This theme sets out to examine place-based inequalities, and those that derive from characteristics such as social class, gender and ethnicity, and how they affect educational attainment at the Secondary School, Further Education and Higher Education stages, progression to employment, and as an outcome of lifelong learning.

It extends UBDC’s existing work on educational disadvantage and place, examining more broadly how urban educational systems shape attainment, skills development and productivity into employment, as well as how the home and educational environments combine within an urban setting to shape educational attainment.

We will produce new knowledge on attainment gaps and key transitions in school, FE and HE student attainment and skilled employment with a place-based (neighbourhood and deprivation) emphasis, using data for widespread applications within educational policy at national and local levels. For instance, this theme will cast new light on the relatively neglected area of educational trajectories within FE, and the extent to which these contribute to filling regional skills gaps in key sectors such as engineering and construction. We will also develop more robust indicators for Learning Cities, enabling more rigorous comparisons of cities.

We will capitalise on the extensive data collections compiled on educational attainment and trajectories, linked to spatially referenced administrative datasets in order to examine policy-relevant questions. Our data will not only yield more nuanced findings about current, active research aspects of educational disadvantage and place (e.g., the influence of neighbourhood deprivation on educational attainment), but will also enable us to carry out analyses that can only be effectively achieved with our big datasets (e.g., exploring causality and accounting for endogeneity, the habitual problem in the interpretation of neighbourhood-based research). Our work will also benefit from the networks of connections we have built with key stakeholders.

Learn more about our work on Education & Skills by exploring the research projects below.