When and why do initially high attaining poor children fall behind?

The role of education as a potential driver of social mobility has been well established and it is critical that we understand how children from different socio-economic backgrounds fare in the education system. In this paper, we examine the trajectories of initially high- and low-achieving children from lower and higher socio-economic status families from age 7 through to the end of compulsory education (age 16) in England for the first time. This enables us to provide new insights into when initially high attaining poor children fall behind their better-off peers. We show that there are substantial differences in educational attainment by socio-economic background at age 7, and that these differences increase as children move through the education system. Our results indicate that pupils from poor backgrounds who score highly in primary school fall behind their better-off but lower achieving peers during secondary school. These findings are not caused by ''regression to the mean'' (where a child with 'high' or 'low' achievement on any given day may have over- or under-performed relative to their 'true' attainment, meaning that the next time they are tested they will look more like the average individual). This suggests that secondary school may be a critical period to intervene to ensure poor children do not fall behind their better-off peers. We also provide suggestive evidence on the extent to which these patterns can be explained by the types of schools that pupils from different backgrounds attend, and by the differing attitudes and aspirations of the pupils and their families. Our analysis suggests that there is less convergence amongst pupils who attend the same schools. And if all pupils had the attitudes and aspirations of the average pupil, there would be more convergence. While we remain cautious about the implications of these findings, they provide suggestive evidence that schools (or the sorting of pupils into schools) and the attitudes and aspirations held by children from different backgrounds may contribute to the convergence in attainment that we see.