The impact of school social composition and neighborhood social mix on upper secondary exam performance in Ireland

There has been growing interest internationally in the extent to which school and neighborhood contexts make a difference to academic achievement. However, there can be difficulties in disentangling school and neighborhood effects in systems where schools operate on the basis of neighborhood catchment areas and/or where between-school tracking exists. In Ireland, in contrast, the degree of school choice at secondary school level in an untracked system makes it possible to provide precise estimates of the relative importance of neighborhood and school composition. A further contribution of the article is its examination of the effects of cumulative disadvantage across primary and secondary education. Drawing on data from Cohort ’98 of the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study, both school and neighborhood disadvantage are found to contribute to lower grades at upper secondary level. Between-school differences are larger than neighborhood differences. Young people attending schools with a concentration of socioeconomically disadvantaged students achieve lower grades than those in socially mixed or middle-class schools, even when a range of social background factors and prior performance are taken into account. Similarly, neighborhood disadvantage is associated with lower grades, even controlling for prior achievement and school composition. The analyses indicate the value of adopting a multidimensional and multilevel approach to unpack the different drivers of educational inequality.