A literature review published in 2008 outlined known relationships between gender, ethnicity, and academic attainment in UK higher education. In the period since this publication, many changes to the higher education sector have occurred, including raising tuition fees, an increased focus on widening participation, and an increasing interest in…

Despite a wide international literature on the effect of vocational and general education on school-to-work transition, relatively little is known about the role of having studied specific subjects in explaining inequalities in young people's labour market outcomes. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining differences in employment chances of…

This paper considers whether subject choice at 14-16 influences post-16 transitions, taking into account prior academic attainment and school characteristics, and if so, whether this accounts for socioeconomic, gender, and ethnic differences in access to post-16 education. We consider post-16 progression to full-time education, A-levels, and…

How are English texts selected to teach students from culturally diverse backgrounds in Australia and England? The English curricula in both countries aim for students to read and interpret meanings through texts, while learning about their culture, and that of cultural others. However, the current list of prescribed texts in both curricula are…

There are long-standing achievement gaps in England associated with socio-economic status (SES), ethnicity and gender, but relatively little research has evaluated interactions between these variables or explored school effects on such gaps. This paper analyses the national test results at age 7 and age 11 of 2,836 pupils attending 68 mainstream…

Newly accessible data from the Scottish Mental Survey 1947 are used to investigate the legacy in the 1950s of reforms to Scottish secondary schooling in the first four decades of the 20th century. These reforms had sought to extend opportunity for post-primary education beyond the children of the professional middle class who had formed the…

One quarter of the 1958 British Birth cohort attended single-sex secondary schools. This paper asks whether sex-segregated schooling had any impact on the experience of gender differences in the labour market in mid-life. We examine outcomes at age 42, allowing for socio-economic origins and abilities measured in childhood. We find no net impact…

This article examines some of the conversations that took place between women's rights advocates on the subject of female education. The relationship between Victorian feminism and educational reform was a complex one, and historians have long argued over whether campaigns for women's schools and colleges can be termed "feminist". This article…

An examination of gender, social class and ethnicity performance and participation patterns in different UK countries shows that inequities occur in relation to gender, class and ethnicity but that the patterns of inequity look quite different in the three domains. Achievement is equal for different genders but many more males take mathematics…

The Labour government elected in 1997, which lost power in 2010, was the longest serving Labour administration Britain has ever had. This period saw an enormous expansion of further and higher education, and an increase in the proportion of students achieving school-level qualifications. But have inequalities diminished as a result? We examine the…

The article investigates unequal admissions patterns at the University of Oxford. Statistical work shows differences in admission rates by social class, ethnicity, gender, qualification status and secondary schooling. In-depth interviews with admissions tutors, college and university officials and observations of eight admissions meetings provide…

This study used longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) to examine the role of neighbourhood quality, assessed when cohort members were aged five, in boys' and girls' school leaving age. It was expected that, since context is in general more strongly predictive of boys' rather than girls' behaviour, neighbourhood quality would…

Previous research has indicated significant variation between schools in the proportion of their students who go on to higher education. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the specific school characteristics influencing application and entry to tertiary education. This paper sets out to analyse the individual and school factors…

This article reviews current interpretations of Labour's education policy in relation to gender. Such interpretations see the marginalisation of gender equality in mainstream educational policy as a result of the discursive shift from egalitarianism to that of performativity. Performativity in the school context is shown to have contradictory…

British-Chinese pupils are the highest achieving ethnic group in the British education system, and British-Chinese boys performance equals that of girls. This paper investigates aspects of British-Chinese pupils constructions of learning, focusing particularly on subject preferences and their constructions of themselves as pupils. The results are…