A very leaky pipeline: factors moderating participation in senior mathematics of students with high levels of prior mathematics achievement

This paper investigates students’ participation in senior school mathematics in their final year of schooling in New South Wales, Australia, using a dataset of 147,397 Year 12 students over the years 2017-18. We examine the prior achievement trajectories of these students based on National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) numeracy scores to understand its relationship to later mathematics participation, and how this relationship is moderated by the key student characteristics of gender, socioeconomic status, Indigenous status and school location. Our findings generally suggest a very leaky pipeline, with students who are high achieving in their earlier years from Indigenous backgrounds, lower SES backgrounds, and rural communities less likely than other high achieving students to participate in advanced mathematics in upper secondary school. The gender gap between earlier achievement and later participation is less pronounced. We also find that there is variability in the provision of the more advanced mathematics in schools which are the least advantaged, manifest in differences in the offering of mathematics by school sector, SES quartile and location. These findings provide schools and policymakers with a greater understanding of the factors influencing students’ decisions to enrol in the more advanced mathematics subjects in the final years of schooling.