Series 3

In the third Series of the DIAL Podcast, we speak to some of our projects’ researchers about early findings from their work.

Ability grouping: does it affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English?

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In Episode 16 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast we’re discussing ability grouping in UK primary schools and how it affects children’s enjoyment of certain subjects. Our guest today is Queralt Capsada-Munsech from the University of Glasgow, who as part of DIAL’s LIFETRACK project has been looking at primary school children’s enjoyment of English and Maths at age seven, and later at age 11 to see whether ability grouping positively or negatively impacts their enjoyment of those subjects.

 

Does ability grouping affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English? is research by Vikki Boliver and Queralt Capsada-Munsech, and is published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.

 

Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we’re talking about how grouping children by ability at school affects their enjoyment of certain subjects. Our guest is Queralt Capsada-Munsech from the University of Glasgow, who as part of DIAL’s Life Track project has been looking at primary school children’s enjoyment of English and Maths at age seven, and later at age 11 to see whether ability grouping positively or negatively impacts their enjoyment of those subjects.  

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  0:29 

There are people who are advocates of ability grouping, and their main argument is usually that high ability pupils improve their attainment, while there is no detriment in lower ability, once their academic performance mainly. But you know, the opponents in the general debate of ability grouping, what they say is that high ability students only do marginally better when they are grouped with a, yeah with a group of students that are homogenous to them. While lower ability ones are the ones that are substantially worse off from these ability grouping. And what we have seen mostly in previous research is that there is the main mechanism that we call that is the self-fulfilling prophecy of low attainment that you know, because you are grouping the low ability grouping and people, and students are aware of that. So they just know that they are not doing as well. And they continue to do more poorly while those that are in the high ability grouping, so they think better of themselves. And that leads them to better academic achievement. And usually, the way it has been measured has been based on what we call academic self-concept that basically is asking students, how good are you at maths, at English or at school in general? 

Christine Garrington  1:48 

So talk us through some of the policy context here – ability grouping as an education policy.

Queralt Capsada-Munsech   1:53 

In the gaze of the UK ability grouping was encouraged by the New Labour governments in the 1990s and in the 2000s. And the main idea was that it would raise standards generally, with higher grades in brightest kids in particular, that was something that was quite influential in past decades. And that had clearly an effect in policy because, you know, the prevalence of grouping practices still remains in place. And it increased quite a lot for the past few years. And we see in the UK, even that ability grouping is becoming increasingly common in early years, you know, at ages three and four and even in Key Stage One ages five to seven was, which was something that we didn’t see in the past. While you know, in the 1990s, there were fewer than 3% of primary schools who reported that they were streaming students by 2008 16% of seven year olds, were being streamed by ability for all subjects and 26% were being taught in ability sets for English and Math so that’s quite the change.

Christine Garrington  3:01 

What was it for you that you wanted to look at exactly about the way in which children are grouped by ability at primary school? What was it you wanted to look at and why?

Queralt Capsada-Munsech   3:10 

Empirical evidence what did show us that at least for the UK suggested that there weren’t many benefits of practising ability grouping. Mainly at the secondary level was most of the studies and it did little to raise the school’s standards, and it was more detrimental for socioeconomically disadvantaged students. And it was through that, you know, measured ability at the early ages is predictive of ability group placement. But so were also a lot of socio-economic indicators. So there were also a few mechanisms, you know, that people were looking at. So for instance, teaching practices or teaching learning environments. So the reason why this happened, that it was more detrimental for some instruments to the individual than others because teacher quality is correlated with ability grouping, meaning that mainly you know, teachers that are more qualified, more experienced tend to be a placed with a high ability grouping, while less experienced in the lower one, which maybe should be the opposite. But also because of students self-perception, so they internalise these labels of consequences for their self-esteem. We could see that there were many studies that had been undertaken at secondary level, but not that many at the primary level. So what we want to talk that was that academic enjoyment so that it would be different question like, how much have you enjoyed reading or doing number work or English or maths more, more precisely.

Christine Garrington  4:45 

So why was it important to look at how much children enjoyed subjects? What was it about that particular concept or idea that was was important in your research?

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  4:56 

Academic self-concept, the question how good you are at? It’s informed by students awareness of their test scores or their ability group placement, but it’s also a relational construct, you know how good you are compared to the rest of your pupils in your group or in your class. While academic enjoyment, we thought that it was a more an intrinsic motivation and is more of a personal preference, you know, you might like or dislike reading, even if you are very good at English or not. So it’s more of an independent one. And it’s less relational. So it’s not that you enjoy reading compared to your peers, it’s more they do you enjoy it more? Yes or no, or to what extent.

Christine Garrington  5:39 

So talk us through what you actually did.

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  5:40 

The question that we wanted to look at was looking okay, for instance in primary school at age seven, how much did pupils enjoy Maths or English and school in general? And then to look later on, you know, at age 11, before going to secondary school, how much they enjoy again, Maths, English and school in general. And to see to what extent it had changed from age seven to 11, depending on the ability group that they were in. So we were expecting that, okay, maybe your academic enjoyment of Maths might be different to those that are in the top or bottom ability group. But our hypothesis was that, theoretically, there is no reason for people to change how much they enjoy or not enjoy reading, for instance, from age seven to eleven, regardless of the relative group they are in.

Christine Garrington  6:38 

So where did you get your information from? And why was it a good source of data to help you address these questions that you were interested in?

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  6:47 

So we use one of the cohort studies that are called, that its the Millennium Cohort Study. But basically, it’s a longitudinal survey that follows about 19,000 people born in the UK in 2000 and 2002, approximately. You have the same people, the same individuals, and they have been surveyed throughout their lifetime. What it was important for us in order to make this comparison is that we would have that data about the same individuals, but also that we would have like similar questions at two points in time. So in this case, for instance, because if we want to check if there is a change or not in academic enjoyment, from age seven to eleven, we needed to have this very same question of academic enjoyment at those two points in times. And in addition, obviously, we had some information about ability grouping. And so.

Christine Garrington  7:41 

And when it came to this question of whether being grouped by ability did in some way influence whether a child liked a subject or not, what did you see?

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  7:50 

If we start just with the descriptive statistics, we already saw, obviously, that there were some differences. So maybe it’s worth starting by saying that, you know, overall, there was quite a lot of academic enjoyment among students. So the majority of them like a lot Maths, or reading or English, and most of the students so in most cases above 35%, were placed in the high ability one. And students that were placing the low ability one was usually smaller numbers like below 20%. That already gave us an idea of the distribution. But more importantly, yeah, when just looking at some bivariate descriptive statistics, we could see that those that are in high ability groups, tended to enjoy more Maths, for instance, than those that were placed in the low ability group. And that has stayed like, quiet similar when we look at it both at age seven, and eleven. So that’s something that we could see just from the descriptive statistics.

Christine Garrington  9:00 

Now you had some very specific findings around maths didn’t you? I wonder if you can talk us through what it was exactly that you saw there.

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  9:07 

Being placed in a lower rather than a high ability group at age seven, depress the probability of coming to enjoy continuing to enjoy or even to increasing your enjoyment of Maths by age eleven. And that stayed like this way even after controlling for you know, students measured ability in Maths, sex and social background at age seven. So we found that yeah, really being placed in ability grouping has an influence in your academic enjoyment of Maths. However, we didn’t find quite the same for English and school in general. So, you know, there was this tendency, but once we control for socio-demographic and socio-economic variables, the results weren’t statistically significant. So, we would say that, it’s mainly for maths that we would find some differences or some effects of ability grouping.

Christine Garrington  10:05 

Yeah, really, really interesting, though, and I’m gonna take you right back to the beginning of our conversation when you were saying, you know, just how much policy interest there is in this area around, specifically around education policy. What do you feel that we must take away from from this piece of work? And do you think there are any key takeaways specifically for education policy and practice?

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  10:25 

Overall, I would say that our findings are very much in line with much of the existing research, which indicates that ability grouping is detrimental to those judged to be of lower ability. And at least we find it in relation to Math. So it’s something to be worried about. And ability grouping by measured ability has a negative influence for those that label as that, as lower ability. And we can see now that it’s for both for academic self concept this idea of how good I am at maths, but also for academic enjoyment is like how much do you enjoy maths? So that can be detrimental if you are put in a lower ability group.

Christine Garrington  11:08 

Okay, so that’s the key sort of takeaway message, but what recommendations might you have in this area then?

Queralt Capsada-Munsech  11:14 

We are aware that it’s difficult to be in a classroom and that we don’t mean that because they are doing ability grouping they are bad teachers or bad educators. But yeah, I guess it’s something that we’ll have to continue exploring. And while some parts of ability grouping might work for some students or for some teachers overall, I wouldn’t encourage the policy of ability grouping, at least in the UK.

Christine Garrington  11:45 

Does ability grouping affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English? is research by Vikki Boliver and Queralt Capsada-Munsech, and is published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. Thanks for listening to this episode of the DIAL podcast, which was presented by me Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts. You can find out more about all the DIAL projects at dynamicsofinequality.org.

Discrimination harassment and violence: the experiences of LGBT communities

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In Episode 15 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast we’re discussing LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence. Our guests are Sait Bayrakdar from Kings College London and Andrew King from the University of Surrey who, as part of DIAL’s CILIA project have been using a large cross national survey to look at the experiences of nearly 29,000 people living in Germany the UK and Portugal. LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence in Germany, Portugal and the UK: A quantitative comparative approach is research by Sait Bayrakdar and Andrew King and is published in the journal Current Sociology.

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we’re discussing LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence. Our guests are Sait Bayrakdar from King’s College London and Andrew King from the University of Surrey, who, as part of DIAL’s CILIA project have been using a large cross-national survey to look at the experiences of nearly 29,000 people living in Germany, the UK and Portugal. I asked Andrew first to talk us through the background to the research.

Andrew King  0:30 

This piece of research is part of the larger CILIA LGBTQI project, which has been exploring inequalities across the lives of LGBTQI people in four European countries – England, Scotland, Germany, and Portugal. We had a large research team from four different institutions on the project. And they brought expertise from different disciplines, as well as different methodologies. So the main aims of the CILIA project were to study LGBTQI inequalities from an intersectional and lifecourse perspective and bring some comparative dimensions to this. We started with a literature review and survey mapping exercise, which helped us document what had been done so far in the area, then we went on to analyse various sources of data, as well as collecting a large qualitative data set from LGBTQI individuals in the four countries. But this research article reports on the research, which was a part of our quantitative strand.

Christine Garrington  1:43 

Okay, that’s great. Thanks Andrew. I’m going to come back to you a little bit later in our discussion for your sort of reflections on what was was found. But Sait you were the lead author on this, and what was it specifically that you wanted to try to get to grips with and why in this particular paper?

Sait Bayrakdar  1:58 

We were aware from our qualitative research that despite over 10 years of equality legislation, issue of discrimination, harassment, and violence we’re still very significant to LGBT people, but we wanted to look at this both quantitatively and cross nationally. In a nutshell, we were mainly interested in understanding the patterns of discrimination, harassment and violence experienced by LGBT individuals in these countries. But this was quite tricky, because most survey studies still do not collect information about sexual orientation or gender identity. And it is even more difficult to find an international study that collects data from individuals across different countries. One exception to this was the LGBT survey conducted by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency. And this data allowed us to do a comparative analysis across the countries in the CILIA project. In fact, this really was the on the Pan-European data set that spoke to these inequalities. Also, we wanted to document the diverse experiences and patterns within LGB and T communities. Partly because of data limitations, and small numbers in surveys, these different groups are often merged in a single category as LGBT. Although their experiences differ quite a lot. And our results also come from these differences. Qualitative researchers are quite ahead in this regard. And they have done amazing studies showing the diversity in experiences and outcomes. We hope this research will help us show these differences quantitatively and highlight the need for better survey data collection that allows researchers to study LGBTQI plus lives in this way.

Andrew King  3:37 

So although we, there were four countries involved, actually, the dataset just puts everybody into a UK group. So we couldn’t separate out England and Scotland. And the other thing is that the dataset doesn’t include specific questions relevant for intersex people either. So we weren’t able to include intersex people in the quantitative analysis that we did.

Christine Garrington  4:01 

Okay, yeah, understood. Now, what sorts of things were people asked about in the Fundamental Rights Agency survey then Sait? It just sounds, it sounds a really useful resource for this.

Sait Bayrakdar  4:12 

Yes, absolutely. So the respondents were asked about many things, including their demographic data and social identities, their experiences of discrimination or other kinds of unfair treatment, whether they report these incidents, whether they change their behaviour in public to avoid discrimination. They are also asked about their views about equality policies and their relationships with people they interact in their daily lives. It’s quite a rich study, and I believe it is terribly under used by researchers. In this research, we looked at LGBT individuals experiences of discrimination, harassment and violence, and the survey was asking whether they had experienced any of these as a result of the person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. We looked at how these differences differ for LGBT individuals separately, and how their social background affects their likelihood of experiencing this incidence.

Christine Garrington  5:07 

Yeah and large numbers of people took part in this survey as well. So, Sait let’s dig a bit deeper now and move on to you know what everybody is interested to hear about, which is what you actually found – can you talk us through that?

Sait Bayrakdar  5:20 

Sure. So earlier, I said that we were interested in bringing forward the diverse experiences within and between LGBT individuals, and between different countries. And I can confidently say that we found out that there are quite striking differences across LGB, and T individuals. First of all, in all countries, trans individuals are more at risk of experiencing negative incidents of discrimination, harassment and violence. Compared to their cisgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual counterparts. This is perhaps not surprising for many, but this wasn’t explored quantitatively previously in an academic study. And another interesting finding for me was that different groups were more prone to experience different kinds of negative incidents. For example, lesbians seem more at risk of discrimination and harassment, and gay men are more at risk of violence. We do not know why this is the case. But there is definitely an observable gender pattern here. And my feeling is that this might be related to the ways these identities may be seen as a threat to masculinity. And I think we should definitely need more research to look at these intersections of sexuality, gender, and maybe also other, other social identities.

Christine Garrington  6:38 

Yeah, some really, really interesting and important findings emerging here. And was the story the same across all of the three countries that you, you looked at?

Sait Bayrakdar  6:47 

Not quite. In the first instance, all three countries showed similar patterns in the likelihood of experiencing these incidents across different groups. In all countries, reports of discrimination and harassment were more common than reports of violence and trans individuals were more likely to experience all three forms of negative incidents but there were some interesting differences when we dug deeper. For example, the rates of violence are higher in the UK, which begs the question why the UK is less able to protect these individuals despite being a front runner in equality legislation? Perhaps another thing is that the reports of violence are particularly high for trans individuals and gay men in the UK. These two groups in the UK are more likely to experience violence than those in Germany and Portugal. And I think this suggests that contextual factors may be shaping some part of these experiences or the likelihood of experiencing these incidents. This is something that comparative data can help us understand a bit better.

Christine Garrington  7:47 

Okay, Sait so was there anything else at play? Any other factors that we should take into account or that you took into account that were important or relevant?

Sait Bayrakdar  7:55 

Yeah, so we included quite a few other variables relating to social identities and individual characteristics. I think the most important but perhaps not so unexpected finding was that those who have greater socioeconomic resources are less likely to experience these negative incidents. And this implies that class based social inequalities may have a role here as well. So for example, a more economically advantaged person may be able to protect themselves a bit better, whereas other less advantaged might unfortunately, be more vulnerable to such incidents. We found this effect to varying degrees in all countries. I think this is very important because it points out that intersections of class, sexuality and gender identity are creating unique experiences. Depending on one is positioned across different social demographics, the likelihood of experiencing negative incidents change. We also find that LGBT individuals with disabilities and minority ethnic or religious backgrounds are more likely to experience discrimination. It is really very important that we create more empirical evidence on these intersections looking at different life outcomes, not only discrimination, harassment and violence, but maybe also the outcomes of education, labour markets, and other domains of life.

Christine Garrington  9:15 

Yeah, no, absolutely understood. Now, what would you say then say, Sait that we take away from all of this in an era where, you know, many people assume or think, believe that discrimination on the grounds of sexuality and identity as somehow a thing of the past? I mean, your your research tells us otherwise?

Sait Bayrakdar  9:32 

And this is a very interesting question, which I also find difficult to answer. I think there has been an immense advancement in the equality legislation in the UK, as well as the other countries in our research. And public attitudes have also progressed significantly in recent years. And I think maybe, possibly because of these recent changes, some people may think that the struggle has now been won, and equality has been achieved. However, having legislation is one thing and putting it in effect is another. LGBT individuals still experience discrimination in their day-to-day lives, and the things heterosexual cisgender individuals take for granted are usually not available or accessible to the same extent to LGBT people. And I think that is because the norms and cultures in workplaces, social lives, families are shaped by cis-heteronormativity. So I think those with lived experiences have a better understanding of discrimination and whether or not it is a thing of past.

Christine Garrington  10:33 

And on that note, do you have any thoughts on the implications of all of this for, for policy, especially around efforts to promote greater equality, and diversity, you know, wherever we’re at in the world, but particularly in these countries.

Sait Bayrakdar  10:47 

In this piece we provide quantitative evidence for many issues scholars have been discussing for a while. And we do this by providing further original comparative evidence, we knew that the discrimination, harassment and violence was there. But for me, the most important take home lesson is that there are country differences in the likelihood of experiencing these incidents. And we see that violence is more likely in the UK, particularly for trans individuals. We do not test the effect of potential factors, but our study does show that trans individuals are more more vulnerable to these attacks. So I think policy should really prioritise this. Trans rights have become a very heated topic for some years now. I must say, I think the way trans rights are discussed in the UK is not helping. As a policy priority the government and other policymakers should prioritise addressing trans people’s very immediate needs and ensure that everyone regardless of their gender identity is protected from discrimination, harassment and violence. And another issue. Police documents don’t always take account of diversity in terms of gender identity, sexual orientation, or variations in sex characteristics and intersex status. They often assume that LGBTQI plus communities are a homogeneous group, despite their characteristics and needs being quite different. I think there should be more engagement from policymakers with communities themselves, so they can see that they are working with diversity and difference. This should also take account of differences related to other social backgrounds, such as education, class, ethnicity, disability, religion, and possibly any other significant difference that people may feel or identify with.

Christine Garrington  12:30 

Yeah, thank you Sait for those really interesting reflections. And Andrew, I wonder if there’s anything that you’d like to add to that?

Andrew King  12:36 

Yeah, an overall recommendation from the CILIA project is the need for intersectional policymaking. So policies tend to address people as single subjects and adopt a one size fits all approach, which in a way, erases differences. And as we’ve demonstrated in our article from an intersectional lifecourse perspective, this is really problematic. This means that we need policymaking that focuses on multiple and contextual marginalities as well as inclusions and exclusions and how privilege and oppression are created in multiple ways. So not recognising this intersectional diversity in policymaking, or perhaps only doing so in limited ways means people who embody the intersections of different and multiple marginalities get overlooked. So while some policies need to be specific, they should also recognise intersections. And we very much hope that our article and the wider CILIA project contributes to a new policy agenda in this respect.

Christine Garrington  13:46 

“LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence in Germany, Portugal and the UK. A quantitative comparative approach” is research by Sait Bayrakdar and Andrew King, and is published in the journal Current Sociology. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast to access earlier and forthcoming episodes. Thanks for listening to this episode of the DIAL podcast which was presented and produced by me Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts.

Golfing with Trump: who does it and what does it mean for rising populism?

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In Episode 14 of Series 3 of our podcast, we talk with Professor Andrés Rodríguez-Pose from the London School of Economics about his research looking at who propelled Donald Trump to power and what the future holds for populist politicians, politics and policies?

 

Transcript 

Christine Garrington  0:01 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we’re discussing the rise of populism in the US with Andres Rodriguez-Pose at the London School of Economics. He has been asking the intriguing question of who exactly propelled Donald Trump to power and what the future holds for populist politicians, politics and policies?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  0:25

I’ve always been interested in populism and the rise of populism. And I do it feel that many of the explanations of why people vote for, let’s say, anti-system parties and anti-system options, were probably not the most adequate. Of many voters of populism have been considered to be uneducated, poor, rural and white men. And very often, it has been said that we just have to wait for these people to die and then the problem will sort itself out. I think that’s first macabre and not a joke. And second, I do feel that that is also wrong. Because the people that are voting for anti-system parties, both in the US and in Europe, probably have got and certainly have got you know grievances that are related very often, to the long-term economic, social, cultural, and surface decline of the places where they live. But urban elites have tended and political elites have had a tendency to tell them that they are rednecks, that they are despicable, that they live in flyover states and in places where there’s no opportunity, and the best solution for them is just to get on their bikes and move to a place where there’s opportunity, which mainly means the big cities in from that perspective,

Christine Garrington  1:48

Indeed, and so what was it about Trump’s election and obviously near re-election, that you wanted to sort of hone in on and look at specifically and why?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  1:57

Trump, in my view, represented from his arrival, a threat to democracy and to American democracy that traditionally was the beacon of democracy across the world. It also represented the radicalization of the Republican Party that had been traditionally mainstream. And for me, that was really interesting trying to understand what had driven voters in certain parts of the US to vote for Trump, especially in the light of what Robert Putnam, probably the best known political scientist in the world from Harvard University, had written 20 years ago, well in 2000, about the potential threats. to threats to American democracy, which was where coming from, on the one hand, the rise of inequality in the US a country that is far more polarised interpersonally than Europe, but where territorial disparities are significantly lower. And the other challenge, which was the parallel declines since the 1970s, and 1980s of what is he called social capital, which is the sense of interaction, community, and cohesion within localities and within American cities, towns and rural areas.

Christine Garrington  3:15

Now you went about this by carrying out an econometric analysis. For those of us who might not sort of immediately understand what that looks like, in reality, I wonder if you can tell us what you actually did?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  3:25 

Well, I wanted to explain what is known as the Trump margin. So the additional votes that Donald Trump received in 2016, and then in 2020, relative to the votes that a perfectly mainstream Republican candidate in the 2012 election, like Mitt Romney had received. So trying to explain the additional extra percentages of votes in specific counties in the US on the basis of a series of factors I thought, and my co-authors thought that the additional vote for Trump was very much related to economic and demographic decline in particular parts of the US, but also I introduce, we introduced a number of what we call controls, which are the factors that either from political science or economics, or sociology have been regarded as the main drivers of the swing and the vote for Trump. And these are mainly related to individual characteristics, what I said before – levels of education, age and ethnicity of the voters in the case of the US, but also related to the places where they live. And there has been a lot of work that has highlighted the divide in the vote in the vote between big cities in the United States and small towns and rural communities.

Christine Garrington  4:49

So what did you find then when you looked at the types of communities that it was thought propelled Donald Trump into into the presidency? What did you find there?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  4:57 

Well we started with a hypothesis launch by Robert Putnam in 2000, about the idea that the threat to American democracy and therefore the vote for an extreme outsider like Donald Trump was coming from, on the one hand interpersonal inequality and the decline of social communities. What we thought is that just by looking anecdotally, at what had happened in the US that it was not the poorest of the poor, or the richest of the rich that were voting or voted in 2016 for Donald Trump. In fact, they voted together for Hillary Clinton, whereas it was mainly people living in declining communities, in places that had been seeing that people leave, jobs go, that their salaries were being depressed, etc. Those were the ones that were casting the vote. So our hypothesis was clear. It was not interpersonal inequality, and declining social capital, it was probably long-term economic decline in places that were still relatively cohesive. And this is what we found that on the whole, a country with strong interpersonal inequalities, the vote for anti-system candidates in this case, Donald Trump was not related to huge salary polarisation, although this might explode in the future. It was mainly related to long-term economic decline, in the form of loss of employment, but also to long-term demographic decline in the form of loss of population. By contrast, we saw no connection between declining wages and declining salaries and vote for Donald Trump.

Christine Garrington  6:41 

Really interesting. And now, it’s also been said that the global financial crisis of 2008 was was a key driver. Did your research support that or not?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  6:52

Yes, we’ve done the research for every decade. So economic decline since the 1970s, until 2016 and 2020. The dates of the elections that we look at. 1980 to those years 1990, 2000 and 2010. Until then, and the 2008 financial crisis is the fuse, it’s probably the last drop that actually made the glass on the water overflow, in places where that were very hard hit by the crisis in places where they have seen the loss of jobs accelerated to, for example, competition by trade, mainly coming from China. Those are the places where the switch from Mitt Romney to Donald Donald Trump, where the Trump margin increase the most those are the places that actually led to Trump winning the vote. But having said that, this is a far, far longer decline. That is there, we find evidence that for every single decade that we control all the way back to 1970, that in all cases, the decline in local population and decline in local employment is positively and significantly correlated, to more votes for Donald Trump.

Christine Garrington  8:05 

Okay, and what other key things emerge that you think, you know, really might be important in these years where we’re looking back on we’re living through still this incredibly intense period of American politics and European politics, global politics, and what what is played out?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  8:22

We saw the events of the 6th of January 2021 and the risk it has represented to democracy. But we have seen in the case of the UK, that something that is, probably hasn’t happened for centuries, like proroguing Parliament took place without virtually everyone batting an eyelid. We’re seeing how countries like Hungary, and Poland are moving away or drifting away from democracy. So what we have is a really, really serious threat to a system that with all its problems, and it’s needed of reform has generated greater prosperity, greater equality. And I would say in the last 70 years in the developed world, the longest period of peace we have ever experienced. So with all its flaws, is probably by far the best system that we have. That what these anti-system let’s call them populist politicians are offering might be apparently simple solutions, but in reality are far more dangerous and likely to just exacerbate polarisation and lead to conflict because these people feed on external enemies, whether real or imaginary. So there was a need for me to try to find potential solutions to this problem. And what has emerged from the research is that lack of opportunities, long-term economic decline, long-term demographic decline, long-term decline in service provisions to many communities in the US but also across most of Europe are at the root of the problem, we have a territorial problem. This is the situation we have, for example, in the UK where there, the need to level up is not just to reduce disparities, but mainly to tap on the potential of places that whether in America or in the north of the UK, for the past, where the motives of the US and the British economy and now are languishing mainly because of lack of political attention, but not just a lack of political attention, lack of belief, from political elites, and often from the population in big cities, but also from themselves, that they have got significant potential, and that this potential can be mobilised in order to lift their economies or lift their quality of life.

Christine Garrington  10:46

Some really important insights there, Andres, thank you. But I just wonder if we might finish by asking you whether you feel that the research tells us anything about what the future might hold in respect of continuing support for Trumpism and more populism and populist policies?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  11:02 

This is a deeply rooted problem, that it has been brewing for a very long time. And it requires sustained and serious policy solutions. We have seen in the situation in recent days in the UK with the publication of the levelling up white paper, that this has become centre stage of UK politics. But I do still feel that whether it is in the case of the UK, or in the case of the US or elsewhere in Europe, what we’re finding is that many decision makers are paying lip service to the idea that there’s a need to mobilise resources that there’s a need to invest in areas that have been declining that there’s a need on to tap on those resources. But in reality, there’s a strong lack of belief that place based, place sensitive policies that respond to local challenges, but also mobilise local needs local potential, they think they’re not going to work.

Christine Garrington  12:01 

And what from your point of view, would you say are the ramifications of continuing down that road?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  12:06 

If we keep on doing this, we are in a situation where many people in our countries have said enough is enough, we have had enough of a system which seems to benefit someone else. And not us. That if we are asked to do let’s say, an environmental transition? Well, we have. And this is the situation in France, what has happened is that diesel fuel taxes have increased, and we were told 15 years ago that diesel was the future. And now our ageing diesel cars, we have to pay for it. Whereas the people living in Paris, for example, they have alternative transport, they’re richer so they can very often afford electrical cars. And we are paying for a transition that is driven by an urban elite that is aloof to our needs. If this is not addressed, these people have now have decided that they want to shake the tree and they want to shake it hard and they are doing it and they have found their champions. So if this is not done seriously I’m afraid, we might see that the prospect of a 2024 re-election of Donald Trump and it would be the first US president since Grover Cleveland to when non-successive terms, or someone of that ilk, either in the US or in many across parts of Europe and other parts of the world is likely to become something that is common. And in my view, that would be very dangerous for the reasons I said before. We have a system that is flawed, but a system that with all its flaws is far better than any of the alternative we have at the table.

Christine Garrington  13:45 

“Golfing with Trump. Social capital, decline, inequality, and the rise of populism in the US” is research by Andres Rodriguez-Pose, Neil Lee and Cornelius Lipp. It’s been produced as part of DIAL’s project Populism, Inequality and Institutions. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of the DIAL podcast, which was presented and produced by me Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts.

Extending working life: what needs to change to make policies work?

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In Episode 13 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne discusses findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project (Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life. 

 

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, we’re talking to Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne about findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life. I started by asking her to talk about the policy backdrop to the research

Nicky LeFeuvre  0:25  

Over the last 10 or 12 years there has been this quite widespread consensus about the need to extend working lives and this consensus has existed at national levels, you know, government initiatives, also across international organisations like the OECD, and the dominant narrative has been based on kind of two or three basic assumptions this inevitability of increasing full pension age, to keep pace with life expectancy. Questions about the sustainability of our existing welfare systems, pension systems, and also a discourse around personal individual choice and personal responsibility. You know, this idea fielded by the OECD that people are increasingly free to construct their own biographies and so there has been this sort of focus on rewardingly later retirement or penalising early retirement in actual fact, and relatively little concern for the inherent, I would say dynamics of accumulated inequality that lie behind this policy objective. And so this was very much something that we wanted to address in the in the DAISIE project and of course, it was completely in line with the overall aims of the DIAL programme. And our sort of particular focus was to say okay, individuals are receiving this policy discourse which is relatively homogenous across the board, and what are they doing with it? Okay, how is this really impacting on their lives? And notably, how is this being interpreted and acted upon by their employers, by the occupations that they’re in? And to what extent their past life experiences, particularly their employment histories, and the way that their past employment has been articulated with their care duties if they happen to be women? How is all this coming together to produce a, what we presume would be quite a varied experience of what extended working life actually means for individuals and for organisations, to be honest.

Christine Garrington  2:28  

Yeah, now that brings me very nicely on to my next question, actually, because in recent years, policymakers have really recognised the need, the importance of taking, you know what we talked about as a life course approach to this issue, something you’ve just hinted at, and, and this is something that really resonates with your research. Tell us why this is so important.

Nicky LeFeuvre  2:45  

I think there has been it’s been slow to come, but it is there, I would say, perhaps emerging recognition that rather than full-fledged recognition at the moment of the need to avoid the accumulation of individual disadvantages over the life course in terms of extended working life and this is related to health issues. You know, we do not age equally, people are not as equally able to envisage extending their working lives and they’re also not as equally motivated to do so. So that this recognition has come or is coming slowly. And in the most recent OECD document, for example, which is entitled working better with age, there is this idea that perhaps there has been too, too much of focus on these financial incentives. So making it you know, financially penalising people for leaving the labour market too early with the too being in speech marks and the need to address what is often termed demand side barriers to extended working life. And I really do like this this quote from the OECD that now recognises the fact that we need workers who want to work longer and also employers who want to employ them, and I think this is really the crux of the issue here. You know, there’s there is this emerging shift towards the recognition that this is not just about individual choice that these extended work, working life issues are related to a whole host of structural constraints and opportunities. And this is really what we were wanting to do in the DAISIE project. It does really resonate with us because we were arguing that it is important to look beyond macro level policies and to study exactly how they are being interpreted how they’re being applied by employers and by individuals according to the you know, particular histories and their particular circumstances. So yes, this this really was very exciting for us, because we did see this policy shift on the horizon, as we were, you know, preparing to to address those issues in the project.

Christine Garrington  4:58  

Yeah, that’s great. That’s a really neat summary of the backdrop to this work. So let’s move on then. And if you could give us an outline an overview of what the DAISIE project has actually been doing?

Nicky LeFeuvre  5:12  

We set out to adopt what we called a multi-level research design, because we wanted to integrate as I just said, the policy background obviously you can’t completely abstract this out of your reasoning. So we did want to look at the similarities or the variations in these extended working life policies across countries and see whether there were some best practices or some policy recommendations that were being really adopted across the board and others that were perhaps, you know, more localised in certain contexts or certain countries. So we wanted this macro level analysis of working life practices, but also the objectives that were that were being defined by by different policymakers, either at the EU level or in particular countries. We also wanted to sort of micro socio sort of individual analysis. So we wanted to explore particularly the well-being, the health and the work life balance issues that older workers were facing. So we knew we wanted to use biographical accounts we wanted life history interviews, we wanted really to be able to get at the experiences of older workers, which are kind of slightly invisiblised in the policy documents. And in order to integrate those two levels or those two scales of analysis, we needed the mezzo level which is the sort of intermediate level the occupational and the organisational level, as I said previously, often sort of left out of existing analyses in order to look at what was happening in different employment sectors. And therefore, we adopted this case study method where we selected three different occupations or three different sectors: finance, health and transport. And with our sort of cross-national comparative perspective, we then looked at these three sectors that we could compare both within with other sectors within the same country and across countries to see whether these extended working-like issues were being addressed and implemented to the same extent and in the same ways in different sectors and in different countries.

Christine Garrington  7:20  

Such an ambitious programme of research and also at a very challenging time with everything going on with COVID.

Nicky LeFeuvre  7:27  

Carrying out empirical fieldwork during the COVID pandemic was a little bit challenging for us. But what we’ve actually done is cross country and cross sector comparative analysis using case studies that we carried out in the five countries and in three different sectors as I said, health sector, health sector, finance and transport. We have collected a huge amounts of empirical data, qualitative data to a large extent. We’ve used biographical interviews with older workers, male and female workers, and we have about 500 of these interviews across the board. We have of course prepared English language summaries of these interviews because we have to now compare them comparatively and they were not carried out all in the same language. So as you can imagine, this is slightly challenging. And we’ve also done about 60 expert interviews and we met up in each country and each company we went into we met with the human resource managers, we we talked to line managers, trade union representatives, and so on, to get a feel of how ageing at work was being framed in these different institutions. And we have a collection of about 500 life course grids, which enable us to kind of visualise the life course events that led up to people ageing at work, if you like. So the family events, the residential ability events and of course, their employment histories that frame the ways in which they are now thinking about whether they’re going to retire at what age they want to retire, whether they could envisage extending their working lives and under what circumstances. So quite quite a wealth of data. We’re starting to get to grips with along with a secondary statistical analysis that we did previous to the to the case studies.

Christine Garrington  9:12  

So what are the sort of the first things, most the things that you did early on Nicky I think was to map older workers employment trends, what were the key things to emerge there?

Nicky LeFeuvre  9:22  

We were really interested in looking at cross national differences here. And of course, we do see and that’s not you know, that’s unsurprising given given the convergence in the policy measures that I mentioned earlier. We do see a convergence of the employment rates, basically in the 55 to 64 year age group, I would say. So if we look at the data over the past 10 years, the differences between countries have been reduced. We still have about, you know, up to 20% difference in employment rates at 55 to 64. So this is not negligible at all, but the differences across countries are becoming smaller. So there’s there’s this idea of a kind of norm of extended working life, but remember, I’m talking about 55 to 64 here so what we’re really looking at is actually encouraging people to work up to full retirement age and very little actually about encouraging people to work beyond full retirement age. I think that’s a you know, quite an important point to remember when we’re talking about ageing at work. In actual fact, we’re looking at 55 to 64. And that’s where you know that the changes have been over recent years. The other important thing to remember is that there has been a slight reduction in the gender gap in retirement timing. Over the same period, women do continue to retire earlier than than their male counterparts in in almost all of the countries we’ve looked at. And of course, that’s why they they are to a certain extent the prime targets of many extended working life policies in recent years. But the the gap in the retirement, the actual retirement age of men and women has been falling. And that’s also very interesting because it means that the gender dimension of what it means to age at work becomes particularly important to look at in detail.

Christine Garrington  11:18  

So although as you said, you looked across a number of employment sectors, we’re going to be focusing in on the finance sector for our interview today. So my first question is why the finance sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  11:28 

We were trying to decide which sectors to focus our case studies on. Several criteria were taken into consideration. One of them was of course the gender composition so we wanted sectors that was sort of contrasting in terms of the share of male and female workers. So healthcare was our sort of highly feminised sector transport our highly masculinised and finance our sort of gender balanced sector. Then we wanted sectors where the share of older workers was quite variable. And finance actually is the sector where we have the lowest share of older workers of the three sectors we looked at we have more or less depending on countries there is some variation around 20 to 30% of over 50 year olds in the finance sector, which is let’s to give an example half the rates of older workers in employment compared to the transport sector for example. So quite a low share of older workers in finance. And this is obviously related to the history of the of the sector of the occupation. Which is an occupation which has been downsizing and restructuring for the past 20 to 30 years. And where older workers have in most countries been targeted during these restructuring, downsizing operations and have often been offered various early retirement packages, or at least some older workers, mostly male managers, in fact, have been offered packages. And so the finance sector has kind of lopped off a whole generation. And this means that today, it is one of the sectors were that were older workers are relatively underrepresented. But it’s a sector that is now facing a number of challenges whether these rather generous early retirement packages have become financially non-viable, and where there’s also been some recognition that the accumulated experience of older workers, actually the banks actually needed that experience in order to face the new challenges. And so there is a shift in policy and this was also very interesting for us.

Christine Garrington  13:39  

Okay, let’s move on to some numbers then. What were you able to see in terms of the share or the proportions of the numbers of older workers in the finance sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  13:47  

So, the moment we have a very, very small share of older workers, if I give you just you know, some figures for example, in in the Czech Republic, only 10% of men working in the finance sector are aged over 50 in 2019, but 20% of women in the Czech finance sector are aged over 50. So this is also interesting. It’s one of the rare sectors where, proportionally speaking, the share of older women, as compared to the whole female workforce is greater than the share of older men as part of the male workforce. And this is quite a rare configuration in sort of the European labour markets at the moment. So that was also something that we were very interested in exploring further.

Christine Garrington  14:31  

So let’s dig now into some of the rather wonderful data that you’ve been collecting, especially that qualitative data so when you asked workers about their experiences of being older employees in this sector, what were some of those key things that come out of that? Of what they told you?

Nicky LeFeuvre  14:46 

Well, perhaps I can, I can start with a rather eloquent quote from one of our Swiss interviewees, and I mean you have to take this against the backdrop of this very sort of systematic offloading of older workers over the past 30 years from the banking sector, and one of our interviewees said sort of almost in a whisper “ageing is something we just don’t talk about in this bank”. And this really I think, translates quite nicely how stigmatised the question of ageing is within the banking sector. We came across a lot of negative stereotypes about older workers. Older workers are systematically presented as lacking skills, being unable to keep up with the pace of organisational and technological change. And to a certain extent, this is of course the banks justifying their past age management policies which were almost entirely based on externalising ageing at work if you like, getting rid of their older workers, before they actually had to deal with ageing at work. And so in a lot of our interviews, ageing was seen as either something that could possibly enable one to leave the finance sector well before reaching retirement age. So you know showing that you were not able to adapt was seen as as a as a good reason to to leave early, or as something that was quite risky in that the bank could therefore consider you to be too old and and not flexible enough to face the challenges of this digital revolution that’s going on in in banking, and therefore you could be made redundant because you were not keeping up with the pace of things. So basically, there was this idea that age is something that we don’t talk about and older workers are a great pains to prove to their employers and to the themselves and to their colleagues, that they are actually not part of this terrible stigmatised group that one would call older workers.

Christine Garrington  16:56  

So some quite unexpected views expressed there about this whole issue of being an older worker, and what are the implications of that for any sort of age management policies that any business might want to put in place in this sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  17:10  

Any kind of age management strategies that are adopted in this in this context, are destined to fail basically, because people refuse to be identified with a stigmatised group. That would be the target of you know, these age management policies, and therefore, even when there are minimal measures, I mean, we didn’t have a huge range of age management measures that we came across in our case study banks but most of them were related rather to the transition to retirement. So you know, accompanying workers in the transition to retirement, which we consider not really to be age management policies at all because this is you know, this is thinking about how to get rid of your older workers still, rather than thinking about what you do with them when they stay. But even in in those cases, there was a very, very low take up rate because nobody really wanted to run the risk of being identified as an older worker, because this was such a, you know a stigmatised category, and no one wanted to be demoted, or no one wanted to be encouraged to leave because they were part of that group.

Christine Garrington  18:13  

So Nicky, there seems to be a real disjunct – a real mismatch here between the sort of policy top level policy narrative that you outlined earlier and what you’re actually hearing on the ground from workers. You know, what, what’s your take on all of that? How does this chime with that policy narrative that you were outlining?

Nicky LeFeuvre  18:29  

Yes, so I mean, I think these results do, really do tell us that any serious attempt at extending the duration of our working lives requires the active involvement of employers in the business sector as a whole. It’s it’s quite incredible I think that we should find such a small share of older workers in a non-manual sector like banking, where the physical limitations to you know working longer in terms of health and well-being should in theory be far more limited than in the health sector or in the transport sector, but actually, we find the opposite. We find that finance, in finance we have a small share of older workers. So this really does confirm that postponing retirement is not only about health, it’s not only about financial incentives, and it is very much about how older workers are perceived within particular sectors, how they are treated by their employers, and particular I think in those parts of the job market that are looking to reduce staff costs that are looking to scale down their activities or who are confronted with technological change or organisational restructuring. Then, then we really do have to accompany I think companies in in looking at how they, how they frame the whole issue of, of ageing and working.

Christine Garrington  19:51  

Something I found quite extraordinary in in your research was that when you spoke to companies they expressed, expressed a reluctance or hesitation to introduce any age related policies for fear that this would somehow be seen as discriminatory in some way. What’s your take on that?

Nicky LeFeuvre  20:08  

We had a number of examples where HR managers line managers went to great lengths to explain to us that they couldn’t offer any positive support to their older workers because this would be seen to be discriminatory towards other groups of workers. And so we were kind of left a little bit speechless at this thinking, but what interpretation of equal opportunity is being developed here? And why is it that companies believe and they do apparently strongly believe that any accommodation of ageing in organisational structures in the way that work is shared  out or the way working time expectations or or shift work organisation – anything that would facilitate the experiences of older workers identified as a group with potentially some needs that are different to those of other age groups. This should not be seen as discrimination. This should be seen as equal opportunity policy, and it shouldn’t be seen as coming into conflict, for example, with gender equality policies or with parental support policies or whatever other objectives companies are seeking to meet. So I think, really applying or emphasising the need to think equal opportunities in an intersectional way looking at how gender and age and ethnic origin and disability and so on, interact across the life course and how employers can deal with these in innovative and creative and complex ways. I think this would be really something very useful because we were struck by this, this difficulty that that organisations were facing in thinking through what they could actually do to support their, their older workers.

Christine Garrington  22:05  

You did make a number of quite clear recommendations for employers and policy makers in the work that you’ve done. Can you just talk us through those?

Nicky LeFeuvre  22:12  

The need for organisations I would say, you know, policymakers at the national level, international level, but also within companies to recognise that there is a potential mismatch. In fact, in the older workers we are talking about as a target group for extended working life policies. Spontaneously when we when we talk to to employers about the kind of older workers that they would be interested in keeping on that they would be interested in training or that they would be interested to target for bridge schemes or for unretirement schemes as they call it and so this possibility of employing retirees back perhaps on a on a reduced rate. Companies do have quite clear, clear image of the kind of worker that they would be interested in in involving in those kinds of schemes. Unfortunately, those images do not equate very well with the profiles of the workers who are actually motivated and interested in extending their working lives. Who tend not to be the most highly qualified or who tend not to be the workers who have continuous employment histories. Who have had haven’t had any major health events during their adult life course, who haven’t had any significant care commitments that have taken them out of the labour market, who have relatively comfortable financial arrangements made for their latter years and so on and so forth.

Christine Garrington  23:37 

So among the people you spoke to then, who was motivated to extend their working lives and why? 

Nicky LeFeuvre  23:45  

Workers can also be motivated because for example, they have developed their careers quite late on in life. So maybe they are just moving into a management position because they’ve had, if they’re women, they have had some years out of employment for family reasons. We also had a number of very interesting testimonies from older women saying that continuing to work longer was actually very attractive to them, because it was one way of avoiding being swamped by care duties that they could be expected to take charge off in later life. So either you know, being on call for grandchildren or being available for elderly dependent relatives. This idea that continuing to work was actually a way of avoiding being overwhelmed by by these care expectations was something perhaps something we were not expecting to find to such a wide extent. And so quite clearly, women like that who are interested in extending their working lives as long as their working conditions are adapted to their needs are not being identified at the moment as resources that employers could call upon, and people that the employers could have in mind when they think about how they are going to manage age. You know what strategies they’re going to put in place and how they’re going to start, operationalizing their age management policies before people become old you know before people get to within two or three years of retiring.

Christine Garrington  25:20  

So is there a simple message in all of this?

Nicky LeFeuvre  25:22  

Making it clear that they’re the kind of people that employers would spontaneously think about as their target group for extending working lives are not necessarily primarily the people who are interested in extending their working lives, but there are other groups who are highly motivated to work for longer. I think this is you know, one message that we can pull out of the research that could translate into some quite exciting and quite innovative policy decisions on the ground as it were.

Christine Garrington  25:55  

Dynamics of accumulated inequalities for seniors in employment is a DIAL research project, looking at the gendered impacts of policies and an extended working life. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which was presented by me, Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Why and how do rich parents have rich children?

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In Episode 12 of Series 3 of our podcast, Jamie Hentall MacCuish from University College London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies discusses findings  from DIAL’s TRISP project on the intergenerational elasticity of earnings or why rich parents have rich children. 

The Intergenerational Elasticity of Earnings: Exploring the Mechanisms is a DIAL Working Paper. 

 

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, we’re talking to Jamie Hentall MacCuish from University College London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He’s been investigating why rich parents have rich children. I started by asking him to explain the background to the research.

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 0:26

If you will permit me I think it’s a bit hard to answer that question without very quickly saying what the paper is about. So in it, we decompose the intergenerational elasticity of earnings or the IGE, which is the correlation between parents and children’s earnings. And we do this to try and understand what mechanisms transmit privilege from one generation to the next. We were using this dataset – the national cohort data study or NCDS – for another paper with a slightly different focus, and we realised the data set offered a unique window into the mechanisms affecting the IGE. Now the NCDS follows a single cohort of people born in a particular week in 1958. From the moment of their birth, up until now as they approach retirement. And it really is a globally unrivalled resource for social scientists due to its combination of information about family background, parental effort and time investment in their children and children’s ability, educational outcomes and later life earnings. Having this information allows us to disentangle the relative importance of family background parental investments in children, further education and ability in explaining the correlation between parents’ and children’s earnings. Now, I mean, I’ve said it’s a globally unrivalled data set what really makes it globally unrivalled is how forward looking this policy was in 1958. I mean, other countries have since introduced similar datasets, but much later meaning that now we don’t have data that covers really most of the working life of these group of individuals, which really makes it a fascinating window into what explains that intergenerational correlation in earnings or IGE.

Christine Garrington 2:10

What exactly was it about having wealthy or poor parents that you wanted to get to grips with specifically in this piece of research?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 2:19

Why wealthy parents have wealthy children and vice versa? So the children of rich families tend to differ from the poorer peers in multiple ways. They have fewer siblings and a more and more educated parents, their parents spend more time with them and send them to better quality schools. Their cognitive skills are higher at the end of compulsory education, and they complete more years of total education. All these channels have been found to affect an individual’s earnings. But in order to design policies to improve intergenerational mobility, we need to understand the relative importance of these channels and how they interact with each other to generate correlations in lifetime earnings.

Christine Garrington 3:00

Okay, so what did you actually do then once you know, once you sort of started digging into the data, what did you actually do?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 3:06

A multi-level mediation analysis. Basically, that means we work backwards to see how much of the IGE is explained by each mechanism. So that’s probably pretty cryptic. But in the first level, that we started at we only allow for direct effects on a child’s earnings of the years in education, their cognitive ability, the quality of the school they attended, and the parental investment they received and their family background. So in this first level, for example, we find that education accounts for 43% of the IGE amongst females. However, in the next level, we account for the fact that other channels refer to events earlier in the child’s life, than total years of education because really, total years of education is determined by further education decisions. And so other events plausibly impact on the years of education. Once we account for both the direct effects as well as these indirect effects through years of education, the fraction of the IGE explained for females by education collapses to just 2% to continue with the example given earlier, and cognitive abilities at the end of compulsory schooling really explained most of this difference.

Christine Garrington 4:22

Can you help us unpack that a little bit Jamie? What does that actually imply?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 4:25

Once you account for cognitive ability at the end of compulsory schooling, the fact that children of richer parents spend longer in education doesn’t account for much of the persistence in earnings between generations. And then we then extend the analysis back to more levels to account for the fact that parental investments and stalling might, like school quality, might impact cognitive ability at 16. And that family background might impact parental investment decisions, or the parents’ choice of school.

Christine Garrington 4:52

You mentioned a little bit earlier about, you know, the amazing data resource that the NCDS is. Are we able to sort of tease out a little bit more about the sorts of things that people are asked in that study that would help you with, with this research?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 5:07

There are multiple things asked and multiple tests. So it’s not just survey questions. There were tests; reading tests, math tests administered to these children in schools. They measure their weight at birth, the researchers went into the children’s school and ask the teacher their impressions of how interested the mother and father are in the child’s education. With, it was asked how many outings the parents took their children on, and these are I mean, we combine all of these measures about parental investments into sort of using a latent factor analysis to tease out a measure of how much the parents invest in their children. And similarly, with the child’s ability, we have measures of reading scores, math scores, and then teacher ratings of these children on maths and reading ability. So I mean, it’s it’s a very, I could go on. It’s a very, very rich data set. And it’s yeah, it’s not just survey data. It’s tests administered medical information. Yes, it’s really quite detailed.

Christine Garrington 6:11

You’ve touched on this a little bit already. But when you looked at the data what were the key differences? Tell us more about the key differences that emerged between the children of wealthier and poorer parents.

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 6:23

The children of richer families tend to differ in multiple ways from their poorer counterparts: fewer siblings, more educated parents, better parental time investments and school quality investments, higher cognitive skills, and more years of total education. But for us, that was really just the jumping off point to then analyse which of these differences matter most to explain this correlation of earnings between parents and generations from this persistence of inequality from one generation to the next.

Christine Garrington 6:51

And you took into account obviously a range of other factors as well what factors mattered most in all of this and how did they play out?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 6:59

So once we accounted for all the levels of analysis, so the for the effect of a family background and early investment on cognition and years of education, what we found is that family background and investment in early childhood mattered the most, the relative importance being different for men and women. For women, the most important was family background followed by school quality. And for men, parental time investment mattered most followed by family background.

Christine Garrington 7:24

So this is all very interesting, but I’m wondering now you know what are the important takeaways from the research about this relationship between how well off a parent is and their child’s life lifetime income prospects, for example?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 7:38

It simply what factors we found mattered most? It seems that to explain the persistence of inequality in earnings across generations, early childhood investments and family background really matter the most. And higher educational choices, for example, aren’t one of the mechanisms generating persistence in inequality in earnings across generations.

Christine Garrington 8:02

Right, I wonder if there’s any more to say there about from a policy perspective, if you like for those committed to want to seek and create a more equitable, a fairer playing field for all children, regardless of their background and how rich their parents are, what sorts of things are most relevant? Are they the things that you’ve outlined already? Or is there anything more that they can take away from this?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 8:21

Obviously, you want to be careful making too many policy suggestions off one piece of research, but that said, I think our research really is in alignment with a large and growing literature that says early childhood investments are one of the best levers available to reduce intergenerational inequality. I think anything the government, our research would say and so I think with a large growing body of research say, that anything government could do to reduce the inequality in investments in early childhood would be one of the most powerful mechanisms to reduce intergenerational inequality.

Christine Garrington 8:56

The Intergenerational Elasticity of Earnings: Exploring the Mechanisms is a DIAL Working Paper by Uta Bolt, Eric French, Jamie Hentall MacCuish and Cormac O’Dea from the Trends in Inequality: Sources and Policy or TRISP project . You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which was presented by me, Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Documenting childhood inequalities and the case for early intervention

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In episode 11 of the DIAL podcast, Professor Gabriella Conti from University College London discusses two pieces of research part-funded through DIAL’s Growing up Unequal? The Origins, Dynamics and Lifecycle Consequences of Childhood Inequalities project.  The first investigates socio-emotional inequalities in children born in the UK in the 1970s and the Millennium and the second investigates the long term health benefits of the UK Government’s high profile Sure Start programme. 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, we’re talking to Professor Gabriella Conti from University College London, about two pieces of research. The first compares the behaviour of children born in the 1970s with those born in the millennium, the other looks at the long-term health benefits of the UK government’s Sure Start programme.

Gabriella Conti  0:26  

So we know that early human capital is a key determinant of lifecycle outcomes. And by now we also know that if there are early life inequalities that can perpetuate and amplify a person’s life cycle. And so it’s really important to document existence of early inequalities if they’re present, thinking about what we can do about them. So there was one starting point we ha. Another one was that we know that inequality has been increasing throughout the developed world and in particular in the US and the UK in the recent years. And there is likely less evidence for inequalities in child development. In particular, we were interested in the dimension of child development whose importance is being increasingly recognised which is child social emotional development. And so this is why then we started looking into data and see what we could do to document the evolution of inequalities in the social emotional development of children as early as we could.

Christine Garrington  1:26  

So how did you go about the research tell us what you actually, what you actually did?

Gabriella Conti  1:30  

You know, the documenting evolution inequalities for a long period of time requires that you have data which can be compared across time. And in the UK we’re fortunate enough to have British Cohort Studies, which essentially follow the life cycle of cohorts since birth. And in particular, we use the data from two of these cohorts. The British Cohort Study, which has followed the cohort born in one week in 1970. And the Millennium Cohort Study which has followed a cohort born throughout 2000. So these were like, a thirty years apart. And we had pretty big sample sizes more than nine thousand for the 70 Cohort, more than five thousand for the 2000, so called Millennium Cohort. So we were able to extract from these two data sets, relatively similar questions on child behaviour as to the mothers in the two cohorts. At age five so relatively early in life, and mothers were asked questions about whether for example, the child is restless? The child is solitary? Child is screaming or fidgety? And we construct the comparable skill so for two important dimensional social emotional skills, which have been used widely in an interdisciplinary literature on child development, namely, externalising and internalising.

Christine Garrington  2:51  

Can you explain in simple terms, a little bit about what we mean by those types of things?

Gabriella Conti  2:55 

Such emotional skills internalising refer to the child ability to focus their drive and determination and externalising relates to interpersonal skills. So a child with better externalising skills is likely less restless, hyperactive, less antisocial and a child with better internalising skills in less solitary, neurotic and worried. And one important thing that it’s good to notice at this point is that while you know the same questions have been asked to the mothers across the two cohorts, and we were super careful and just used the questions which were worded in a similar way of course it could be that what is perceived as a hyperactive child has changed in thirty years. And so we use reasoned methodological advances to take this into account to make sure that we’re effectively comparing the same constructs that showing the development of children and this methodology can be used in other settings. And we’ll show that it’s really important to use as we show in our application.

Christine Garrington  4:01  

Just talk us through then the key things that sort of emerged once you’d gone through all of this, once you’d look so closely at that data, once you’d put those methods in place and once you’d used those really robust approaches.

Gabriella Conti  4:12  

Yeah, so actually, we find that inequalities in social emotional development – this externalising internalising behaviour of these very young children of five years did increase in this 30 years between 1970 and 2000. So this kid we’re measured in 1975 and 2005. And it’s important to notice that we’re not able to say whether one cohort was better or worse than another because we weren’t able to compare the levels. Because thanks to our methodology, we were able to compare the difference so the inequality between these two cohorts but no whether one was better or worse than the other. But we saw very clearly that the inequality in the cohort born more recently, so the one born in 2000 was greater than one born in the seventies. So in particular, we see increasingly this early gap between the children with the highest and the lowest social emotional skills. So for example, no matter which measure we used we saw that for example, if you looked at the difference between the 19th and 13th percentile, this has widened substantially in 30 years. And this increase was particularly pronounced for boys. For example, for boys, the gap is increased by 19% for externalising skills and even more 30% for internalising skills. So inequality in the social emotional skills so very young children are five years of age was much lower among the children born in the 70s than among those born in the 2000.

Christine Garrington  5:50  

I will ask you what you make of all of that in a moment, but you also took a number of sort of different factors into consideration, didn’t you including the mother’s level of education, what did you see there? That was important?

Gabriella Conti  6:00  

Yeah, indeed, because as we know there have been several changes in the composition or the population composition or the workforce but also changes in women’s experience, especially in the labour market. And so we wanted to look not only what happens in these gaps across the groups but also zooming in on particular groups. And so in particular, we found that even when we compare children or mothers with different characteristics, we found increases inequalities and in particular, while having more educated mothers or mothers with healthier behaviour was an important determinant to the skills in both cohorts. We found that the benefit of having the mother we higher levels of education or a mother in employment was significantly larger for both boys and girls in the most recent cohort than in the cohort born in 1970. So in other words, the difference between the children are more or less educated mother was greater among those born in 2000, as compared to those born in the seventies. And we found this for children’s mothers with respect to mothers education, with respect to mothers employment, but those inequalities increase between children and mothers who smoked and not during pregnancy.

Christine Garrington  7:19  

Okay, so some really interesting findings. I’m interested to know whether you were surprised by what you found? And if so, how you explain what you found?

Gabriella Conti  7:26  

I might sound a bit cynical but I am going to say I wasn’t actually surprised about the findings per se, because we do know that there have been many increases inequality across different dimensions. What I found really surprising was the extent of the increase and the fact we could see that so early across such an important measure of development. So we did spend a lot of time in trying to tease out the various determinants of this increase in inequality and as I mentioned before, there being significant societal changes in these thirty years so for example, it’s also documented in the paper across the two cohorts. The average age of women have children has increased by approximately three years from 26 to 29. The proportion of women in employment has increased in our data we see from 42% to 62%. And especially the proportion of unmarried mothers is increased dramatically from 5% in the 70 cohort to 36% among mothers in the 2000 cohort. So mothers are having children on one hand at an older age and when they’re more engaged in the labour market, which is good for social emotional skills. But on the other hand, mothers are also more likely to be unmarried at birth, which is more stressful, and so it’s less good for social emotional development. And we have used the methodology to decompose these factors. And we found the changes in these factors explain about half of the cross cohort increasing inequality when it comes to externalising skills. 

Christine Garrington  9:02  

Okay, so let’s consider them the, the implications of these widening inequalities that you’re hinting at here and talking about here, especially in the you know, recent context of the COVID-19 pandemic. What would you say overall Gabriella that we learn from this work?

Gabriella Conti  9:17  

So first of all, let me remark that we’ve seen during the pandemic because there’s been increases in inequalities in learning experiences at all level by the children in the home environment. So the children would have been better able to have learning for example, at home or will have had the parents will be better able to cope. They certainly been affected less severely than children in a more disadvantaged situation. And so now it’s starting to be documented that in particular, children’s social emotional skills have been affected by the pandemic. And on the other hand, as have documented those in other work, support especially for the more disavantaged is also diminished during the pandemic. So for example, done work on the Universal Health Visiting therapist showing that they’re in addition to the cuts of course for many years, they’ve been an unequal in widespread deployment across local authorities. And so the pandemic there has been a double hit on the one hand families that have been unequally affected depending on individual circumstances. On the other hand, also, you know, public services so which are supposed to help families and to help preventing inequalities have been also unequally affected. And so it’s really crucial that the government takes stock of this and hopefully, in the upcoming annual review, it provides more support for the earliest and prevent at least the widening of these inequalities.

Christine Garrington  10:47  

Yeah, on this whole idea of the importance of early intervention being key to reducing inequalities. We’re really fortunate to be able to talk to you today about another piece of research that you’ve been doing, and looking at one of the best known really policy innovation interventions in this era, particularly here in England, which is called Sure Start. Now, I think many people are familiar with it, but for those who are not I wonder if you can just talk us through what Sure Start is?

Gabriella Conti  11:11  

Yes, thanks so much for this question. Indeed, with colleagues at the Centre for Fiscal Studies we have been working for a few years now on Sure Start and Sure Start is really a major early education initiative in UK, which was originally area based. And for those who don’t know, it has quite a long history. It was indeed first introduced by the Labour government in 1999, so called Sure Start local programmes, and the idea was to give quality services for under fives only in disadvantaged areas then it was so popular and so well accepted by families that the government gave it the major change in 2003 and changing it to Sure Start Children’s Centre which were gradually rolled out across England and at the peak they reached more than 3500 of these centres. And what was really nice about the centres was first they provided a physical place for parents to go to bring their children to interact with other parents and it has a wide variety of services which the parents can use. Ranging from early education services, parenting support, childcare, there were health visitors providing the visits there in the Sure Start centre. There were signposts for job search assistance. So think of it really, as a one stop shop for families with children under five. If you had a child and you needed help for health, for other reasons – so you wanted a childcare place, then you could just go to Sure Start centre. And it’s also to be said that at its peak in 2010 Sure Start also received a third overall earlier spending as much as £1.8 billion a year. But then unfortunately after 2010 spending has fallen by more than two thirds, many centres have been closed, they’ve been scaled back or they’ve been renamed children’s centres. Now you don’t even hear Sure Start  or they have been integrated into family hubs.

Christine Garrington  13:10  

Yeah, so big changes over, over the piece there and your research on Sure Start has looked quite specifically at its effects on children’s health which is, you know, really important and you started by looking at hospitalizations and links with that. What did you, What did you find there?

Gabriella Conti  13:26 

So we have a data set which contains the exact address and opening date of each Sure Start both local programs and children’s centres so we were able to look at the origin of the programme and its expansion up to 2010. And then in England, we have a very good dataset called Hospital Episode Statistics where there is collected data on the universal patients using English public hospitals. So this is important because we can really have a very comprehensive look at the effects across all Sure Start centres for all England the local authority so it wasn’t like a selected or a small sample. It was quite good administrative data. And so what we did – we essentially will be focused on the expansion period of Sure Start so as I say, 1999 up to 2010. So where there were all these centres opening up. And then we’re looking at what happened essentially when you have access to Sure Start since they’re in your area. And what we find, that we find very interesting effects which changed across the life cycle of the child. So first of all, greater access to Sure Start in your area initially increases hospitalization at age one and this shouldn’t be really surprising, given that it’s common in other studies as well and my reflect the fact that the programme would help referring the parents to proper health care in the case of childhood illness, but also brings their exposure to infectious illnesses from other kids being all in the same setting. However, what is really remarkable is that these early increases are more than outweighed by longer term effects. So as we look throughout childhood adolescence, we find that there is a reduction in hospitalizations.

Christine Garrington  15:18  

And there were even longer term benefits for these children as they got older weren’t, weren’t there? Talk us through, talk us through what those benefits were.

Gabriella Conti  15:25  

So we found is that exposure to an additional centre per 1,000 children at ages 0-4 average around 7% of hospital admissions at each file. Which goes up to 8% by the end of primary school, so age 11 and 8.5% by age 15, which is the final age of this study. Now this represents approximately 2800 fewer earlier hospitalizations at age five and over 13,000 hospitalizations prevented of 11 to 15 year olds each year. So that’s quite a substantial number. It’s pretty much an 8% reduction on the pre-Sure Start hospitalizations rate and this is all completely looking essentially at the peak level of Sure Start provision where there was one centre per 1000 children available throughout England. And what is really interesting, while Sure Start was for children under fives, we’re able to detect impacts which are increasing over time and are able to detect them essentially 10 years after the children have aged out of eligibility. And if we look at the drivers of these reductions hospitalizations, we see that it’s important conditions such as external causes, so things like injuries and also mental health related admissions in addition to infectious illnesses.

Christine Garrington  17:00  

Those are just really striking findings Gabriella and I know that you also tried to get a feel for the potential cost savings that Sure Start would have generated. What were you, what were you able to say about that?

Gabriella Conti  17:11  

Yeah, I think it’s quite important is this not only to provide evidence so that a programme is effective, but that it also provides enough bang for the buck. And with Sure Start it is particularly important given as I said before all the money, which was spent at the peak of the expansion. So what we did in this case, essentially, we had on the one hand, the money that the government had provided, and so we computed in this way a cost per child which is really more like the amount of money that the government spent on Sure Start per child, and we computed this amount to be approximately £415 per eligible child which is lower by the way than the cost of other programmes. And then what we did we looked at our estimates, and we considered first of all, we costed only the results, which for which we found significant impact. So as I said, subset of external conditions in particular injuries and also poisoning, then infections. So respiratory, parasitic and then mental health as you can imagine, you know, those have huge cost. And we considered three different types of costs. So on the one hand, the reduction in hospitalization has a direct cost saving in terms of the healthcare sector, so you will have less money essentially spent because fewer kids are going to be in the hospital. And this is more like a short-term cost, the cost at the time at which we estimate the impacts. Then there are assorted indirect costs, so if parents don’t have to spend time taking care of the sick child, they are not going to be absent for work. So it’s all savings in terms of averted the loss of productivity, and also in case the parents need, for example, to buy additional drugs. And on the other hand, we also included the long-term cost. So, for example, injuries experienced by a child can have a serious long-term consequence. Mental health conditions, especially experience in adolescence, which is the time at which you will find that Sure Start significant to reduce hospitalizations also have very costly long-term consequences. And so when we add up all this benefits together – all this averted cost, we come up with number which is around £330 million. Now of these, approximately a little bit over 10% like £3.9 million is attributed to the direct cost saving to the NHS and the rest is from the longer-term averted cost. And given that we’ve computed the cohort, this is going to be a total cost of a little bit over £1 billion then these represent approximately a third of the spending on the programme. So taken together, the savings from reduced hospitalization offset around 31% of spending on the programme. And importantly, this is only considering health benefits. Our calculations haven’t included yet any potential benefits in other domains such as for example education, social care or crime.

Christine Garrington  20:34  

Goodness me so just looking at health benefits alone some, some really important good things that would change and, and help children grow up to live better, healthier, happier lives, but also an incredibly cost-effective programme. One which really doesn’t sort of exist in the same way anymore. So what are the key takeaways for policymakers here would you say? 

Gabriella Conti  20:56  

Yeah, unfortunately it’s not been good in my opinion, that Sure Start has been dismantled so quickly. So first of all, I think a key takeaway. So one key message for policymaker and not that this is a hard one to deliver. Because there are policy cycles and usually policymakers work based on these policy cycles but good programmes might take time to deliver their benefits, but it’s crucial that when a policy is decided, it has to be looked at the evidence and also it has to consider the long term benefits not only the upfront cost. Another important lesson I think, is that what probably made Sure Start so successful. Well, there are different components. I think one key component is to have everything in one place and to make it easier for the parents to access it. So having this suite of possible interventions and providing a place for parents to congregate and have access to resources. I do believe it’s key and it’s also the case that if you provide a variety of services, they are you know, their combined effects is not only the sum of the different ones, there are interactions and there are synergies. Among them. So now, you know unfortunately, Sure Start does not exist anymore. So there is this family hubs which are being shaped up and at least my hope is given that Sure Start no longer exists all these lessons will be considered into the shaping on the family hubs. And a particular part in this regard, there is a lot of talking about proportion at universities. Now one key finding that we have is that all the benefits that we find, for Sure Start are concentrated in the poorer neighbourhoods. So we don’t find the particular benefit in the richer ones. And so this is important why? Because on one hand Sure Start did help to reduce inequalities but also because going forward an important lesson for the new services such as family hubs is that the model combining universal services with a narrow base focus of disadvantaged neighbourhoods can be a successful approach to earliest interventions.

Christine Garrington  23:10  

Inequality of socio-emotional skills: a cross-cohorts comparison and The health effects of Sure Start are research part funded by DIAL’s Growing-up Unequal? The Origins, Dynamics and Lifecycle Consequences of Childhood Inequalities (GUODLCCI). More information is available on the DIAL website. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which was presented by me, Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Education pathways: how do they affect young people’s job prospects?

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In episode 10 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Steffen Schindler from the University of Bamberg discusses findings from DIAL’s LIFETRACK project which is looking at how different education pathways impact the type of job young people go on to secure. 

Further information

 

Transcript 

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three of the podcast we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode I caught up with Professor Steffen Schindler from the University of Bamberg, at DIAL’s final conference to talk about the LIFETRACK project, which has been looking at how the type of Secondary Education experienced by young people in seven different countries affects the type of job they go on to do.

Steffen Schindler  0:28  

This is the period when education systems start to sort their pupils or students into different paths, different tracks, different streams. And we were interested in how much the sorting that takes place in secondary education already predicts inequality in later life outcomes when the students are in the labour market when they’re grown up.

Christine Garrington  0:53  

Although you were looking at a number of different countries, you weren’t looking to compare across them but within them, weren’t you? So tell us about the thinking behind that.

Steffen Schindler  1:01  

There’s already some research out and we know that countries that are considered as having comprehensive education systems such as the UK for example. They tend to have lower levels of education inequalities than countries that track their students such as Germany for example, that have different schools where they go to. The new thing that we wanted to look at in our project was even though the level of inequality might be different between countries, we were interested does the differentiation in secondary education within a country still predict inequality in that country – is it important for the formation of inequality? So in the end, we have some sort of idea whether it contributes a lot or not so much to inequality.

Christine Garrington  1:50  

So working across seven countries must have posed some challenges – how did you go about organising all of that?

Steffen Schindler  1:57

Yeah well we had a very structured approach. So we had project meetings two times a year, and where we made a plan what we wanted to achieve till the next meeting. So basically, we started off with making a plan how we measure certain things such as social origin, or the labour market outcomes such as income or social class and we want to observe when people are grown up or in their 30s or 40s even So that we standardised across all the teams and then we made a plan for what we want to analyse. And we were very standardised in the beginning and the more the project was progressing the less standardised we were – the more freedom we gave to the project teams for their analysis.

Christine Garrington  2:44  

Yeah, that makes sense. So at first look all of the research teams in the countries that you were looking at, identify this differentiation between academic and vocational routes. Can you talk us through, through that? 

Steffen Schindler  2:58  

Basically, each education system has this distinction between academic tracks or streams that eventually lead into higher education on the one hand, and more vocational tracks that don’t lead into higher education. But the systems differ, how that looks like. So we have separate schools, for example, in Germany and Germany starts very early with that separation. We have separate schools in other countries such as Finland, for example, in Denmark, were the separations a bit later. Then we have England, which is a comprehensive system, but we also have some sort of academic stream, which is defined by taking a certain number of A Levels at the end. So the systems differ a bit – what the academic stream actually is, but each of them has one academic stream. And it turned out in our analysis that it’s always the separation between the academics and the non-academic stream, and that students that on academic stream always end up with better labour market outcomes in the end.

Christine Garrington  4:08 

Yeah, let’s talk about that a little bit. So when it came to those labour market outcomes for the young people concerned, what was the main implications of the differences?

Steffen Schindler  4:18  

Well, first of all, the people from the academic streams end up let’s say higher social classes with a better higher income, a better paid job with a more prestigious job in the end. So this is one result, which was pretty obvious. But another implication is that it’s also related to social inequality or social reproduction. Because if we consider who enters those academic tracks and who doesn’t, and then this is again, a question which is related to social origin. So the selection into the tracks is heavily based on social origin in all of the countries.

Christine Garrington  4:56  

And I’m interested to know if there were any advantages to being on the vocational path compared with being on the academic path.

Steffen Schindler  5:03  

I think the distinction is not so much between the academic and the vocational path but between being in upper secondary education or completing upper secondary education. So we have many countries which have an upper secondary stream, which is a vocational stream. And if we compare those students to students who haven’t been in upper secondary education, they might even have done vocational training, but the distinction is between upper secondary vocational training and lower secondary careers. And there we see advantages where people in the vocational stream in upper secondary education, indeed have labour market advantages. 

Christine Garrington  5:45  

So some of the studies also look back over people’s life courses to their social backgrounds. That’s really interesting. What were the key things to emerge around that?

Steffen Schindler  5:53  

What we saw in all of the countries is that differentiation in secondary education is a mediator of social reproduction, as we call it. That means that on the one hand, the selection into the academic secondary tracks is highly based on social backgrounds, family background. So this is the one part and the other part as I already said, since academic tracks lead into the better labour market outcomes, and this produces social inequality in the end.

Christine Garrington  6:25  

Yeah, indeed. And it really is a fascinating and important body of work that’s been carried out. What would you like those who are interested in reducing social inequalities to take away from all of this?

Steffen Schindler  6:38

I guess the core message of our project is that we have to look at differentiation in a broader sense. So usually, we were distinguishing educational systems based on very formal criteria, whether it’s a formally comprehensive system, or whether it’s a track school system. But what we’ve seen is that even in comprehensive systems there is some sort of internal differentiation, such as ability grouping, or other things that we call the hidden differentiation. That’s not very obvious. So another example would be the distinction between private education or state funded schools which is another dimension of differentiation. And I guess the core message would be to look at more carefully, those more hidden things, the more hidden differentiation in school systems

Christine Garrington  7:32 

Yeah and where do things need to go from here then? So more work to be done as always, presumably?

Steffen Schindler  7:37  

Yes, it is always more work. Our project was heavily based on longitudinal data where we could observe students from the day the entered the school system into adulthood and this is quite complex data. And what we saw is that when we are interested in those hidden forms of differentiation, we need better measures. So I think if we want to follow up on this path, we should think about how we could incorporate those measures in in those data so that would be a message also evolving from our projects that is more directed to our research.

Christine Garrington  8:15 

Educational differentiation in secondary education and labour-market outcomes is a special issue of Longitudinal and Life Course Studies by Steffen Schindler at the LIFETRACK project team. Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast, which is presented and produced by me, Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Modelling the LGBTQ workplace for new insights and understanding

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In Episode 9 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Andrew King and Matt Hall from DIAL’s CILIA-LGBTQI+ research programme discuss their work exploring how Agent Based Modelling (ABM) can contribute to the study of LGBTQ lives, and conversely, how theory and insights from LGBTQ studies can inform the practice of ABM.

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Antenatal steroids: are there links with mental and behaviour problems later on?

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In Episode 8 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Katri Räikkönen from Helsinki University and a member of DIAL’s PremLife project, talks about her research investigating whether the babies of mothers who whilst pregnant are prescribed steroid drugs, because of concerns around premature births, are more likely to develop behavioural and mental disorders later on.

Associations Between Maternal Antenatal Corticosteroid Treatment and Mental and Behavioural Disorders in Children is research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

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Mums who smoke and their baby’s birthweight

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In Episode 7 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Rita Pereira from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a member of DIAL’s Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities(GEIGHEI) project, talks about her research looking at the links between mothers’ smoking and their baby’s birthweight.

The Interplay between Maternal Smoking and Genes in Offspring Birth Weight is a DIAL Working Paper by Rita Dias Pereira, Cornelius Rietveld and Hans van Kippersluis.

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