Statistical analysis of the educational mobility of primary schools across Scotland

In this report we provide some data visualisation and descriptive statistics documenting educational inequalities across Scottish primary schools. In particular, we will closely follow the approach adopted by Chetty et al. (2020), who examine income segregation across US colleges by calculating income mobility rates for each college. In their work, colleges characterised by high intergenerational mobility where those with a higher share of high-income (top 20% of income distribution) alumni coming from low-income family (bottom 20% of income distribution). However, we will be focusing on "educational mobility", in other words how well students from low socio-economic background perform at school. This is motivated by the vast literature linking poverty or deprivation to low educational attainment (see Robertson and McHardy 2021 for a review) as well as the longstanding involvement of the Scottish Government in relation to the attainment gap.1 For this reason, we will be using free school meals (henceforth, FSM) registration at the school level and provide a descriptive analysis of the link between socio-economic background and educational attainment in primary schools. A similar approach was followed by Blanden et al. (2007) and Jerrim and Macmillan (2015).