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Dan Anderberg, Royal Holloway, University of London and Yu Zhu, University of Kent
(Project no. 30128)
The current project looks at the causal effect of education on fertility. It exploits a feature of school-leaving law in England and Wales which allowed pupils born in the first five months of the academic year (Sept-Jan) to leave school at Easter of the year in which they reached the minimum school leaving age (while the remaining academic cohort were required to stay on for one more term). This feature created a gap in academic attainment by month of birth at the induced January-February threshold, most notably for the 14 academic cohorts born between Sept 1957 (the first to be affected by the age 16 school-leaving age) and Aug 1971 (the last before the introduction of the GCSEs). We have obtained from the ONS, fertility for women born in E&W by month-birth-cohort and will examine fertility by month of birth relative to the January-February threshold. However, the structure of the ONS data does not allow us to describe the simple association between qualifications and fertility for the relevant cohorts. For that reason we are requesting data from the LS that will allow us to do this.
As noted in the previous paragraph, the data that we are requesting is to be used to complement data on fertility by month-birth-cohort obtained from the ONS. That data will be used to explore the existence of a gap in fertility outcomes by month of birth relative to the January-February threshold (which defined the requirement to stay on for an extra term and which generated a gap in academic attainment for the 14 academic cohorts born between Sept 1957 and Aug 1971). By combining the gap in academic attainment induced by the school-leaving law with the gap in fertility, we can study the causal effect of education/academic qualification on fertility outcomes. However, the structure of that data does not allow us to provide a simple description of the association between fertility and academic qualifications. For that we request data from the LS which gives fertility outcomes by academic cohort and qualification-level for women born in England and Wales within the relevant 14 year period. The current project is a follow-up on a project which used the same research design to consider the effect of education on marital outcomes, and which has demonstrated that the women who obtained an academic qualification due to having been required to "stay on" over the exam term are more frequently married to spouses who hold some academic qualifications and are economically active. That research was based on the LFS. However, as noted below, the LFS is not suitable for conducting the corresponding research on fertility outcomes.