The ‘changing’ nature of social inequality – how are young people’s attitudes to school stratified and how are they changing?

In this paper we examine young people’s attitudes to school level education. Through pooled data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales (YCS) we explore how attitudes to school are stratified. From preliminary analyses we have observed that there are interesting trends in pupil’s attitudes towards their school and that these are stratified by school type and educational attainment, but also by gender, social class, and ethnicity. In this paper we present the results of exploratory analyses of the data spanning several decades. We attempt to develop more sophisticated analyses through the application of latent class statistical models.