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

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.