The social contexts of educational disadvantage: focus on the neighbourhood

Abstract

ABSTRACT Educational disadvantage is a multilevel and multifactorial phenomenon, with a myriad of contributing factors having been identified within the social contexts inhabited by the student from a lower socioeconomic status (SES) background. Irish research has accumulated a comprehensive body of empirical evidence on the factors operating within family, school and societal contexts but less attention has been paid to the role that the neighbourhood might have in contributing to the under-achievement of students from lower SES backgrounds. This study employed data from the 9 and 17/18-year-old cohorts of the Growing Up in Ireland survey to explore whether the SES of the neighbourhood within which a student lives makes a significant contribution to the prediction of academic achievement over and above the SES of the family and school. A series of multilevel models demonstrated the additive effects of social contexts on academic achievement in both samples. Each social context provided a unique, statistically significant contribution to the prediction of academic achievement, with smaller contributions made by more distal contexts. These findings support an understanding of educational disadvantage as a phenomenon that is perpetuated within multiple social contexts and suggest that strategies to tackle educational disadvantage should take a pan-contextual perspective.