Analysing family circumstances and education

The Department for Education sought views on the development of a methodology which intended to improve our ability to understand the links between family circumstances and education of pupils in England.

We welcomed your views on the statistical analysis and methodology outlined in the consultation for looking at ‘ordinary working families’, and how to refer to them in DfE publications.

Broadly, respondents generally agreed with our proposed methodology in expanding the number of years of analysis to provide a time series as well as including other sources of income such as Self-Assessment to provide a clearer picture on household income.

One of the recommended changes by respondents was to remove the term ordinary working families as it suggests that groups outside of these are not ordinary and to use a scale of income instead of a name.

We have developed a Business-As-Usual dataset called Pupil Parent Matched Data (PPMD) which is still at a relatively early stage of development and includes further revisions to strengthen the proposed methodology.