Together Apart

: A Study of Residential and School Mobility in England

Abstract

Mobility during childhood has been widely studied, with contributions focusing on residential mobility, on the one hand, and school mobility on the other. The evidence from both have identified the negative outcomes that can accrue from moving but despite both literatures being well developed little research has been carried out where a study of residential and school mobility is combined. Given the clear linkages between the place of residence and school attended, and therefore the clear dependency between moves in one impacting moves in the other this is especially surprising. Where these linkages have been made studies are largely cross-sectional, using single point in time measures. Longitudinal studies tend either to use small, unrepresentative data samples or large aggregate data that misses finer spatial detail.
This thesis builds on the current literature by using temporally rich data from the UK National Pupil Database (NPD) and longitudinal analyses to evaluate residential and school mobility based on ethnicity, socio-economic status and geography to examine the extent to which these are associated with educational attainment at age 16.
The first part of the thesis focuses on neighbourhood moves, analysing who is moving, the type and distance of move, whether there is a ‘trade up’ or ‘trade down’ in the neighbourhood hierarchy over the educational life course, and any change in ethnic composition between origin and destination neighbourhood to understand the type of move different groups are making.
The second part of the thesis examines school moves, which is then combined with earlier analyses on residential mobility to evaluate simultaneous home and school moves by ethnicity, socio-economic status and geography.
Finally, school and home moves, along with the type of moves and individual characteristics are modelled with a measure of secondary educational attainment as the outcome variable to assess how moving and type of moves are associated with educational attainment at age 16.

Date of Award	25 Jun 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	David J Manley (Supervisor) & Richard J Harris (Supervisor)