Linking Regeneration and Educational Outcomes

Improvements in school performance and in educational outcomes for pupils are some of the wider benefits that policy-makers and practitioners would like to obtain from regeneration activity, if possible.  By changing the housing market structure and through this also the social composition of an area, regeneration may impact upon two important contexts that affect pupil outcomes: the neighbourhood and the school. 

Within a pupil’s neighbourhood of residence, the presence of ‘advantaged’ neighbours is said to influence pupils through the transfer of positive attitudes to educational attainment, and turn away from antisocial behaviours.  Similar processes of peer influence are expected to operate with the school context due to changes in pupil composition following developments in the surrounding catchment area. In addition, school pupil composition is said to affect performance through its impacts upon school organisation and management, available resources, curriculum content and teacher quality.  

As part of GoWell’s interest in assessing the wider impacts of regeneration activity, we examined the relationships between measures of school context and neighbourhood context and pupil outcomes across secondary schools in Glasgow in 2011.  Two outcomes were examined: the proportion of pupils achieving  5 or more Standard Grades at credit level, and the proportion of pupils going on to a variety of positive destinations after school.

Both school context and neighbourhood context were found to be associated with pupil outcomes within schools.  However, a key finding of the study was that the level of owner occupation within the catchment area of a school is positively associated with both examination results at S4 and with positive destinations post-school (particularly entry into higher education).  Moreover, these effects were more apparent among schools with a higher share of pupils from deprived areas.

The findings provide initial evidence that having more mixed tenure school catchments would be beneficial for educational performance across the city.  However, this positive effect is likely to be conditional upon a range of other factors among the pupils and the schools which we do not fully understand yet.  Nonetheless, the findings support a mixed communities approach to regeneration as providing wider social benefits.

The research is available in this open access article: Mixed tenure communities as a policy instrument for educational outcomes in a deprived urban context?