ADR UK Research Fellows: Longitudinal Education Outcomes
Categories: ADR UK Research Fellows, ADR England, Office for National Statistics, Children & young people, World of work
5 November 2024
ADR UK is funding four Research Fellowships to analyse the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset. These projects will generate novel insights around people’s pathways through education and work, with the potential to inform policy decision-making and improve public outcomes. The projects are a result of ADR UK Fellowship opportunities which invited applications to carry out research using eligible ADR England flagship datasets.
LEO is a world-leading data product created by the Department for Education. It contains de-identified information on the characteristics, education, employment, benefits, and earnings of members of the British public. This is a unique source of information, offering unprecedented opportunities for researchers to examine longer-term labour market outcomes and educational pathways of (currently) around 38 million individuals.
The fellows are addressing a range of policy-relevant issues, from understanding earnings in the creative industries to exploring the impact of vocational education and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subject readiness. They are accessing the dataset via the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Secure Research Service.
Learn more about the Research Fellows and their projects below.
Dr Orian Brook
Analysing earnings from creative education and creative work: Understanding the influence of university, industry, and social inequalities
Orian is Chancellor’s Fellow in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh. Her project explores the earnings of graduates with creative degrees, and how they vary with industry of employment
View project details
This project aims to explore the following research questions:
- What industries do creative graduates go on to work in, and what is the relationship with their earnings?
- What are the class, gender, and racial pay gaps for creative graduates, by industry?
- Do social inequalities in incomes of creative graduates persist after controlling for the university that they attend, their prior attainment, and the type of school they attended?
- Who works in the creative industries, and what is their educational background?
- What are the class, gender, and racial pay gaps in creative industry employment, and do these vary according to the type of university and school employees attended?
The methodology used in this study:
- For research questions 1, 2, and 3, the project will begin with descriptive analysis of the earnings of graduates from creative undergraduate degrees five, ten, and fifteen years after graduation. This will be according to the industry or industries that they work in (noting that creative workers are twice as likely to hold more than one job at the same time), as well as those who are working freelance (where we don’t know their industry of employment).
- Regression modelling will estimate the association between earnings and industry after controlling for various factors at the individual level (social class, ethnicity, gender, educational attainment) and institutional level (type of school and university attended). Multilevel models will be used to disaggregate how much of the variation in earnings depends on individual, university, and industry factors.
- For research question 3, descriptive analysis and regression modelling will be deployed, focusing instead on the educational and social backgrounds of all graduates employed in creative industries. This will explore how their earnings vary according to what they studied, and how this compares to individual and educational institution characteristics.
Funded value: £169,369
Duration: April 2024-October 2026
Dr Guglielmo Ventura
Unpacking returns to vocational education: The role of skill, labour market sorting and mobility
Guglielmo is a Research Economist at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance. His project aims to understand how post-16 education choices in England affect students’ labour market trajectories.
View project details
This project aims to explore the following research questions:
- What are the differences in employment and earnings of students choosing different post-16 educational pathways?
- What are the sectors in which academic and vocational students are more likely to find employment, and how does this affect their earnings growth?
- How does curriculum specialisation affect future workers’ ability to move across sectors and firms, and how does this impact their earnings?
- Did the recent increase in the education participation at age 17-18 improve students’ skills and labour market performance?
The methodology used in this study:
- Using LEO data, this study will track the annual earnings and employment status of young people who made different post-16 education choices, as they progress in the labour market. Statistical techniques will indicate to what extent the difference in earnings growth between students who took academic courses (such as A-Levels), and students who took more vocationally-oriented further education courses (such as BTECs) can be attributed to being employed or switching employment across different sectors or businesses.
- The project will use information on the type of work activities carried out in different economic sectors, testing the hypothesis that vocational courses may channel students into jobs that are more focused on routine-based tasks with typically weaker earnings growth. A measure of the specificity of post-16 education curricula will be developed, in order to study the relationship between curriculum breadth and young people’s propensity to move around jobs in their early labour market careers.
- To establish more rigorously the role of education choices on the outcome mentioned above, as well as ensure differences in education are not picking up other differences in students’ characteristics (such as their socio-economic background), statistical techniques will be used to compare students who are expected to look similar in any other respect. The project will compare students whose post-16 education choices differed purely because of how far they lived from different types of post-16 education providers (such as further education colleges), exploring these students’ employment patterns across sectors and businesses.
- Finally, the project will study what happened when the government increased the Education Participation Age in 2013, requiring young people to stay in some form of education or training until they turn 17. The intent of this reform was to convince young people who would otherwise stop studying at age 16 to acquire additional skills and access higher paid jobs. This part of the analysis will compare:
- the education and labour market outcomes of young people born in the education cohort affected by this reform, with
- those of students who enrolled in the cohort above due to being born a few days earlier.
Funded value: £142,569
Duration: June 2024 – November 2025
Dr Golo Henseke
Investigating STEM readiness, inclusion, and economic returns
Golo is Associate Professor at the Institute of Education, University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society. Workers in science, technology and engineering (STEM) differ in their socio-demographic compositions from the total employed labour force. This project aims to examine who ends up working in STEM industries. The project will also explore the point at which ‘leakages’ – where an individual exits their trajectory towards a STEM career – emerge during people’s pathways from school to early careers.
View project details
This project aims to explore the following research questions:
- Who is ‘ready’ for post-18 STEM education?
- Who enrols and completes post-18 STEM education?
- Who works in STEM fields after graduation?
- What are the patterns of inequalities in STEM at each career stage, and how do they intersect and compound?
- How well do STEM subjects compare to other fields in terms of earnings?
The methodology used in this study:
- First, the project will develop a way to measure 'STEM readiness' using school performance in maths and science from primary to secondary school. This measure will help to understand who is prepared for STEM studies after secondary school and college.
- Second, the project will look at the educational and career choices people make after turning 18. This includes both university degrees and further education, including apprenticeships - particularly those that lead to high-skill STEM careers. It will compare these paths to see how traditional university routes stack up against other options. Differences in STEM choices linked to gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status will be investigated, seeing how these relate to a student's STEM readiness. The careers of these students will be tracked, examining who stays in STEM fields from their first job up to age 30.
- Third, the project will examine how well 'STEM readiness' at the end of secondary school explains differences in choices and outcomes along the STEM pipeline—from education through early career. Statistical methods will break down the factors behind different STEM career choices, focusing on the role of STEM readiness. This will help pinpoint where and why students drop out of the STEM track, and whether these patterns can be predicted by their earlier school performance.
- Finally, the project will explore the earnings related to different STEM education paths in early careers. Statistical analysis will be used to compare earnings of STEM and non-STEM graduates who had similar STEM readiness scores at the end of secondary school. This will take into account their field of study, type of educational institution, and demographics like gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background.
Funded value: £153,303.67
Duration: June 2024 – November 2025
Dr Taheya Tarannum and Dr Farshad Ravasan
Graduating in austerity: Do welfare cuts affect the career path of university students?
Taheya and Farshad are Research Fellows at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Their project aims to understand the effect of austerity policies on labour market opportunities and human capital formation, providing insights to protect those who are most vulnerable to these effects.
View project details
This project aims to explore the following research questions:
- How do austerity policies impact early job earnings and quality of employment, immediately after graduation and five years post-graduation?
- What is the influence of austerity policies on acceptance rates into selective universities, choice of academic fields, enrolment status (full-time/part-time), and degree completion?
- How do austerity policies affect job mobility and earnings gained through job transitions?
The methodology used in this study:
- This project studies the impact of the UK Government's Welfare Reform Act of 2012, which resulted in a significant decrease in welfare benefits. The extent of these cuts varied substantially across different regions, with the worst-hit local authorities losing around four times as much as the less-affected local authorities.
- These geographical variations will be used to assess the effect of austerity policies, by comparing young adults who lived in the areas with low and high exposure to benefit cuts before and after the reform. Using this approach, the project will examine whether welfare cuts had a detrimental effect on:
- their transition from school to university
- their transition from university to the workforce
- their job mobility within the first five years after graduation.
- The project will further examine how variations in these effects depend on students' individual characteristics and socioeconomic backgrounds. This allows identification of which segments of students are more susceptible to the impact of welfare cuts.
Funded value: £144,458
Duration: July 2024 – December 2025
Categories: ADR UK Research Fellows, ADR England, Office for National Statistics, Children & young people, World of work
