Following Chapter 4, this chapter looks at how education and experiences at school can influence outcomes and attributes other than cognitive attainment. Attainment is important but is only one possible educational outcome of schooling. Others such as wellbeing, enjoyment of learning, or preparation for adult life could be just as important. Although interventions and policies to enhance wellbeing, resilience or engagement may not convert into higher attainment (see Chapter 8), they can still lead to positive outcomes in their own right.

My work in this area falls into two main categories. I looked at formative interactions at school between adults and students, and between student peers, and their link to students’ intentions for the future, their sense of justice and expectations of life (Smith and Gorard, 2006; Gorard, 2007c, 2010e; Gorard and Smith, 2010). I then conducted robust evaluations of interventions intended to improve students’ non-cognitive outcomes such as communication, teamwork and confidence (See et al, 2017a; Siddiqui et al, 2017a,b). Both categories are summarised in this chapter.

The wider and non-cognitive outcomes of schooling are potentially very important but difficult to define, and so to research. The chapter beings with one of the easiest outcomes to assess.

School experience as a determinant of post-compulsory Participation

Only just over half of 14- to 15-year-old pupils in England report that school encouraged them to want to learn more, and that they plan to continue in formal education of some sort (see Table 9.1). Since this work was done (Gorard and Smith, 2008), the leaving age for education and training in England has risen to 18, but the pattern remains, and is strongly linked to wanting a professional occupation as an adult.

Table 9.2 shows the result of logistic regression models using a number of possible explanatory variables to try and explain the difference between pupils reporting the outcomes in Table 9.1 and the rest. Variable were entered in three groups, starting with individual student background. These personal and family background factors explain a substantial amount of the variation that can be explained in all three models. This is because the outcomes are stratified by SES to some extent. A smaller amount of variation is explicable by schoollevel factors. However, because adjusting the school mix would cost very little (see Chapter 4), it is worth taking into account.