In the first part of this post, we saw that both disadvantage and low early literacy skills were associated with worse longer-term outcomes. In this part, we investigate how outcomes vary by the combination of literacy skills and disadvantage.
Below we plot the same outcomes we saw in the previous post, again split by early literacy band, but we show results for those who were never eligible for FSM on the left-hand side of each bar, and those who were long-term disadvantaged on the right-hand side.
Although we see that long-term disadvantaged pupils tended to have worse outcomes than the never disadvantaged, the relationship with early literacy skills is still there.
There are some interesting results here. For those with the highest literacy skills, there’s a difference of 12-13pp in GCSE outcomes, but 23-25pp in the proportion going on to obtain L3 qualifications or study for a degree.
And in the final two outcomes – the proportion observed in a positive destination or receiving workless benefits – there’s a bigger difference in outcomes between those with the highest and lowest literacy scores for the most disadvantaged than the least. For example, among never disadvantaged individuals, there’s a difference of 16pp between those with the highest and lowest literacy skills observed in a positive destination, while for the long-term disadvantaged it’s 27pp.
