What are the real barriers to educational achievement?

What is the relationship between young people's aspirations and how they are formed? Based on longitudinal research in three locations in the UK, this study investigates aspirations and empirical evidence.

There is a high degree of interest among politicians and policymakers in aspirations, driven by two concerns: raising the education and skills of the UK population, and tackling social and economic inequality. High aspirations are often seen as one way to address these concerns, but how aspirations contribute to strong work and educational outcomes is not well understood.

The report:

• examines the nature of aspirations;
• explores how parental circumstances and attitudes, school, and opportunity structures come together to shape aspirations in deprived urban areas; and
• argues that the approach to intervention should be reconsidered.

A new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has recently been published. The report: The influence of parents, places and poverty on educational attitudes and aspirations (St Clair, Kintrea and Houston, 2011), was based on research conducted by a team from the University of Glasgow and examines the educational and career aspirations of young people from three distinct and disparate locations in an attempt to understand how and in what ways neighbourhood, friends, family and school may impact on the development of individual aspirations.

Adopting a longitudinal approach, young people were surveyed and interviewed aged 13 and again when aged 15. The report maps out how deprivation manifests itself in different ways dependent upon culture, material circumstances and socio-historical context. It finds that young people have generally high aspirations and that these tend to become more realistic and perhaps achievable as they get older. However, many of the young people, particularly in London exhibited extremely high aspirations that for many would prove to be unrealistic. It is suggested that a focus solely on aspirations is not sufficient to ensure either social inclusion or social mobility.

A summary and the full report are available for download.