10 years on: What did we learn from the 2011 Census?

By Chris A Garrington, on 1 August 2024

As the release of data from the 2021 Census gets under way, Dr Jitka Pikhartova reflects on research which has explored the results of the ONS Longitudinal study’s census sample over the past decade. Which topics were key, and which stories made headlines?

Much has changed since the beginning of the 21^st Century: in 2001, people either handed their census form to field staff or posted it, but by 2011 they had the option of filling in the form online.

Similarly, the topics on which research has focused have grown and developed over the past two decades – and many of those topics have been the focus of media coverage or policy debates.

For the first time in 2011 census respondents were asked about:

• Their national identity and citizenship
• What passports they held (though not in Scotland)
• When they arrived in the UK
• Their main language and their fluency in English and Welsh
• Whether they were in a same-sex civil partnership
• Whether they suffered from specific chronic conditions (not in England/Wales)
• Whether they undertook voluntary work (Northern Ireland only).

In many cases, research was published over several years before hitting the headlines. For instance, Saffron Karlsen and colleagues had been working with LS data on religion and ethnicity for several years when their findings chimed with ‘Black Lives Matter’ debates in 2020.

Professor Karlsen’s studies found that in 2011 men and women of Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnicity were 50 and 30 per cent more likely to be in manual work than their white counterparts respectively. Chinese and Indian men and Chinese women were less likely to be manual workers than white men – a reversal of the situation we saw in 1971.

Census-based research on ethnicity by Zuccotti and colleagues also caught media attention when it asked how ethnicity was linked to the labour market outcomes of young people in 2001 and in 2011. It found young men from ethnic minority backgrounds who were not working or studying in 2001 had similar chances of being in work in 2011 as white British men.

This evidence that some ethnic minorities were penalised less for unemployment or inactivity than their white British counterparts was good news in terms of integration, but also raised concerns for the employment prospects of both young white British men and ethnic minority women.

Long-term outcomes

Professor Amanda Sacker led a joint study by University College London (UCL) and King’s College London on long-term outcomes for those who had been in care as children, analysing data from 350,000 people who self-reported their health after 10, 20 and 30 years.

It found adults who had lived in residential care had a 40 per cent chance of reporting poor health after 10 years, rising to 85 per cent over the following two decades. By contrast those who grew up with a relative in kinship care saw their chances of reporting ill health range from 21 per cent to 43 per cent over the 30-year period. Adults who grew up with their parents only had a 13 per cent chance of reporting poor health after 10 years, rising to 21 per cent at both 20 and 30 years.

This project led to more than 30 academic and other publications including widespread media coverage, and was cited in the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

Education and social mobility are also topics of research which often use the ONS Longitudinal Study. Professor Franz Buscha and colleagues found neither of the two most powerful 20^th Century educational interventions – the development of grammar schools and raising the school leaving age – resulted in significant changes in social mobility. They said:

“Education affects our social, emotional and cognitive skills, as well as our earnings and employment. But the role of education in driving social mobility is complex, and factors such as early life circumstances and socioeconomic status are also crucial in shaping life outcomes.”

Another project looked at jobs in the creative arts, finding that those from professional families were four times more likely than those from working class backgrounds to work in creative industries. And Gabrielle Hecht’s work also looked at social mobility, finding that moving into a higher professional or managerial job doesn’t necessarily mean moving away from where you grow up. More than two thirds of the most socially mobile people born between 1965-71 and1975-81 have never made a long-distance move.

Meanwhile London has cemented its position as the epicentre of the elites since the 1980s. For the younger generation – those aged between 30 and 36 – moving to London and working in an elite occupation is largely the preserve of those from a privileged background, and this has become even more pronounced in recent years.

Personal characteristics

Moving on from social mobility, Tony Champion’s project looked at how a much broader range of personal characteristics influenced individuals’ propensity to move, and how the strength of these determinants changed over time, while work by James Robards and Ann Berrington looked at dramatic changes in fertility levels which were not predicted by demographers or government statisticians. Although it has never been a stated aim of the British government to boost fertility by increasing access to nursery care, this research caught the attention of the BBC.

And some very interesting and unique research, made possible by the fact that the ONS LS  allows us to look at household composition, tested the hypothesis that parents gain ‘immunisation’ from children. It found exposure to the pathogens which cause the child to acquire its own immunity have a secondary effect on the parents’ immune system. Thus, parents are better equipped for older age. This led to another catchy headline, this time in The Times.

To sum up, we can agree that ONS LS is an excellent resource for answering many scientific questions. For many the study itself is enough, but there is also the possibility to request the connection of data from other sources. Our user support is free, we try to be accommodating and we are quite fast if everything depends only on us – of course we are linked to ONS and they also have a lot of other work. There is much to celebrate in the fact that for 50 years this representative study has been able to inform us on long-term trends for such a wide range of social topics.

This blog has been adapted from Dr Jitka Pikhartova’s talk at a recent event celebrating 12 years of CeLSIUS at UCL. The event showcased work which has been supported during the directorship of Professor Nicola Shelton, who hands over to Dr Stephen Jivraj in September 2024.

Informing the future of the Census

By Chris A Garrington, on 9 July 2024

The new Government is expected to make an announcement about the future of the census following a recent ONS consultation. In this blog based on his inaugural lecture at UCL, Professor Oliver Duke-Williams, Professor of Population Information and a senior member of the Centre for Longitudinal Study Information and User Support (CeLSIUS) team, asks how the past can inform that future.

The most recent census taken in this country was also perhaps the most unusual – the pandemic affected both the way in which people completed the form and the answers they gave. In addition, the vast majority of households completed the census online, where only a small proportion had done so in 2011, when the option was first available in this country. It may also be the last of its kind: alternative data sources offer the potential for different ways of counting the population, bringing with them their own opportunities and threats.

So why do we have a census, and for whose benefit is it? There are a number of purposes: censuses aim to count all people and households in the country, gathering a snapshot of the population at a particular time. They can also have a more subtle purpose: to assert the existence of a nation state, and to define the people that comprise the nation – both in terms of overall numbers of those included and perhaps excluded, and also in the categories and classifications chosen by the state to enumerate them. On a more general level, censuses in most countries including the UK are used for planning, in the hope that the state can make better decisions given better information.

Our census started in 1801 and the first few were very different to the ones we have now: they collected aggregate data rather than data on individuals, but from 1841 they began to become more robust, and primarily based – just as today – on individuals living in households.

We can use census data for many purposes. Whilst historic data is most commonly used to trace family histories, it can also be used more collectively via curated research datasets. For instance, data from Cornwall in 1891 shows the rapid rise in the number of girls named Florence after Florence Nightingale became famous. It is mostly a bit of fun, but allows use to think about the role of celebrity in popularising names, and using census data rather than birth records, also to think about naming practices amongst groups of people with differing characteristics.

Contemporary censuses

Moving to contemporary censuses, as well as the more familiar aggregate results that tell us information – often vital for planning – about how many people there are with particular characteristics in the country, or in specific locations, we can also study the way that individuals change over time. Linking data over time, the ONS Longitudinal Study – a one per cent sample of all census respondents from 1971 to the current day – can enable us to observe the changes in anonymised individuals during their lifetimes – where they live, what their occupations have been, how their households form and change and so on. Amongst other things, this can provide information on social mobility over lifetimes, and on occupational mortality over long periods.

The census isn’t perfect – the pandemic caused a glitch, for example, because the census in Scotland was delayed to 2022 while the censuses in the rest of the UK took place in 2021. So those who moved from England to Scotland between those two dates were counted twice, and those who moved the other way from Scotland to England weren’t counted at all. More generally, some people will be missing – whether by accident or design – in any census.

Some of the questions have become outdated – for example we saw a growth in working from home from 11 per cent to 31 per cent between 2011 and 2021, which has left questions about travel to work looking somewhat out of date. The assumption is still that people have one job and they go to it every day using the same mode of transport, but for many people that’s not the reality any more.
So, the census does make mistakes, and this brings us to its future.

Can AI help?

Perhaps we need to think about whether AI can help – it’s been suggested that natural language systems might help people to ask questions of the census in ways that are easier than the existing interfaces; there are a number of researchers working towards this, and it is fair to say that some people find existing tools hard to use. The answers that come back will be numbers, and it may be that AI could help to present those numbers in a more understandable form.

Just to see how well this would work, I asked the CoPilot, a Microsoft AI tool, to draw one hundred people, and to make them representative of the current UK population. All of the four responses I received had more than one hundred people in them – sometimes far more – and more importantly they weren’t very representative; there were few young people, few people of colour and almost no people with visible disabilities.

So if we think that AI can represent data for us and simplify data for us, we don’t yet have evidence that it can do a good job of it.

But administrative data does have advantages. It gives new sources of data for which some of the costs are already met- health service data or tax data, for instance, collected as part of the day to day operations of the relevant departments, and which can be re-used to create demographic data.

With these sources we don’t have to wait 10 years for the next set of data. But there are problems because at the moment we don’t have a single identifier which will enable us to link the records of individuals across different administrative datasets, so linkage becomes more difficult and expensive.

Big data

There’s also interest in using big data such as mobile phone data to gain insights into people’s lives. But again, there are issues with identifying those individuals and linking their data with other sources; phone data could potentially tell us a lot about movement patterns, but discerning movement by different groups of people would be less easy to achieve.

So, should we retain a census? It has had a 200-year run and not many administrative operations can beat that, so maybe its time has come?

The poor arguments for keeping it are that it’s what we’ve always done. Better ones include the fact that it’s hard to gather some types of information from other sources. The census provides us with a trusted framework for sampling, and once it’s gone we can’t easily recover it.

But there are also arguments for a hybrid approach – census and admin data are different, and they tell us different things. We’re at an interesting branching point, in a way a bit like we were back in 1841 when census data collection began to become more robust. What will the next census look like? The future is currently unknown.

Oliver Duke-Williams is Professor of Population Information in the Department of Information Studies at UCL, where he also leads MA/MSc programmes in Digital Humanities. He is the Census Service Director at the UK Data Service and is also a Senior Advisor to the Centre for Longitudinal Study.

Do ethnic minority care leavers suffer from a ‘double whammy’?

By Chris A Garrington, on 31 January 2024

Research into the long-term effects of children’s social care has highlighted that this group often experience poor outcomes. But does ethnicity have an additional effect? Amanda Sacker and colleagues used census data to compare different groups of care-experienced adults – and their results challenge previous assumptions.

The Looked after children grown up project, on which we have worked for several years, has provided compelling evidence of the disadvantages suffered later in life by those who have spent all or part of their childhood in care.

So when we set out to look at the relative effects of having been in care on different ethnic groups we did so with the premise that minority status would compound their disadvantage. In fact, we found ethnicity affected adult outcomes following care in both positive and negative ways.

Using linked census data from the ONS Longitudinal Study, we were able to track the lives of almost 670,000 people who were children between 1971 and 2001. An important aspect of our study was that we were able to compare those who had experienced care with peers who had not – something which other studies of ethnicity and care had not been able to do.

We know from earlier studies that Black children tend to be over-represented among the care population, while those from Asian backgrounds are under-represented. But there is no certainty about why – perhaps institutional racism affects social workers’ decisions about Black children; perhaps South Asian children are more likely to be cared for by wider family networks, but these are questions we cannot definitively answer.

And they could affect what happens to the different groups after they leave care, because those who only go into care in the most difficult or deprived circumstances are likely to be affected later in life by those background factors.

We could, however, look more closely at what happened to these different groups in adult life. And in doing so we could control for background factors such as country of birth, age, gender, and parental social class, qualifications, employment status and marital status.

We found the picture was a mixed one in which those from ethnic minorities did not consistently have worse care outcomes than those from White families.

These are our key findings:

• There was a clear link between self-reported health issues and a history of social care for both the White and South Asian groups, but not for the Black group. When we looked at long-term and life-limiting illnesses, only the White social care group were more likely to suffer from these than peers who had been in parental care.
• The level of qualifications among South Asian care leavers was significantly lower than for their peers, and there was also an effect, though smaller, for the White group, but Black care leavers had the same level of qualifications as their peers. Among the total population White people were most likely to have low levels of qualification, followed by Black people and then South Asian people.
• Adult employment rates for those in parental care were highest for the White group, followed by the Black and South Asian groups. But the employment rate for Black people was not affected by care experience, and for South Asians there was only a small difference.
• The social class of care-experienced White and South Asian adults was lower than that of their peers, though the impact was greater for White people. Black care leavers’ social class was no different from their peers. Overall, South Asians had the highest probability of being in professional or managerial jobs.
• Home ownership was lower among White people who had been in social care, but this was less so for South Asians and did not apply to the Black group.
• Care-experienced White adults were less likely to marry than their peers, but the reverse was true for the Black and South Asian groups.
• Teenage motherhood was more common among Whites and South Asians who had been in social care, but it was less common in the Black group.

Mixed picture

What can we conclude from this mixed picture? Certainly we can say that inequalities between care leavers and the general population are widespread and long-lasting, and that this should be monitored and acted on as a priority.

But given the evidence that White care leavers are equally or more disadvantaged in some respects, new and existing policies promoting better outcomes for care-experienced adults should be universally provided for all children who have been in social care rather than being targeted at specific minority ethnic groups.

We also believe there is a need for qualitative research into this field, in order to unpick the different factors which may be impacting different ethnic groups.

Key messages from this research:

• Ethnicity moderated the impact of social care mainly for socio-economic outcomes and their long-term effects
• South Asian individuals fared better than Black people if they had been in social care
• A history of social care affected White adults more than Black or South Asian care-experienced adults

Sacker, A., E.T. Murray, B. Maughan, and R.E. Lacey, Social care in childhood and adult outcomes: double whammy for minority children? Longitudinal and Life Course Studies

The NHS 75 years on: What was the long-term impact of making health care free at the point of access?

By Chris A Garrington, on 8 November 2023

The fact that the NHS has reached the age of 75 years has been widely celebrated – but key questions remain about its influence over health, education and economic outcomes. In this post, Genevieve Jeffrey describes research which uses census data  to uncover the far-reaching consequences of the introduction of free health care over the course of 40, 50, and 60 years. It reveals this monumental event impacted not just on individuals’ health and well-being but also on their educational outcomes.

One of the most significant changes brought about by the introduction of the NHS was the elimination of financial barriers. Before its introduction, the cost of medical care during pregnancy and childbirth posed a burden on women and their families. The NHS introduction changed this by providing free access to essential healthcare services during gestation and at birth. The introduction of the NHS negated worries about saving for health costs and navigating the availability of doctors and midwives. This enabled expectant mothers to access healthcare without delay.

This change was important, particularly in preventing complications through timely access to antenatal care. But were there wider longer-term effects?  To delve into this, we harnessed the power of the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS). Because this enabled us to break down our sample by exact dates of birth, we could compare the outcomes of those born in the 18 months before July 5th, 1948 – the date of introduction of the NHS – with those born in the 18 months after. The two groups had very similar access to healthcare and to other social services such as education, with one major difference: the mothers of those born in 1946 and in early 1947 did not have free healthcare while pregnant and while giving birth.

Health outcomes

We were able to look at how those in our sample reported their own health later in life, using questions in the census from 1991 onwards about whether they had a long term life-limiting illness and from 2001 on how they saw their own health, from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad.’  We found individuals born after the NHS introduction were more likely to report having no long-term limiting illnesses in their 40s. And we uncovered a noteworthy improvement in self-reported health among those born after the NHS introduction when they were in their 50s and 60s, with respondents more likely to rate their health as ‘good’ compared to those born before.

When assessing objective measures related to cancer, such as cancer incidence, age of first cancer diagnosis, and the sum of cancer events per diagnosis, no significant effects were found. While self-reported health improved, there was no discernible change in cancer-related outcomes.

The impact on economic outcomes

The study also investigated the impact of the NHS on education outcomes. While we found no difference between those born under the NHS and just before it in terms of obtaining no educational qualifications, there was an increase in the likelihood of obtaining a university degree or higher qualification among those born just after the NHS introduction.

Prior research could provide a clue as to the mechanisms that drive these effects. Greater access to healthcare during gestation and at birth can improve the health stock of individuals at birth, and these impacts compound throughout the life course, also impacting educational outcomes. Of course, all of this generation – whether born just before the NHS or just after – benefited from the free secondary education introduced under the 1944 Education Act, and they also benefited from the expansion of the universities which followed the Robbins Report of 1963. The effect on educational outcomes found in our research is separate to the effects of these policies and represents the effect of access to the NHS during gestation and at birth.

Besides education we also looked at the number of hours our sample worked in their 50s and found no significant impact associated with the NHS introduction. Similarly, outcomes for home ownership in the 50s and 60s , serving as a proxy for economic status, displayed no significant effects.

The lasting legacy of the NHS

Our findings underscore the enduring impact of the NHS on the health and education of individuals. Access to healthcare during critical life stages, such as pregnancy and childbirth, carries long-term ramifications for both individuals and society. It not only enhances individual health but also contributes to a more educated population.

While this research provides valuable insights, it also poses vital questions for future exploration. How can healthcare systems be further refined to impact on long-term health outcomes? What are the key pathways through which health at birth impacts on educational attainment in the UK?

These questions are pivotal for policymakers and researchers as they shape the future of healthcare and education policies. The focus of the study was on those born in the months around the NHS introduction. It would be important to also investigate the impact on other segments of society to gauge the true extent of the impact of the NHS introduction.

The introduction of the NHS in 1948 triggered profound and enduring effects on the health, education, and opportunities of individuals in the UK. Our findings underscore the long-term benefits of offering accessible healthcare services, particularly during critical life stages like pregnancy and birth. This study reinforces the significance of upholding and fortifying such healthcare systems, especially during global debates about healthcare access.

As we reflect on the legacy of the NHS 75 years on, this research serves as a potent reminder of the positive societal outcomes achievable when healthcare is a universal right. It encourages us to envision ways to enhance healthcare and education systems for the betterment of individuals and society at large. The NHS remains a shining example of what can be achieved when healthcare is made universally accessible.

Genevieve Jeffrey is a fellow in the LSE Department of Health Policy, and this research formed her PhD thesis.

Reducing inequalities in life expectancy: what works?

By Chris A Garrington, on 12 September 2023

Social inequalities in life expectancy are a major issue for governments – and they have increased over time. But they have done so at different rates in different countries, and there is a need for greater understanding of how and why this has happened. In this blog, Daniel Zazueta-Borboa describes a new study which uses the ONS-LS to look in detail at how policy and social change is linked to reductions or increases in these inequalities.

We know that in modern welfare states, people with higher socio-economic status live longer than those with lower status. And efforts to reduce these gaps have not always been successful.

It’s crucial for policymakers to understand the dynamics of these phenomena if they are to tackle the issues. Yet most studies of the subject either cover only short periods of time or they take longer periods but look only at their start and end dates. This means they are unable to pinpoint accurately the key points at which different phases or changes in trends have occurred. So they have not been able to verify whether social events or policy changes have had a sudden or a gradual effect: for example, how did ‘lifestyle epidemics’ such as increases in the number of deaths due to smoking relate to the life expectancy of different social groups? How did improvements in key medical interventions such as cardiovascular care play out across societies?

Using Census data from England and Wales, register data from Finland and survey data from Turin in Italy, we were able to look at mortality from 1971 onwards. Using a standard measure of educational attainment to indicate socioeconomic status, we compared the life expectancy of those with no more than lower secondary schooling with that of those who continued to study after school leaving age.

For England and Wales, we used data from people in the ONS Longitudinal Study who were aged 20 and older at the time of the 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011 censuses. For Finland we were able to check on census respondents aged 25 and older every five years from 1970 to 2015. For Italy, we looked at respondents in Turin who were aged 20 or older in censuses from 1971 to 2011 and who were also included in the Turin Longitudinal Study from 1972–2019.

Trends in inequalities

By looking at trends in the gaps in life expectancy between the lowest and highest socio-economic groups over time, we could map changes in these inequalities and when they happened. We found that over 47 years the inequalities grew more among men in Italy and among both men and women in Finland, but grew less among British men and remained stable among British women. Among Italian women, they were roughly the same at the end of the period.

When we looked in more detail at what happened during different time periods, we could see different phases and breaks in these overall trends.

In England and Wales, there was a clear break in the mid-1970s as women began to gain better educational qualifications, though for men this was reversed in 2008. In Finland, there was a break in the 1980s as educational inequalities increased – again, reversed among Finnish men in 2008. In  Turin, there was a clear break in the mid-1970s indicating increased inequality among men, while among women this happened later, in 2003.

Figure 1: Time trends in educational differences in life expectancy at age 30 (high minus low educated – in years-), by sex and country. Dashed lines represent the start of increasing educational differences in life expectancy.  Solid lines represent the start of reducing educational inequalities.

Where there were long-term increases in educational inequalities, the more highly educated improved their life expectancy at better pace when compared with those who had lower levels of education. Conversely, where there were decreases in inequalities those with lower levels of education gained more years of life expectancy. This was particularly the case for young men in Finland and Italy.

Health and behaviour changes

What triggered the marked changes in the trends? A key factor is likely to be the revolution in cardiovascular care, which began in the early 1970s and involved both medical advances and changes in health behaviours such as smoking: we know those in more highly educated groups gained greater health benefits from these changes. Similarly, those with higher levels of education benefited more from decreases in mortality linked to alcohol.

For Italian women, reforms which made healthcare more universally accessible in the early 1980s are likely to have been important in improving life expectancy and reducing disparities in life expectancy. There were negative social factors too – in Italy there was a large increase in deaths from AIDS in the 1980s which was linked to drug use among younger men, particularly those in lower social groups, and that might be behind the increase of educational inequalities in life expectancy among Italian men.

So, reversals and breaks in these life expectancy gaps can be set in train by gradual social changes, and they can be set in train by more immediate policy decisions. For example in Finland, a reduction in alcohol tax and prices in 2004 was accompanied by a rise in alcohol-related deaths among deprived men, and this was reversed when the tax was increased from 2008. In England and Wales, austerity measures from 2010 have been linked to slower improvements in life expectancy, particularly due to higher mortality among younger age groups in areas of high social deprivation.

What can be done?

There are hopeful messages here for policymakers: inequalities in life expectancy can be shaped by public policy decisions. These may be short-term, such as changes in taxation, or they may be longer-term, such as initiatives to effect behavioural changes. Policies aimed at improving the health of younger people in lower-educated groups could be particularly effective.

Reversals in past long-term trends in educational inequalities in life expectancy for selected European countries, by Daniel Zazueta-Borboa, Pekka Martikainen, Jose Manuel Aburto, Guiseppe Costa, Riina Peltonen, Nicholas Zengarini, Alison  Sizer, Anton Kunst and Fanny Janssen, is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, July 2023, 77(7):421-429, https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2023-220385

Does educational success lead to job success for second-generation immigrants?

By Chris A Garrington, on 11 August 2023

Second-generation immigrants in the United Kingdom now gain better qualifications than those whose parents were born here. So why do they struggle to get into the best jobs, and what role does social class play? In this blog Carolina V.  Zuccotti and Lucinda Platt describe new research which uses census data to shed light on the issue.

A lot has been written about how the children of immigrants fare in education and in work, and the United Kingdom provides an important perspective: in many countries these young people do worse in education than their peers, but in the UK the opposite is the case. White British young people are now outperformed by their ethnic minority peers at every level of the education system.

We set out to ask three key questions, using data from the ONS Longitudinal Study (LS): 

• How do second-generation ethnic minorities gain an educational advantage despite their tendency to come from lower socio-economic backgrounds?
• To what extent does this success carry them through into good jobs?
• What does this case tell us about the interplay between education and social origins, and what are the implications for future research?

There are differences between ethnic groups – for instance, Indians tend to be higher-attaining than Black Caribbeans – but all second-generation ethnic minorities in the UK improve their test scores throughout their schooling faster than the majority population. They are also more likely to stay on in education after the legal school leaving age, and more likely to go to university.

Yet there is a paradox – despite their apparent ability to overcome humble social origins to succeed in education, these well-qualified young people are still at a disadvantage when it comes to entering the labour market, and their access to the top jobs is mixed.

There are some well-documented explanations for this. Migrants, the parents of these children, – by the very fact that they have been prepared to move around the world – are likely to be aspirational, determined, and resilient. Their children may benefit from these qualities and from their parents’ relatively good education.

Yet, migrants tend to end up in jobs for which they are over-qualified, so they take a step down from where they started out in their country of origin, which may negatively affect their children’s job prospects. These  families are also likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods and to lack access to important social networks that could get their children a start in the world of work. 

Unique dataset

Using the unique 40-year dataset provided by the LS, we were able to track individuals well into their working lives and also to look at the relationship between education and career success for men and women in each ethnic group. 

We identified around 175,000 individuals who were aged under 15 in 1971, 1981 or 1991 and for whom we could see which socio-economic groups their parents were in. We then tracked their educational and work records to see how they were doing between the ages of 20 and 45.

We looked at whether they had degree-level qualifications, whether they were employed or unemployed, whether those who were employed had professional or managerial jobs and – for women only – whether they were economically active or inactive. We compared those who were second-generation Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Caribbean – these being the four biggest distinct ethnic minorities in the UK – with those in the white British majority.

Manual jobs

We found all the ethnic minority groups’ parents were more likely to be in manual jobs than White British parents, but this was especially so for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. All ethnic minority groups were also more likely to have grown up in overcrowded households and in deprived neighbourhoods. Yet they were still likely to do better in education than their white peers. For example, almost half the second-generation South Asian men had parents with manual jobs, compared to just three in 10 White British men. Yet more than a third of second-generation South Asians had degree-level qualifications, compared with around a quarter of White British men.

When it came to labour market outcomes, results were more mixed. Of all the ethnic groups, only Bangladeshi men were more likely to be employed than white British men, once key predictors of employment such as education and social origins were considered. Among women, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis had higher levels of inactivity than their White British peers, especially those without university education. 

Those who achieved in education managed to translate some of that advantage into the labour market, especially in terms of the type of job they accessed. Indian and Bangladeshi men and women, for example, were more likely to have professional or managerial jobs than White British people from similar social backgrounds. This suggests that unmeasurable background factors such as parental motivation may play only a small part in access to jobs, but a bigger one in the quality of the job and in later promotion. 

Advantage and disadvantage

So, a mixture of both advantage and disadvantage is an increasingly common feature of the second-generation immigrant experience in the UK. Disadvantaged socio-economic circumstances growing up do not constrain them from high rates of success in education, but the picture is much more mixed once they enter the labour market. Social class clearly does not mean the same thing for ethnic minority groups as it does for the majority, but it still plays a role in their occupational outcomes

What are the implications for future research? We believe the complex interplay between different factors in the lives of second-generation migrants needs further investigation. The fact that this group is bucking the social trend in terms of education provides interesting opportunities to look at what the ‘black box’ of social class really means to different groups of people.

The paradoxical role of social class background in the educational and labour market outcomes of the children of immigrants in the UK is research by Carolina Zuccotti and Lucinda Platt, and is published in The British Journal of Sociology.

Carolina Zuccotti is s a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Global Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Getafe, Spain, and Lucinda Platt is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Do caregivers’ children reach milestones earlier?

By Chris A Garrington, on 15 June 2023

The number of looked-after children in England has risen significantly in the past three decades, and around three quarters are placed with foster families. Many of those families have children of their own: what are the longer-term effects on them? In this blog Amanda Sacker and colleagues describe research which set out to shed light on the issue – and which suggests specific training for social workers could be helpful.

A growing body of research suggests those who grow up alongside foster children are affected in the longer term by the experience – in ways which are both positive and negative. On the plus side, these children can learn to appreciate their families, to empathise with others’ misfortunes and to take responsibility. Challenges can include having to share belongings and parents’ time, dealing with negative behaviours such as stealing or lying, loss of privacy, family tensions and sometimes a loss of innocence.

But how strong are these effects? Although findings from earlier studies are quite consistent, they tend to be from unrepresentative and often small-scale qualitative research. Using a large, representative dataset from the ONS Longitudinal Study (LS), we set out to discover whether foster carers’ children made key transitions to adulthood sooner than other young people. 

This is a subject that should be of interest to policymakers: official statistics from 2022 suggest there were 58,000 caregivers’ children in England, living alongside 82,000 looked-after children – the latter being a rise from 47,590 in 1994. 

The LS enabled us to access information on children who lived with foster-siblings between 1971 and 2001 – we identified 2656 who lived with a foster child and 209,453 who did not. We looked at whether there were differences between the groups in the ‘big five’ transitions to adulthood: finishing school; leaving home; finding work and becoming financially independent; getting married and having children. These were broken down further to give us a total of 11 measurable outcomes.

Different outcomes?

We found there were differences – but they were small. For nine out of the eleven outcomes, caregivers’ children had earlier transitions than non-caregivers’ children but for three of those nine, the effects were not statistically significant. 

There were some significant differences, although small – 83 per cent of caregivers’ children left school with few qualifications compared with 79 per cent of non-caregivers’ children, for instance. Three out of four measures for getting on in work and becoming financially independent showed differences between the two groups of children. Caregivers’ children were less likely to be in work in early adulthood – 69 per cent as opposed to 72 per cent – and more likely to be non-employed long-term. These differences were independent of the household’s socioeconomic environment.

Twenty per cent of caregivers’ children were in managerial or professional jobs compared with 23 per cent of those without a foster child in the family. Those who had left their parents’ homes were less likely to be owner-occupiers and more likely to be renting or in other less secure housing.

Caregivers’ children were a little more likely to be married before they entered their 30s – 16 per cent compared to 14 per cent – and women who grew up with a cared-for child had children younger: six per cent were teenage mothers compared with five per cent of the non-caregiver group, and 1.6 per cent of mothers had three or more children by the age of 30 compared with 1.2 per cent of others.

The only transition for which we did not find any evidence of earlier transitions was leaving home.

We found some limited indications that daughters could be more affected later in life as well as during fostering in childhood. Unfortunately, we only had information on women’s fertility and cannot comment on parenthood for caregivers’ sons.  Evidence supporting the notion that caregivers’ sons and daughters were less affected when the foster children were of the opposite sex was very limited and equivocal at best.

The effects we did find had disappeared by mid-adulthood: by the time they were in their 40s, no differences between carers’ children and non-carers’ children were seen. 

Taking action

We believe social work education and training could include knowledge and skills development relevant to foster carers’ own children, including the risk of an early transition to adulthood. Social workers both supervise and support foster carers, and they act as intermediaries between the caregiver and the foster child’s own social worker, so with better understanding of the issues they could play a key role. 

For example, supporting foster parents to keep their children in education for longer could become part of the role of supervising social workers. They might explore with foster carers any barriers to their own children staying in school, and what might prompt them to want to leave. They might also take on a wider role in supporting the children of foster parents, especially during their adolescence, though to do this, fostering services would have to ensure there was sufficient extra support time available.  

Our research suggests a broader investigation of foster carers’ households is called for: there are several areas where further study is needed. Are these earlier transitions driven by the benefit of maturity or by the challenge of sharing a home? Do caregivers’ children cope better if they are older than the foster child? Are daughters in fostering households more affected than sons? And although our focus was on the children of caregivers, it would be helpful to know whether children in foster care fare better or worse if placed with a foster parent who has children. 

Our study is the first of its kind to examine the transition to adulthood in relation to caregivers’ children – and although its findings are modest, they do support the suggestion that they make earlier transitions to adulthood. With some tens of thousands of caregivers’ children potentially experiencing these impacts, more work needs to be done on the issue.

Is foster caring associated with an earlier transition to adulthood for caregivers’ own children? ONS Longitudinal Studyis research by Amanda Sacker, Rebecca Lacey, Barbara Maughan and Emily Murray and is published in SocArvXiv Papers, 19 Feb 2023

Is selective education really ‘the great leveller’?

By Chris A Garrington, on 7 June 2023

As recently as 2017 the Conservative government was elected on a manifesto which pledged to promote new grammar schools – with the explicit aim of increasing mobility. But is school selection really a factor in ‘levelling up’? In this blog Franz Buscha describes research which used census data to track the generation which experienced a mass change from grammars to comprehensives in England. Selective education made little difference to their life chances, it found.

For many decades, opponents and proponents of selective education have argued over its possible effects on social mobility. And while the current government has never fulfilled its pledge to remove legal constraints on new grammar schools, the idea that selective education is a route to ‘levelling up’ remains popular with many MPs and social commentators.

Those who support the expansion of grammar schools argue they give children from disadvantaged backgrounds a leg up in life by enabling them to access high-quality teaching and positive peer influence. Those who oppose selection point to the disadvantages suffered by those who find themselves excluded from such education. Non-selective schools can aid social mobility without the psychological scarring that comes from entry failure at an early age, they argue.

Until now, research evidence has tended to focus on individuals who attended grammar schools. How did those who narrowly passed the 11-plus fare when compared to those who narrowly failed it, for example? Broadly, those studies tell us grammar schools have small positive effects on pupils’ test scores and larger ones on their likelihood of staying on for more years in education. 

But such research cannot look at the effect of selection on the whole population because it ignores the possible negative effects on the majority of pupils. For many children in selective school systems, selection means being educated in schools from which the top end of the ability spectrum has been removed. For policy purposes, the key question is how to design systems which work for the whole pupil population, regardless of academic talent, geography or ability to pay.  We were able to address this by using census data which gave us a picture of the system as a whole.

England provides a rare opportunity to look at this issue, because in the space of two decades during the 1960s and 1970s it went from having a predominantly selective education system to a predominantly mixed ability one. For the vast majority of pupils, their secondary school choices went from either grammar or secondary modern to comprehensive only. Using the ONS Longitudinal Study we were able to look at a sample of more than 90,000 pupils who were born between 1953 and 1972, and whose secondary education therefore took place during this period of transition. 

We linked information on the proportion of pupils attending selective schools in each of England’s 145 Local Education Authorities to census data which allowed us to look at social mobility in those areas over time. Using recognised measures of social mobility we could then track pupils through the changing system to see if those in selective areas were more or less likely to end up in a higher social class than their parents.  

Evidence

Overall, our results showed little evidence that selective or comprehensive education systems made a difference to overall levels of social mobility. The shift to mixed-ability teaching brought some minor positive changes, but these were insignificant once we adjusted for broader social trends. Based on our evidence, even a change from 100 per cent to 0 per cent selectivity would have led only to small improvements.

Mobility

Although our findings are in some ways modest, our analysis provides an important advance in understanding how school selectivity is related to social mobility. We can now definitively reject the more florid claims made by both sides in the political debate over grammar schools.

Individual tales of ‘long range mobility’ from humble working-class origins to professional and managerial destinations – with the key turning-point being admission to the local grammar school – will continue to be told by those in favour of selection. And our findings do not contradict these anecdotal experiences. There is no doubt that for some people from disadvantaged backgrounds, attending grammar school makes a big difference. 

However, we hear much less often from the corresponding group of people who did less well in a secondary modern than they would otherwise have done in a comprehensive school. And to properly assess the effect of a schooling system on social mobility, it is necessary to consider the outcomes for all affected individuals, not just the beneficiaries. 

Conversely, we can now see that the introduction of comprehensives did not bring its promised increase in social mobility either – though to be fair, the claim has never been as central to the comprehensive ideal as it has been to the selective one. It is also true that the full benefits of a comprehensive system cannot be realised while a significant minority of academically high-achieving pupils are ‘creamed off’ into remaining selective schools. 

In any event, we find no evidence that either type of schooling system has had a notable effect on intergenerational social class mobility. Our conclusion casts doubt on the idea that education policy can be a ‘silver bullet’ solution to the larger problems of widening economic inequality and stagnant social mobility. 

Selective schooling and social mobility in England, is research by Franz Buscha, Emma Gorman and Patrick Sturgis and is published in Labour Economics Volume 81, 2023

Is London becoming a city segregated by privilege?

By Chris A Garrington, on 12 May 2023

Globally, more people live in cities, and while they shape those cities they are also shaped by them. In this blog, Dr Bonnie Buyuklieva describes PhD research in which she used census data on London and elsewhere to develop new ways of modelling the metabolic processes of people and their built environments. The results should inform planning, building use and social sustainability.

What makes healthy cities? I believe these should be places able to sustain their populations and enable people to progress through different phases of their lives. 

An unhealthy city, then, is one where the lives of those who live in it are limited by insecurity and infrastructure. An unhealthy city is often a ’burn-and-churn’ place which draws in the young, the educated and the moneyed, then wears them out by failing to afford the context for smooth transitions across different stages and milestones of the lifecycle. 

My research compared data on London and its hinterland and found significant differences between England’s capital and other areas outside it. Briefly, it found that housing increasingly reflects economic privilege. What this means is that London, a place whose populations have for many centuries been empowered by mobility, may in the future become a place where that logic no longer holds. 

Mobility

London may become a place segregated by economic privilege – a place where no-one can afford not to be rich. And that would create problems for all its citizens because it would make it less attractive as a centre of employment. 

I looked at population density, residential stability and mobility, both within London and between the city and its hinterlands.  Using Census data from 1981 to 2011, it became clear that while some pockets of London are not too different from other places in England and Wales, the capital is generally denser and less residentially stable. 

It is not surprising that the centre of London has low population stability and also low density – it is largely commercial and is also home to several University of London institutions along with other education hubs. As for the rest of London – broadly in the North and West few places have a stable population, while the East and South historically have had both higher stability and lower mobility. 

Both South and East London are comparatively less well connected to the rest of the capital, particularly by tube. However, the East, in contrast to the South, is in some senses a residential area in its adolescence:  until the early 1980s it was home to docklands, but as this industry moved out to Tilbury, the area was redeveloped. More recently, it was developed again to accommodate the 2012 Olympic Games, bringing in new housing trends such as purpose-designed built-to-rent developments.  

Looking at built-to-rent developments, which are the fastest-growing sector of London’s housing market, we observe a trend towards smaller-sized, higher-cost rented housing units. These provide ‘plug-and-play’ or ‘just-in-time’ solutions in a constrained market. But they are also a time-limited home for most residents, so they create migration chains that are likely to lead to local residential instability. 

Young families

This trend, along with the rise of asset-based housing wealth and the gig economy’s trend towards precarious, project-based employment, tends to ‘slow down’ people’s lives. Typically, young professionals may delay child-rearing because it is not suited to mobile, dense urban living. They appreciate the tight and bustling city life, but families with easily tiring young children might struggle with that.

Globally, there is a pattern of young professionals clustering in high-density urban neighbourhoods, but the trend has major downsides. Quick-fix policies such as built-to-rent in isolation will impact negatively on London if increasing numbers of people find the financial gains from being in London can only be realised by leaving. 

When compared to the rest of England and Wales, London has few places with high stability and many with low stability. It hosts the densest places in England and Wales. My research has been able to map the small areas which have unusually high levels of density and transience and where we expect to find the churning populations on the edge of belonging in London.

All this impacts people’s lives: social renters and owner-occupiers tend to have children in their late twenties; private renters do not do so until they are over 30, possibly reflecting a sense of housing insecurity. Couples in particular may be treating private rent as a sort of ‘waiting room’ whilst accumulating the financial or social confidence to take on the responsibility of children.

There is an even greater contrast between privately renting households within and outside the capital. Outside London, the majority of private renters over 30 have children; in London, that proportion is only reached after the age of 34. 

As my research took shape, I became increasingly conscious that we needed to look at these issues over time – as people move and their lives change, so do cities. People are the fundamental urban resource, and to maintain healthy cities, planners need to think not just about what is needed now but also in future. By considering how and where populations can move on through their lifecourse, we can plan for the future needs of cities themselves.

Buyana Buyuklieva’s PhD thesis is available to download: London’s Demographic Metabolism: Using Computational Social Science Methods to Map Mobility in Populations and Places

Have school league tables led to more socially segregated neighbourhoods?

By Chris A Garrington, on 24 January 2023

In the early 1990s, parents in England were given access to league tables based on school performance which gave them more information when deciding where their kids would go to school. In this blog Dan McArthur and Aaron Reeves share findings of research which used the ONS Longitudinal Study and which found quantifying school quality had the unintended consequence of increasing the geographical concentration of advantage, potentially entrenching inequalities. 

Where we grow up matters: a childhood in a neighbourhood where the majority of people are materially deprived can lead to lower earnings, a less prestigious occupation and even a lower life expectancy. Neighbourhoods matter because they contain important local services such as hospitals that can have a profound impact on what happens in our lives. Parents sense that neighbourhoods (and the local services available within them) matter and so areas perceived to have high quality services typically have higher house prices, and this can to segregation because less affluent families find it harder to stay in or move to neighbourhoods where the quality of these local services is perceived to be good.

Education is particularly important because school quality can have a major influence on adult life chances, and British parents pay a substantial house price premium to gain access to good schools. This can be self-perpetuating. School league tables at least in part reflect the social composition of the pupils: middle class children tend to perform well, and this pushes their schools up the rankings. Better-off parents move to be near successful schools, and in doing so help those schools to become even more successful. Conversely, the process leads to less successful schools facing a downward spiral as parents who are able to move away from them choose to do so.

The very act of measuring school quality, then, has the potential to deepen divisions between advantaged and disadvantaged residential areas. To explore this possibility, we carried out two studies to explore what happened after the introduction of GCSE league tables in England, which provide a clear and simple (albeit controversial) measure of school quality. 

Our first study compared census data from 1981 to 2011 on the social class composition of neighbourhoods with school performance data, and showed that areas with better-performing schools saw greater increases in the proportion of professional and managerial people among their populations.

Our second study used the ONS Longitudinal Study, a one per cent sample of English and Welsh census records and life-events data, to study individual-level patterns of residential mobility. We found people with professional or managerial occupations became more likely to move to areas with better schools after the introduction of school league tables. However, this only occurred if those people had school-age children: this provides us with strong evidence that those who were most able and most incentivised to benefit from the introduction of league tables did indeed alter their patterns of residential mobility in response to their introduction.

Indirect links

We could not directly ask parents why they moved to a particular area, and we could not see which schools their children subsequently attended, but our study does provide substantial indirect evidence that league tables drove a change in class-specific patterns of residential mobility. We do, however, consider alternative explanations for the changes we see over time. For example, it might be the case that middle class parents became more concerned about their children’s educational prospects during this period; but we find no evidence of a change in this direction. By ruling out these alternative explanations, we can be more confident that the change was driven by the change of policy rather than by other factors.

Would these findings be replicated elsewhere? We believe they would: England’s schools are funded via a centralised system which also redistributes funding to areas where there is educational disadvantage, and in places where this is not the case, such as the United States, the effect may in fact be more pronounced.

We believe the alluring simplicity of league tables based on exam performance may reduce the importance of more informal sources of information for parents. Before the league tables were published, families gleaned background on schools through local networks, as well as ad hoc publicity around the particular successes of individual schools. League tables changed their perspective – what may previously have seemed a good local school may have suffered in comparison with a more successful school further away, and in fact the average distance children travel to school has almost doubled since the 1980s.

We know from other research that there are class differences in how families respond to league tables. Those in less advantaged homes may put more weight on proximity, for instance, and may give their children more say. Those with professional and managerial jobs are more likely to take the lead in the decision, and also to be focused on entry to an elite university. But there are also financial reasons why a middle-class family is more likely to move into the catchment of a good school: those on lower incomes are often unable to afford to do so.

Wider implications

Our research showed that the share of professional and managerial residents increased fastest in local authorities with high-performing schools. It also found those in advantaged social classes became more likely to move to areas with high-performing schools after the introduction of league tables, but only if they had school-aged children. 

This does not necessarily mean that league tables will always lead to a greater geographical concentration of advantage – other background factors such as school funding policies and the level of house price inequality will also play a part. But we can say that quantifying quality in this way reveals inequalities in performance which were previously opaque. It also increases the likelihood that good schools will do even better as successful families move into new catchment areas.

This matters because the measurement of school quality is a political choice, albeit one which – as we have shown – has unintended consequences. League tables enable parents to make informed choices, and may even improve teaching quality, according to some research. But in doing so they deepen the geographical concentration of disadvantage, and they potentially affect the life chances of children whose parents are unable to move into the catchment of successful schools.

‘The Unintended Consequences of Quantifying Quality: Does Ranking School Performance Shape the Geographical Concentration of Advantage?’ by Daniel McArthur and Aaron Reeves, was published in The American journal of sociology: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722470