Disengagement from secondary education: a story retold

Appointed Senior Researcher for this commissioned report by the Learning and Skills Development Agency, working alongside Steve MacIntosh from the London School of Economics (now Reader in Economics at Sheffield University), the report brings together a number of strands in one study, and aims to tell a continuous story of those who have disengaged from the education process, from their time at school, through further education and into their working lives. In this study, disengagement is defined as partial or full withdrawal from the education process, either in terms of attendance or of effort. It is worth noting that the focus is on those who disengage because of disaffection with the education process or their learning, and not on those who have had to disengage from education because of, for example, family problems or caring duties.

The study used large national datasets, representative of the whole population, to supplement evidence from case studies, and aimed to identify who the disengaged are; what effect their disengagement has had on their school examination outcomes; how many re-engage with education by participating in post-compulsory education; and what the characteristics are of those who do; how successful they are in post-compulsory education; and the impact of this continued learning on their labour market outcomes.

The project is in part a scoping study, as it set out to investigate whether such analysis is possible with existing national data sets. The most relevant information in a national dataset that could be found was given in answer to a question in the Youth Cohort Study, asking respondents whether they had played truant during the final year of compulsory schooling, and if so, how frequently.