Posh but Poor: The Association Between Relative Socio‐Economic Status and Children’s Academic Performance

• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Author: John Jerrim,Luis Alejandro Lopez‐Agudo,Oscar David Marcenaro‐Gutierrez
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12476

© 2020 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

334

POSH BUT POOR: THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN RELATIVE

SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS AND CHILDREN’S ACADEMIC

PERFORMANCE

by John Jerrim* and Luis ALeJandro Lopez-Agudo

UCL Institute of Education,University College London

AND

oscAr dAvid mArcenAro-gutierrez

Universidad de Málaga

It is well known that young people from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds have, on average,

higher levels of academic achievement than their disadvantaged peers. Yet rather less is known about

how the relative socio-economic position of students might be related to their academic progression

at school. This is the issue considered in this paper, using longitudinal administrative data covering the

largest region within Spain. We find evidence that the relative socio-economic position of students within

their school is associated with grade retention, performance in standardized tests and attitudes towards

school, even after controlling for the absolute level of their socio-economic status. Our primary conclu-

sion is that both absolute and relative social position matters for young people’s academic development.

JEL Codes: I20, I21, I28

Keywords: academic progression, big-fish-little-pond, socio-economic status, value-added

1. introduction

Socio-economic inequalities in young people’s outcomes is one of the most

studied issues across the social sciences (Perrons and Plomien, 2010). It is now

well-established that large social disparities exist across a wide range of outcomes

(e.g. health, Jones and Nicolás, 2004; access to labor market, Hu, 2013; education,

Jerrim et al., 2015) and that these emerge very early in life (Galobardes et al., 2004;

Currie, 2009). Reducing such inequalities is also a key public policy issue being

tackled by many governments across the world (Brune and Garrett, 2005), with

billions of dollars devoted to this cause each year (Mayer and Lopoo, 2008).

This literature—and public policy—has almost exclusively focused upon the

relationship between young people’s “absolute” socio-economic status (measured by

either parental education, parental occupation or household income) and their later

Note: The data used in this research has been provided by Agencia Andaluza de Evaluación

Educativa, Consejería de Educación, Junta de Andalucía. This work has been partly supported by the

Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under Research Project ECO2017-88883-R and the

Fundación Centro de Estudios Andaluces (under Research Project PRY085/19).

*Correspondence to: John Jerrim, Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education,

University College London, 20 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AL, London, UK (j.jerrim@ucl.ac.uk).

Review of Income and Wealth

Series 67, Number 2, June 2021

DOI: 10.1111/roiw.12476

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Review of Income and Wealth, Series 67, Number 2, June 2021

335

© 2020 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

outcomes. In other words, researchers have typically considered whether children with

more educated, higher-earning parents achieve superior lifetime outcomes (e.g. better

school grades, obtain a higher social position, earn more money) than their peers

from disadvantaged backgrounds—across a country or a region as a whole. Much less

attention has been paid, however, to the role of children’s relative social background

in determining their future achievements. That is, if a child is relatively advantaged or

disadvantaged in comparison to their school peers, does this matter for their future

academic achievements (over and above their absolute socio-economic status)? The

primary contribution of this paper is to examine such “relative” socio-economic sta-

tus influence across a selection of academic outcomes (grade retention, standardized

test scores, attitudes towards school and academic self-concept).

There are several reasons to believe that relative social status is likely to be

important for children’s educational outcomes. In the section that follows, we

describe such potential mechanisms in detail. However, one particularly important

factor could be that children’s relative socio-economic status within their school

is likely to be related to their relative academic rank (i.e. the most socially advan-

taged children within a school are also likely to be stronger academically than the

most disadvantaged children within the school). This, in turn, could give rise to the

much-studied phenomenon of “big-fish-little-pond” effects (Seaton et al., 2009;

Mora and Oreopoulos, 2011; Roy et al., 2015, among others). This wide-ranging

literature recognizes the importance of children’s relative academic rank within

their school, with young people developing higher levels of academic self-

confidence (Jonkmann et al., 2012; Roy et al., 2015) and experiencing faster aca-

demic progress (Elsner and Isphording, 2017) if they are higher-performing than

their school peers (conditional upon their absolute level of prior performance).

Our paper also speaks to this literature by considering whether the link between

relative socio-economic status and young people’s educational outcomes is being

driven by such big-fish-little-pond effects, or whether these two phenomena are

independently associated with young people’s educational outcomes.

The empirical setting for this research is the largest administrative region within

Spain—Andalusia. This region has many characteristics that make it a particularly

interesting context to conduct this work. First, it is the largest and most populated

administrative region of Spain and one of the worst performers in international large-

scale assessment tests. For instance, Andalusian students scored 19 points below

the Spanish average and 19 below the OECD average in the PISA (Programme for

International Student Assessment) 2015 test (MECD, 2016). Additionally, Andalusia

has very high dropout rates in compulsory education, to the extent that around a

quarter of students did not finish their compulsory studies in 2015 (IECA, 2020).

Moreover, Andalusia had one of the highest grade retention rates for 15–16year-old

students among all Spanish regions (38 percent) in PISA 2015, above the average for

Spain (31 percent) and the OECD (26 percent) as a whole (MECD, 2016).

In the present paper we employ logistic models (to analyze the likelihood of

grade retention) and value-added models (to analyze progression in reading and

mathematics) to approach this issue. The use of prior academic achievement in

these value-added models helps to control for relevant unobservables (using it as

a proxy of e.g. student ability) so that we can overcome, at least partially, variable

omission problems. Additionally we control for a range of potential confounding