Higher education expansion and the secondary school curriculum in Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century

Abstract

ABSTRACT The conclusion of recent research on the relationship between students’ school curriculum and their opportunities to enter higher education has generally been that curricular differentiation is a further dimension of social stratification, and that it has become a mechanism of effectively maintained inequality, in the sense defined by Lucas. The present analysis uses a unique series of surveys of school leavers in Scotland, covering the whole of the second half of the twentieth century, to study the relationship between curricular breadth in the senior years of secondary school and the chances of entering higher education. Breadth is found to have been long associated especially with entry to the high-status oldest universities, and also with entry to other universities that were founded before the 1990s. However, breadth of study at school and university is not a new dimension of distinction in Scotland, dating rather from the nineteenth century and earlier. Its effect has not grown with expansion, but in general has declined. The conclusion is that this curricular feature has been a mark of cultural or intellectual distinction, not straightforwardly merely a mechanism of stratification.