YOUNG SCOTS have been outdoing their UK counterparts when it comes to higher education, Edinburgh University researchers have found, writes Grant Smith, education reporter.

A study of more than 20,000 young adults found that both rates of participation at university or college and levels of attainment were higher north of the border.

However, students from the middle class have been doing better than those from the working class.

The project was led by Dr Linda Croxford and Professor David Raffe for the Economic and Social Research Council, one of the country’s leading research funders with an annual budget of £180 million.

The research compared the success rates of young people from working-class and middle-class backgrounds during the period 1984 to 2002.

In Scotland inequalities in attainment at 18 and in entry to higher education were considerably wider than in England and showed fewer signs of narrowing over the period.

Even so, overall levels of attainment and participation were “consistently and substantially greater” in Scotland. Despite the wider inequalities, Scottish working-class youngsters routinely outperformed their English peers.

Dr Croxford said, “A key issue is the effect of educational expansion on social inequalities. In Scotland young people from higher social classes have been far more successful in gaining academic qualifications so that they can take advantage of increasing opportunities for higher education.”

Professor Raffe said, “In England, the narrowing of inequalities at 18-plus may reflect the growth of vocational courses and the increased diversity of post-16 opportunities during the 1980s and 1990s.

“For Scotland, our findings pre-date the new courses and qualifications introduced by the Higher Still programme and we need more research to find out if they have spread opportunities more widely.

“The implications of our findings may depend on how we value education. If education has value in its own right, the working class has been better off in Scotland. However, if education only has value to the extent that you possess more of it than other people, the working class has been better off in England.”

The researchers also found that the proportion of young people saying that school had done little to prepare them for life fell, from half at the start to one third at the end.

Meanwhile, the proportion feeling that school had given them confidence to make decisions rose from half in 1984 to more than two-thirds by 2002.