Social Inequalities and Education

I have just received issue 3 of The Londinian, the magazine for alumni and friends of the UCL Institute of Education. It helps to keep me in touch with current educational research. I spent a postgraduate year at the IOE.

I read with great interest the article by Alissa Goodman, "The long roots of childhood: Explaining economic inequalities across the whole of life". It deals with the core of the UK's social mobility problems, the causes of inequalities in cognitive development, and the cumulative disadvantages which have an increasing impact throughout life.

Alissa Goodman is Professor of Economics, and Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS), UCL Institute of Education (IOE).

There is also a pdf document of March 2010 accessible online:

Poorer children’s educational attainment: how important are attitudes and behaviour?
Edited by Alissa Goodman and Paul Gregg

"This report considers some of the ways that affluence and disadvantage influence children’s educational attainment. It focuses on a broad set of factors, varying across childhood, classified under the broad umbrella term ‘aspirations, attitudes and behaviours’. The implications for policy are also explored. Children growing up in poorer families emerge from school with substantially lower levels of educational attainment. This is a major contributing factor to patterns of social mobility and poverty".

Background to a recent lecture (20 June, 2018):

"Professor Alissa Goodman, Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL Institute of Education, Alissa Goodman is a professor of economics and Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies in the Department of Social Science at the UCL Institute of Education. She is the Principal Investigator of the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study (NCDS), and is currently leading the team responsible for the design and content of the study's major new age 61 sweep. She is an economist whose main research interests relate to income inequality, poverty, education policy, and the intergenerational transmission of wellbeing. Alissa previously served as Deputy Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, which is Britain’s leading independent microeconomics research institute".

"In this lecture I'll talk about my research on inequalities, showing how both cross-sectional and longitudinal data are being used to illuminate and address some of the major social and policy questions of our time. I'll show how the UK's birth cohort studies reveal the long roots of childhood experience on later life, and the importance of tackling childhood mental health problems. I'll show how earlier adult life is influencing the decisions of a generation now approaching retirement age, and some of the striking generational changes occurring in our society, including in incomes, obesity, and mental health".


The public lecture can be heard in this video recording.


Multicultural Britain, Demographics