Project 4: Pupil Mobility

Contacts:

	Dr Shqiponje Telhaj , CEP, Sussex and CEE Associate Tel: +44(0)20 7955 7010 Email: s.telhaj@lse.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1273 873 359 Email: S.Telhaj@sussex.ac.uk
	Ms Joan Wilson, Institute of Education and CEE Tel:+44(0)20 7955 6974 Email: wilsonj1@lse.ac.uk

Pupil mobility refers to the movement of pupils between schools at times other than the normal stages of transition. Pupil mobility has been prominent in recent British policy debates on education. The concern is that these moves may impact on both the educational attainment of individual pupils, and, if concentrated within particular schools (and areas), on overall school performance. To date, there has been limited research on this topic, particularly at the national level.

In our paper, we examine links between pupil mobility and pupil and school characteristics at all phases of state school education in England. We measure school transitions across the first two academic years of the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) data, a unique national administrative longitudinal data source. Our results show mobility to be quite prevalent, with just over a quarter of a million, or around 4.4 per cent of pupils, making school moves at non-standard time points between the academic years 2001/2002 and 2002/2003.

We find that pupils from lower-income families (as proxied by their eligibility for Free School Meals) are significantly more likely to change schools than other pupils, and this is true for students at all levels of schooling. We additionally observe that pupils who move schools are more likely to have a lower previous academic achievement record than pupils who remain at the same school. Moreover, we note that pupils are less likely to move if the school they attend has good average performance levels. When children move school, they are also more likely to end up in a school with better Key Stage performance than the one they left, but this improvement is significantly more marked for children from better-off backgrounds. Finally, in terms of regional variation in school moves, we find that pupil mobility is more marked in London than in other regions of the country.

Related Discussion Papers:

Mobility and School Disruption
Steve Gibbons, Shqiponja Telhaj, August 2007
Paper No' CEEDP0083: Read Abstract | Full paper (free)