Young people’s educational and occupational outcomes are stratified according to their socio-economic origins. Such background factors are difficult to change, they are presumably not the only determinants of stratified outcomes, and anyway they could be mediated by institutional contexts, particularly who goes to school with whom. This study explores the association between school segregation and post-16 outcomes, using national evidence from England. We analysed linked data from Next Steps survey and the National Pupil Database (NPD) for 5,192 young people who attended state schools in England. Hierarchical binary logistic regression models assess the predictive contribution of school segregation after controlling for birth characteristics, family background, and prior attainment. Disadvantaged pupils are significantly more likely to attend schools with higher concentrations of disadvantage, and pupils attending schools with higher concentrations of disadvantaged peers have lower chances of Higher Education (HE) participation and employment at age 25. After controlling for individual-level prior factors, school segregation explains a small but statistically detectable proportion of remaining variation in HE participation and employment. No meaningful association is found with professional occupation status. While background characteristics are the dominant predictors of post-16 outcomes, school-level segregation has a small independent association with HE participation and employment. The results suggest that there is no evidence that segregation is beneficial. Reducing segregation alone is unlikely to generate large improvements in educational equity. Policy efforts to improve equity are likely to be more effective if they focus primarily on underlying socio-economic inequalities, while considering school segregation as a potential contextual factor.
Shao et al. (Mon,) studied this question.