Christopher J. Playford and Vernon Gayle, University of Edinburgh
School examination results were historically a private matter, and the awareness of results day was usually confined to pupils, teachers and parents. School exam results are now an annual newsworthy item in Britain and every summer the British media transmit live broadcasts of groups of young people receiving their grades. This recurrent event illustrates, and reinforces, the importance of school-level qualifications in Britain.
The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is the standard qualification undertaken by pupils in England and Wales at the end of year 11 (age 15-16). School GCSE outcomes are worth of sociological examination because in the state education system they mark the first major branching point in a young person’s educations career and play a critical role in determining pathways in education and employment.
In our paper, we turned our attention to exploring school GCSE attainment at the subject-area level, rather than looking at overall outcomes or outcomes in individual GCSE subjects. This is an innovative approach to studying school GCSE outcomes. The initial theoretical motivation was to explore if there were substantively interesting combinations or patterns of GCSE outcomes, which might be masked when the focus is either overall outcomes or outcomes in individual subjects. Within the sociology of youth there has been a growing interest in the experiences of ordinary pupils who have outcomes somewhere between the obviously successful and unsuccessful levels, and this group have been referred to as the ‘missing middle’.
The data used in the paper are from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales (YCS) which is a major longitudinal study that began in the mid-1980s. It is a large-scale nationally representative survey funded by the government and is designed to monitor the behaviour of young people as they reach the minimum school leaving age and either remain in education or enter the labour market. School GCSE outcomes are challenging to analyse because there are many GCSEs available, there is an element of pupil choice in the diet of GCSE that a pupil undertakes, some pupils study more GCSEs than others, each GCSE subject is awarded an individual grade on an alphabetical scale (A* being the highest and G being the lowest), and subject GCSE outcomes are highly correlated. We employ a latent variable approach as a practicable methodological solution to address the messy and complex nature of school GCSE outcomes.
In the paper we identify substantively interesting subject-level patterns of school-level GCSE outcomes that would be concealed in analyses of overall measures, or analyses of outcomes within individual GCSE subjects (see Table 1). The modelling process uncovers four distinctive latent educational groups. The first latent group is characterised by good GCSE outcomes, and another latent group is characterised by poor GCSE outcomes. There are two further latent groups with ‘middle’ or ‘moderate’ GCSE outcomes. These two latent groups have similar levels of overall (or agglomerate) outcomes, but one group has better outcomes in science GCSEs and the other has better outcomes in arts GCSEs.
Table 1. Latent group model results (four group model) school GCSE subject area outcomes.
Note: Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, Cohort 6; All pupils gaining a GCSE passes at grades A–G; n = 14,281; Posterior probabilities and prior probabilities reported as percentages. Reproduced from Playford and Gayle 2016, Table 5 p.156.
Membership of the latent educational groups is highly stratified. Socially advantaged pupils are more likely to be assigned to group 1 ‘Good Grades’. In contrast, the pupils assigned to group 4 ‘Poor Grades’ are more likely to be from manual and routine socioeconomic backgrounds. The analyses uncovered two latent educational groups with similar levels of moderate overall school GCSE outcomes, but different overall patterns of subject level outcomes. A notable new finding is that pupils in latent educational group 2 ‘Science’, had a different gender profile to pupils in group 3 ‘Arts’, but both groups of pupils were from the same socioeconomic backgrounds.
Our paper is innovative because it documents a first attempt to explore patterns of school GCSE attainment at the subject area level in order to investigate whether there are distinct groups of pupils with ‘middle’ levels of attainment. The sociologist Phil Brown made the pithy statement that there is an invisible majority of ordinary young people who neither leave their names engraved on the school honours board nor gouged into the top of their desks. We conclude that such pupils are found in the two ‘middle’ latent educational groups. We see no obvious reasons why school exam results will not continue to be an annual newsworthy item and we suspect that the media focus is most likely to remain on pupils with exceptional outcomes rather than those with the more modest results that characterise the two ‘middle’ latent educational groups.
A new GCSE grading scheme is likely to be introduced from August 2017. A new set of grades ranging from 1 to 9 (with 9 being the highest) will replace the A*–G scheme. Early indications suggest that the older eight alphabetical grades (A*–G) will not map directly onto the new 1–9 grades, but there will be some general equivalence. Despite the potential reorganisation of GCSEs, and the proposed changes in the grading system, school level GCSEs will continue to be complicated and messy and the methodological approach used in this paper will be equally appealing for the analysis of more contemporaneous educational cohorts.
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