Reconsidering the value of pupil attitudes to studying post-16: a caution for Paul Croll



most likely to express an intention to leave education. On the other hand, if this claim
is not true, we may be misled into wasting time and resource on what children say at
an early age rather than on minimising the very real influence of social and economic
background, and maximising the chances that pupils enjoy education, and get the best
qualifications possible. The practical differences between a focus on changing what
people
say they will do years later, and attending to what we know about actual
patterns of participation from the past to help reduce inequalities in the future, are
substantial. So it is important to be clear whether the kind of claims made by Croll
(2010) are warranted by the evidence presented in his paper.

My major worry on reading the paper was that Croll did not display appropriate
scepticism about the results, especially about being misled by the imbalance of the
reported early intentions and of pupils’ subsequent revealed choices post-16. The key
claimed findings in Croll (2010) are that pupils aged 11 upwards (in year 7 and
thereafter) can express an intention to participate in education post-16, and that these
intentions are valid in the sense of being accurate predications of later behaviour, and
reliable in the sense of being substantially invariant over time. For example, the paper
concludes ‘The longitudinal analysis has shown that most children were able to
express intentions about future educational participation just after they had started
secondary school and these intentions were a good predictor of their behaviour five
years later’ (Croll 2010, p.414). Are either of these claims, about accuracy and
stability, true?

Accuracy of intentions?

Of the figures in his Table 1, Croll (2010) says ‘What is very striking [is] that what
children said at the age of 11 or just over... was a good predictor of what they
actually did five years later’ (p.406). The relevant figures are repeated in Table 1 here,
with 725 year 7 pupils from a total of 1,081 reporting an intention to stay in education
after year 11. Croll also states that these intentions turned out to be 75.9% ‘accurate’
in the sense that nearly 76% of pupils did indeed participate post-16 or not, as they
reported in year 7. In assessing how accurate the year 7 pupil intentions turned out to
be, Croll understandably ignored those who did not express a clear intention at that



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