It is well known that children growing up in poor families leave school with considerably lower qualifications than … children from better off backgrounds. Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio … behaviours of young people and their parents during the teenage years play a key role in explaining the rich-poor gap in GCSE …

follow two cohorts of students in England - those who took GCSEs in 2001-02 and 2002-03 - from age 11 to age 20. The findings … hold for both state and private school students. This suggests that poor attainment in secondary schools is more important … in explaining lower HE participation rates amongst students from disadvantaged backgrounds than barriers arising at the …