Social Class Segregation and Its Relationship to Pupils' Examination Results in Scotland

TLDR

Scotland’s 1965 shift to comprehensive secondary education abolished selective transfers, a process largely finished by 1975. The study maps the socioeconomic makeup of Scottish schools in the late 1970s and investigates how school composition relates to pupils’ Scottish Certificate of Education grades. Using the 1981 Scottish School Leavers’ Survey of 1980 leavers, the authors estimate SES segregation across administrative divisions and apply multilevel regression to assess contextual effects of school mean SES on exam outcomes. Results reveal substantial between‑school SES variation driven by uneven high‑social‑class pupil distribution, and show that school mean SES has significant contextual effects on attainment, stronger for high‑class proportions and equally affecting high and low ability pupils.

Abstract

In 1965 Scotland began to reorganize its secondary education along comprehensive lines by abolishing selective transfer to secondary school. Ten years later the process was substantially completed. This study describes the socioeconomic composition of Scotland's school towards the end of the 1970s and examines the relationship between school composition and pupils' grades and attainment in the Scottish Certificate of Education examinations. The study employs data from the 1981 Scottish School Leavers' Survey, which surveyed a large representative sample of pupils that left school in 1980. The analysis provides estimates of socioeconomic status (SES) segregation for each of Scotland's administrative divisions, and employs multilevel regression analyses to estimate the contextual effects of school mean SES on examination results. The findings show that there is large between-school variation in SES in most school divisions, and that much of this variation is associated with an unequal distribution of pupils from high-social-class backgrounds. The findings also suggest that there are substantial contextual effects of school mean SES on examination attainment, that they are more strongly related to the proportion of high-social-class pupils in a school than the proportion of low-social-class pupils, and that they are equally strong for pupils of high and low ability alike.