement and interest gains. We linked survey data to administrative data of national standardized tests in Year 3, 5, and 7 and found that maternal judgments followed gender stereotype patterns, favoring girls in reading and boys in numeracy. Maternal judgments were more positive for children from non-English speaking backgrounds. Maternal judgments predicted gains in children's achievement (consistently) and academic interest (generally) including during the transition to high school.

The purpose of this research was to analyze the performance of pupils (N = 6,023) who took part in Reading Recovery (RR) in England on a decoding test, the Phonics Screening Check (PSC), administered at the end of Year 1 when children are approximately 5 to 6 years of age. The data cover two academic years (2015/2016 and 2016/2017) and include demographic information, pre- and post-intervention achievement test scores and PSC results. Descriptive statistics and linear regression modeling (using a linear spline specification for timing) were used. Results indicated that pupils who had an RR intervention before the PSC performed better than peers who had the intervention during or after the PSC. There was a positive and statistically significant increase in PSC performance among those whose RR intervention began earlier relative to the PSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its entry into the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2009, the Chinese province of Shanghai has been the top-performing economy within these international rankings. Many have interpreted this as demonstrating how Shanghai has a "world class" education system, the most effective teaching methods, and the best schools. This article questions such interpretations of the PISA results. Specifically, we argue that statements about school and school system quality require information on the progress that children make during their time at school, which the PISA rankings do not provide (at least not directly). Our empirical analysis then uses a "fuzzy" regression discontinuity design approach to demonstrate how a rather different perspective of Shanghai's performance in PISA emerges once pupils' academic progress over one particular school year is considered. Our key finding is that the first year of upper secondary school in Shanghai adds essentially no value (on average) to children's PISA reading, science, and mathematics test scores.

We show how young people's expectations about application to university change during the teenage years, drawing on the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). We reveal the pattern of change by family background, prior attainment at the end of primary school (measured by Key Stage 2 tests) and, critically, the combination of the two. We document the relationship between expectations about university application and the decision on whether to stay on in full-time education at 16. We point to the importance of schools in sustaining or changing expectations. We relate the expectations reported by the teenagers in LSYPE to their actual university application decisions by age 20 or 21. Expectations are high but not universally high. Family background gaps in expectations widen during the teenage years.

For those who grew up in Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century, there is known to be a strong association between social class or family income and attending a private school. However, increasing private school fees and promotion of school choice in the state sector have potential implications for the predictors of participation in private schooling in the twenty-first century. In this article, through analysis of rich, longitudinal data from a recent, representative birth cohort study, we provide new evidence on this issue. Given the high and rising fees required to send a child to private school, one might think that the decision is entirely connected with financial resources. However, while these remain an important factor, we argue that other determinants are also important. In particular, we highlight the importance of parental values and geographical proximity to high-quality state school alternatives: a one standard deviation increase in levels of parental traditional values is associated with a 2.5 percentage point higher probability of their child attending a private school, while each minute of additional travel time to the nearest state school judged 'Outstanding' by England's schools inspectorate is associated with a 0.2 percentage point higher probability of attending a private school. We also examine the characteristics of those who 'mix and match' state and private schooling, noting their similarity to private school attendees in terms of their values but lower levels of financial resources.

With approximately three times the resources per pupil in private compared with state schools, Britain's private sector presents an interesting case of what could be expected from schools that are extremely well resourced. This paper studies the links between private schooling and educational performance in upper secondary school, as measured through their performance in 'A level', the main school-leaving assessment which determines access to universities. Using an English longitudinal study, we find evidence that, compared with otherwise observably similar state school students in upper secondary education and controlling for prior attainment, those at private school study more 'facilitating' subjects, which are known to be favoured by high-status universities; they are placed 8 percentage points higher in the A level rankings and 11 percentage points higher in the rankings for 'facilitating' A levels. We find evidence of a private school advantage for participating in undergraduate study, net of socioeconomic status, subjects selected and number of A levels but there is no private school advantage for attending an elite university, controlling for the same characteristics. Taken together with other studies, our findings mean that private schooling in England is associated with cumulative moderate advantages at every stage of education.

Extensive literature has compared the effect of selective schools with that of non-selective schools on pupil outcomes in England. However, evaluation of selective systems has been sparse and contradictory. From the perspective of educational equity, this study assesses the potential impact of academically selective school systems on pupils' overall academic outcomes. To do this, we compare pupils' academic performance in a selective system with that in a non-selective system using large-scale national data from England. The results show no evidence of a superior academic effect of selective systems on pupils' academic outcomes. While the general results for the effects of the two systems reveal neither system to be superior, an internal pattern implies negative results from the selective system, from which high performers suffer. The findings collectively imply that maintaining selective systems for compulsory education is unlikely to generate any substantial academic gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop an information distortion model (IDM) of social class differences in self-beliefs and values. The IDM combines psychological biases on frame-of-reference effects with sociological foci on ability stratification. This combination is hypothesized to lead to working-class children having more positive math self-beliefs and values than equally able salariat children. We further suggest that the same conditions that give rise to the working-class benefit in self-beliefs and values are associated with signaling effects that suppress educational aspirations and attainment. These hypotheses are tested in 1 cross-sectional multinational and 1 longitudinal study. The results in favor of the IDM challenge cultural models of social class differences and have implications for rational action theory.

In this paper, we identify patterns of subject and qualification choices made at age 14. Much of the previous research on 'subject choice' has focussed on the later stages of educational trajectories, particularly Higher Education. However, the choices made at early branching points can limit pupils' subsequent options, potentially contributing to educational inequalities. This paper identifies the patterns of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) subjects chosen by a cohort of young people born in 1989/1990. We make use of the Next Steps data (formerly the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)) which is linked to the National Pupil Database. We develop an approach to measuring the academic selectivity of subjects and qualifications. We examine the roles of social class, parental education, income, gender and ethnicity in determining participation in these curriculum groupings. Using measures of prior attainment from age thirteen, we address the question of whether curriculum differentials simply reflect differences in prior attainment or whether they actually operate above and beyond existing inequalities. We find clear socio-economic, gender, ethnic and school-level differences in subjects studied which cannot be accounted for by prior attainment.

This paper considers whether subject choice at 14-16 influences post-16 transitions, taking into account prior academic attainment and school characteristics, and if so, whether this accounts for socioeconomic, gender, and ethnic differences in access to post-16 education. We consider post-16 progression to full-time education, A-levels, and studying two or more facilitating subjects at A-level. We use "Next Steps", a study of 16,000 people born in England in 1989-1990, linked to administrative education records (the National Pupil Database). We find that students pursuing an EBacc-eligible curriculum at 14-16 had a greater probability of progression to all post-16 educational outcomes, while the reverse was true for students taking an applied GCSE subject. Curriculum differences did not explain the social class differences in post-16 progression, but an academic curriculum was equally valuable for working-class as for middle-class pupils. Pursuing an EBacc-eligible curriculum particularly strongly increased the chances of girls and white young people staying in the educational pipeline, whereas applied subjects were particularly detrimental for girls. An EBacc-eligible curriculum at age 14-16 increased the chances of studying subjects preferred by Russell Group universities at A-level.

The subjects that young people study from age 14 onwards may have important consequences for their future academic and labour market outcomes. These decisions are shaped by the schools in which they find themselves. Schools also face constraints of their own. This paper explores the extent to which individuals' decisions are affected by the school they attend and to what extent this is affected by the composition of schools in terms of academic attainment, gender, and socioeconomic background. We use multi-level variance decomposition models applied to administrative data on the subjects that young people in mainstream state-funded schools in England study between ages 14 and 16. Our results highlight the important role that constraints on schools play in subject choice decisions. We also note the particular role of attending a non-selective school within a selective schooling district.

A much larger proportion of English 14-year-olds expect to apply to university than ultimately make an application by age 21, but the proportion expecting to apply falls from age 14 onwards. In order to assess the role of socioeconomic status in explaining changes in expectations, this paper applies duration modelling techniques to the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, analysing transitions in young people's expectations both from being "likely to apply" to being "unlikely to apply" and vice versa. Young people's socioeconomic background has a significant association with changes in expectations, even after controlling for prior academic attainment and other potentially confounding factors; in addition, young people's backgrounds affect their responsiveness to new evidence on academic attainment at age 16. This suggests more could usefully be done to maintain the educational expectations of academically able young people from less advantaged families, especially providing guidance on how to view new academic results.

Recent research has suggested significant negative effects of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) on mental health and wellbeing. In this article, the authors suggest that the developmental period of late adolescence may be at particular risk of economic downturns. Harmonizing 4 longitudinal cohorts of Australian youth (N = 38,017), we estimate the impact of the GFC on 1 general and 11 domain specific measures of wellbeing at age 19 and 22. Significant differences in wellbeing in most life domains were found, suggesting that wellbeing is susceptible to economic shocks. Given that the GFC in Australia was relatively mild, the finding of clear negative effects across 2 ages is of international concern.