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

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.