Understanding social disparities in educational attainment requires understanding of students' decision-making throughout their educational career. We focused on students' pathways throughout upper secondary and higher education (HE), identified common types of pathways and studied the role of SES as a determinant of students' pathways.…

Engaging in extracurricular activities is known to affect both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, but there is social inequality in access to these activities. In this study, we examine the role of extracurricular activities in moderating the relationships between secondary school students' social background and their cognitive and…

Using rich longitudinal data from the UK's Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), the authors compare the performance of private and state school pupils in age 16 national examinations (GCSEs) in England, where private schools are particularly well resourced by international standards. Performance among pupils attending private secondary schools is…

This paper focusses on how careers advice provided to Australian secondary school students varies according to students' socio-economic background. National data for students in Years 11 and 12 from five cohorts of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth initiated between 1998 and 2015 are analysed. Students from higher socio-economic…

This article is based on a survey carried out among 2,428 ninth-graders from 64 high-performing schools in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the study, we examine the relationships between socioeconomic background, extracurricular participation, and educational outcomes. The findings demonstrate high levels of participation in out-of-school, compared to…

The most recent OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey enables educators, policy makers and the wider community to compare Australian students with each other, as well as with their counterparts across the world. PISA measures the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the…

This paper examines the unique challenges faced by the 2023 Leaving Certificate cohort in Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) in Ireland due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on the significant impact of the pandemic on students who will be sitting their first-ever state examination at the age of 18. These…

This Snapshot investigates the career guidance and support available for 15-year-old students in their schools, who has the responsibility for providing this support and whether the type of support available varies according to students' socioeconomic background and the location of their school. It also examines the types of activities students…

The present study aims to examine the effect of the flipped classroom model on the academic achievement and critical-analytic thinking skills of students from different socio-economic backgrounds. For this purpose, two schools in the same province, attended by children from families with varying socio-economic levels, were included in the study.…

While quality teacher-student classroom interaction is crucial in promoting students' learning, literature recognizes the meaningful effects teachers' and students' social background characteristics and cultural values or orientations have on classroom interactions. However, the extent of relationships between elements of the social and cultural…

This paper explores the association between children's difficulty in moving to secondary school and their family background. School transition difficulty is associated with a range of poor outcomes in young people, but studies have rarely taken a fully longitudinal perspective or looked in detail at inequalities in transition processes. This…

Fitting vocational training into the Spanish education system has been challenging and problematic because two objectives are trying to be fulfilled; the first to supply skills for the productive system and the second to be an alternative option for the young people who do not follow the academic track. Moreover, the political vicissitudes of…

This paper uses data from PISA 2018 in Germany to explore how the students' chronotype (known as larks and owls) and their academic achievement is related to truancy. We used an adapted version of the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire (MCTQ) to measure the students' chronotype. The results demonstrate a correlation between the students' social jet…

This paper assesses the role of shadow education (SE), i.e., organised learning activities outside formal schooling, in the lives of secondary school students of different social backgrounds and in different school settings, in a high-stakes context. It draws on multilevel analysis of longitudinal Growing Up in Ireland data, alongside narratives…

Assuming that free school choice is one of the parameters contributing to segregation in the Belgian educational system, the government implemented decrees to alter school enrolment policies in order to regulate school choice. In this study, two statistical approaches (a 'Lorenz' index and a multilevel one) have been used to measure the evolution…