Transcript Document

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Sub-brand to go here
CENTRE FOR
RESEARCH ON THE
WIDER BENEFITS OF
LEARNING
A BRIEF RETROSPECTIVE
Sub-brand to go here
Centre for Research on the Wider
Benefits of Learning
WBL: the context
Evidence:
• Contexts
• Inequality
• Crime
• Health
• Wellbeing
Policy implications
Centre for Research on the Wider
Benefits of Learning
• Set up in 1999 by the Department of Education and Employment to
investigate the non-economic benefits of learning
• Tradition of research on the economic returns to education – earnings and
employability
• Much less known about the personal and social effects.
Early days
• Established as interdisciplinary centre: quantitative and qualitative;
economics, psychology, sociology, social statistics.
• 1958 National Child Development Study and 1970 British Cohort Study
both significant resources for WBL.
• Also: Longitudinal Study of Young People in England; Avon Longitudinal
Study of Parents and Children.
• Domains of research: mental and physical health, crime, parenting,
schooling, social cohesion
The life-course
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More recently, Centre’s work extended to life-course as a whole.
Encompass not only returns to learning in adulthood but the whole range
of benefits from learning as a lifetime experience
From pre-school, through primary and secondary schooling and on to
further, higher adult and continuing education.
Contexts and processes
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Emphasis on contexts – home, family, school, community, neighbourhood,
housing
Emphasis on processes – learning and educational, social and
psychological
Emphasis on (in)equality: understanding the processes and contexts that
exacerbate or diminish inequalities
Interactions between children, family and
school contexts
• Explored impact of four contexts on pupil achievement in England at
Key Stage 2.
• How contexts influence and interact with each other to shape children’s
lives.
• How contexts operate to support, sustain or hinder positive
development.
Contexts
The four contexts:
• Distal: background socio-demographic features, such as income and
parental education.
• Proximal: parental support and parent–child relationships.
• School-peer: the nature of the school and its population.
• Child: individual ability, measured primarily in terms of prior attainment.
Contexts
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Pupils with better individual, school and family background and
experience have higher scores in Key Stage 2 assessments in
English, maths and science.
Child capabilities most significant predictor of Key Stage 2 attainment
across all three subjects.
Social and economic family background is second-largest influence.
Much weaker in predicting attainment are proximal features of the
family - family relationships and behaviours.
School-peer context has weakest influence.
Contexts
• For girls, social and economic family background is more important for
both Key Stage 2 English and maths attainment.
• For boys, family relationships and behaviours have a greater influence
on attainment across all three Key Stage 2 subjects.
Youth crime
• Analysis of relationship between juvenile conviction rates and
educational inequality, based on maths Key Stage 3 scores in English
Local Education Authorities (LEAs).
• Controlled for other variables which might be supposed to have an
effect on juvenile crime rates.
• Relationship between educational inequality and juvenile conviction
rates for violent crime within local areas.
• Relationship between educational inequality and racially motivated
crime.
Youth crime
• Analysed effect of the Reducing Burglary Initiative in conjunction with
the Education Maintenance Allowance programme.
• Found that in LEAs where the RBI and the EMA were introduced
jointly, burglary rates fell between 1.1 and 1.5 offences per 1,000 pupils
relative to areas that did not introduce any of these policies.
• The reduction in areas that introduced only the EMA programme or
only the RBI was not significantly different from that in other LEAs.
Health: attitudes to school
• These may be almost as important to future health outcomes as
attainment.
• Teenagers who do not do well academically yet regularly attend school
have better health as adults than truants with the same low level of
qualifications.
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Smoking
• The odds of being a smoker at the age of 33 were 4.7 times higher for
women who had no GCSE equivalents at 16 and had been
disengaged, than for women with no GCSE equivalents who had been
engaged.
• Taking one or two non-accredited courses is estimated to increase the
chances of giving up smoking by age 42 - from 24 per cent to 27.3 per
cent.
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Depression
• If 10% of women in the UK who obtained no qualifications were to gain
a Level 1 qualification (equivalent to five GCSE grades D-G), the
predicted reduction in the incidence of depression could lead to
savings of up to £34 million per year.
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Children’s wellbeing in primary school
• Investigated pupil and school effects on children’s wellbeing between
the ages of 8 and 10.
• Data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.
• Four dimensions of well being: mental health, pro-social behaviour,
anti-social behaviour and achievement.
• The research involved more than 2,000 children in 242 schools.
Children’s wellbeing
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Most children experience positive well-being during the primary
school years.
The majority do not engage in bullying and antisocial activities.
Most children report liking school and being satisfied by their
friendships.
Small subset follow a trajectory of increased engagement in
antisocial behaviour, such as bullying.
One-fifth have declining or lower levels of well-being from 8 to 10
years - most likely to be male, low SES, and low achieving.
Variation in wellbeing
• Most of the variation in children’s well-being exists within schools.
• Individual factors in children’s lives account for most of the variation in
their well-being, as compared with attending a specific school.
• The between-school effects were greater for children’s achievement
than for their psychological and social well-being.
Predictors of wellbeing
What are the strongest predictors of decreases in positive well-being?
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Bullying
Peer victimization
Engagement in antisocial activities
Predictors of wellbeing
What are the strongest predictors of increases in positive well-being?
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English KS1 scores predict fewer antisocial behaviours and more prosocial behaviours
Maths KS1 scores predict better mental health
Liking school predicts more scholastic competence and less
engagement in antisocial activities.
School effects
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Proportion of FSM has negative effects on achievement and
children’s well-being.
School ethos (eg. parental involvement and head-teacher/parent
disputes) has significant associations with well-being.
Resource variables (such as teacher/student ratios) are not
significant.
Change in wellbeing from childhood to
adolescence
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Focus on children’s psycho-social wellbeing. Four aspects:
o emotional
o behavioural
o social
o subjective school wellbeing.
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What accounts for changes in these outcomes?
Change in wellbeing
• Examined changes in wellbeing within framework of risk and resilience
• Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)
• Looked at trajectories and drivers of change – positive and negative –
across two time periods: mid-childhood (7.5 years to 10.5 years) and
adolescence (10.5 years to 13.8 years).
• Also looked at children with a large number of risks to wellbeing in their
lives, identifying factors which may help protect their wellbeing.
Change in wellbeing
• For most dimensions of wellbeing around 50 to 60 percent of children
experience stability
• Around half of the remainder experiencing an increase and half a
decline in wellbeing.
• The exception to this pattern is school wellbeing, where fewer children
experience stability and more experience decline, particularly in midchildhood.
Predictors
• Children with special educational needs (SEN) are more likely than
others to experience poor and declining wellbeing through middle
childhood and adolescence.
• Emotional and behavioural difficulties, followed by specific learning
difficulties, are the most frequent predictors of relatively worsening
outcomes.
• Children with speech and language difficulties do not experience a
decline in wellbeing relative to their peers.
Predictors
• Child-parent relationships are particularly important to sustaining and
improving wellbeing.
• Children who report positive relationships with their parents are more
likely to experience improvements in behavioural and social wellbeing,
and less likely to experience decline in subjective school wellbeing.
• Similarly where parents report positive feelings about their child,
children are more likely to experience improvements in wellbeing than
those whose parents report negative feelings.
Gender differences
• Girls more likely to experience slightly lower levels of and greater
declines in their emotional wellbeing.
• Boys have lower behavioural, school and social wellbeing than girls,
although the gender gap in social wellbeing narrows from midchildhood to adolescence.
• Boys tend to experience a greater decline in wellbeing where there is
maternal alcoholism (paternal alcoholism not included in our measures
for technical reasons) and stressful life events, whereas girls do not.
Gender differences
• Parents’ feelings about their child seem to protect against declining
wellbeing for girls with multiple risks in their lives, but did not seem to
have the same protective power for boys at high risk.
Implications for policy
• Interventions have effects that extend beyond educational and
economic outcomes - the ‘wider’ effects WBL has focussed on.
• Research highlights complex interactions between individuals and
contexts - personal, educational, social (eg. interactions between levels
of wellbeing and attainment).
• Effects not always as expected, or work to either reinforce or cancel
each other out, or work in opposition to each other.
• Policy makers increasingly aware of complexity, the need for integrated
approaches and the consequences for policy design.
Implications for policy
• WBL research shows potential for effective school and educationbased interventions, particularly to support people at disadvantage.
• ‘One size does not fit all’; different groups have different needs and
respond in different ways to similar interventions.
• Need to understand differences in order to design effective policy and
communication strategies.
• Need for policy to be targeted at specific groups or differentially
applied.
Implications for policy
• Lifecourse approach highlights lifelong consequences of early
experience.
• Hence need for early intervention and support – eg. evidence from
research on parenting and early development; studies of early
development and school readiness.
• Longitudinal research develops understanding of change across the
lifecourse, including adulthood.
• WBL research illuminates the processes whereby advantage and
disadvantage is passed across generations.
Implications for policy
• WBL research recently informed DCSF input to the National Equality
Panel, SEU approach to tackling low aspiration neighbourhoods, and
strategic thinking within DCSF.
• Informed Departmental Strategic Objectives 1 (Secure the wellbeing
and health of children and young people) and 4 (Close the gap in
educational achievement for children from disadvantaged
backgrounds).
• Rather than immediate practical application, the effect is largely to
‘drip-feed’ evidence and messages into the DCSF and beyond, through
briefings, reports, meetings, etc.
Challenges
• Balancing scholarship and academic rigour with need for timeliness,
accessibility and policy relevance.
• Managing expectations: ‘by Monday’, demonstrating causality, bulletproof answers to critical policy questions.
• Communication and liaison: knowledgeable , constructively critical
colleagues at both ends of the policy/research relationship.
More information
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Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning
Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London
WC1H 0AL
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email: [email protected]
web: www.learningbenefits.net
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Institute of Education
University of London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Tel +44 (0)20 7612 6000
Fax +44 (0)20 7612 6126
Email [email protected]
Web www.ioe.ac.uk