Aspirations & Educational Attainment

The link between child poverty and success at school seems to be a perennial topic for enquiries - if you've ever sat through one of my information skills sessions, you'll know that it's a topic I use as an example when demonstrating how to construct a search. So here are two more publications to add to the literature on this topic...

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just released two new reports. The first is entitled The Impact of Attitudes and Aspirations on Educational Attainment and Participation, and explores the available literature on the relationship between parental expectations and a child's achievement at school and beyond - the report also investigates whether the current situation, whereby children from poorer families tend to do less well at school, can be improved by activities to enhance the beliefs and behaviour of the most educationally marginalised families.

The second report is entitled Can Changing Aspirations and Attitudes Impact on Educational Attainment? and is in a similar vein to the first. However, this publication focuses more on interventions that have been implemented with low income families, and attempts to evaluate whether or not these have been effective.

For further reading on this topic, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have also published many other reports - try Poorer Children’s Educational Attainment: how Important are Attitudes and Behaviour? from 2010, or Education and Child Poverty: a Literature Review from 2006. For reports from other organisations, try looking at some of my bookmarks on this topic on the Diigo site.