The complexity of school and neighbourhood effects and movements of pupils on school differences in models of educational achievement

Traditional studies of school differences in educational achievement use
multilevel modelling techniques to take into account the nesting of pupils within schools.
However, educational data are known to have more complex non-hierarchical structures. The
potential importance of such structures is apparent when considering the impact of pupil
mobility during secondary schooling on educational achievement. Movements of pupils
between schools suggest that we should model pupils as belonging to the series of schools
attended and not just their final school. Since these school moves are strongly linked to
residential moves, it is important to additionally explore whether achievement is also affected
by the history of neighbourhoods lived in. Using the national pupil database, this paper
combines multiple membership and cross-classified multilevel models to simultaneously
explore the relationships between secondary school, primary school, neighbourhood and
educational achievement. The results show a negative relationship between pupil mobility
and achievement, the strength of which depends greatly on the nature and timing of these
moves. Accounting for pupil mobility also reveals that schools and neighbourhoods are more
important than shown by previous analysis. A strong primary school effect appears to last
long after a child has left that phase of schooling. The additional impact of neighbourhoods,
on the other hand, is small. Crucially, the rank order of school effects across all types of
pupils is sensitive to whether we account for the complexity of the multilevel data structure.