Dataset - UK secondary school students' views of inequality and their sense of agency concerning their occupational prospects

This project investigated UK secondary school students’ views of inequality and their sense of agency concerning their occupational prospects, using questionnaire and interview data. The data came from 78 students from three secondary schools in England between Year 7 and Year 13 who were aged between 12 and 19. The three schools were in areas with different socioeconomic characteristics – an affluent town in the London commuter belt (School A), a city in the east of England (School B) and a town to the east of London (School C). School A had a lower than national average free school meals (FSM) rate, whereas both School B and School C had a higher than national average FSM rate. <br> 18 participants were from School A, 38 from School B and 22 from School C. While all 18 students in School A and all 22 students in School C participated in both the questionnaire and follow-up interview stages, in School B 37 participants filled in the questionnaire and, of these, 22 took part in the interviews. One student from School B who did not fill in a questionnaire took part in the interview, making the total interviews from School B 23. One student from School C did not want to have their interview audio-recorded; therefore, their interview transcript does not exist. <br> As a result, the dataset in total contains 77 questionnaires and 62 interview transcripts. The PDF files are questionnaire files and the word document files are interview transcripts. A file name (for both the pdf files and word document files) begins with ‘Y’ that is followed by a number which indicates a school year and this is followed by two letters that indicate a code for an individual participant, while the letter A, B or C immediately after a hyphen indicates School A, B or C respectively. <br>