@article{discovery10204680,
         journal = {Research Papers in Education},
            year = {2025},
           title = {Examining the relationship between ethnicity, school attainment and higher education participation in England},
           month = {February},
           pages = {1--22},
            note = {{\copyright} 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor \& Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.},
       publisher = {Informa UK Limited},
             url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2025.2464737},
          author = {Martin, Paul},
        abstract = {Analyses of administrative data have revealed that during the 1990s
and early twenty-first century, young people in England from ethnic
minority backgrounds appeared to have a greater propensity to
participate in higher education than their white British counterparts. This paper presents the results of an analysis of linked administrative data for the entire cohort of English school pupils who took
their GCSE examinations in 2015 (n = 565,169) to further investigate
recent trends in HE participation by ethnicity. In line with previous
research, school pupils from almost all ethnic minority backgrounds
were found to be more likely to progress to degree-level study by
the age of 19 than those of white British ethnicity. Large gaps in the
likelihood of HE participation by ethnicity could not be explained
by other confounding variables such as prior attainment or socioeconomic background. However, gaps in HE participation by ethnicity were relatively narrow for those with higher levels of school
attainment but were very wide for those with below-average school
attainment. Unlike their white British counterparts, lower attaining
school pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds appear to have
a strong inclination towards degree-level study, as opposed to
possible alternative pathways.},
        keywords = {Ethnicity; higher education;
widening participation;
social mobility},
            issn = {0267-1522}
}