In most countries, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are under-represented amongst the undergraduate population. One explanation is that they do not see higher education as a realistic goal; that it is ‘not for the likes of them’. In this paper, I use the Programme for...

Social mobility has emerged as one of the key academic and political topics in Britain over the last decade. Although economists and sociologists disagree on whether mobility has increased or decreased, and if this is a bigger issue in the UK than other developed countries, both groups recognise...

The international surveys of pupil achievement - PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS - have been widely used to compare socioeconomic gradients in children's cognitive abilities across countries. Socioeconomic status is typically measured drawing on children's reports of family or home characteristics rather...

'Bullshitters' are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue. This paper attempts...

International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

There has been much interest across the social sciences in the link between young people's socioemotional (non-cognitive) skills and their educational achievement. But much of this research has focused upon the role of the Big Five personality traits. This paper contributes new evidence by...