Van Poortvliet, Matthew; (2025) Unequal journeys through school: Longitudinal analyses on children’s mental health, educational attainment, and absence in the UK. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores how children’s socio-emotional development, mental health, and absence from school influence educational inequalities. It uses the Millennium Cohort Study, and linked administrative data on school records to provide new evidence on key policy concerns. The first paper explores whether gaps in children’s socio-emotional development (ages 3–14) widen over time according to family background. It explores different ways to overcome regression to the mean in the analysis of trajectories, and finds that large gaps in early childhood persist through school, and that children with similar initial skills diverge over time according to family background. The second paper assesses the relationship between child mental health and academic attainment across the whole of mainstream schooling (ages 5–16). Using longitudinal models with individual fixed effects, it finds that mental health affects attainment, with hyperactivity and inattention the behaviours most strongly linked to adverse attainment outcomes. These behaviours are disproportionately seen in those from disadvantaged backgrounds, with worsening impacts at later ages. The third paper focuses on absence from school. It provides new evidence on a rich set of factors (from parental working patterns, to child mental health) that predict different types of absence across primary and secondary school. Controlling for these factors and using individual fixed effects, it assesses the effect of absence on attainment and mental health at each key stage of education (ages 5–16), and heterogeneity in these relationships. It finds negative effects on attainment and emotional health for each extra day of school missed, with variation by absence type, and disproportionately adverse impacts for those with the highest levels of absence.

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