Social, gender and ethnic inequalities in education and school-to-work transitions

This chapter provides an overview of what existing transitions research tells us about social, gender and ethnic inequalities in the education system and youth labour market. Much of the work to date has focused on social inequalities, documenting the way in which family background shapes how long young people stay in the education system, the pathways or tracks they pursue, the smoothness of their transition to employment and the quality of that employment. Inequality in early labour market outcomes mainly relate to differences in educational attainment patterns but there is consistent evidence of a direct impact of social origin on job quality. The chapter highlights gaps in transitions research in relation to other dimensions of inequality, with a lack of embedding of gender in transition typologies and a neglect of inequalities by ethnic or migrant background. The authors argue for the potential for transitions research to pay greater attention to intersectional inequality, offering a more nuanced discussion of the way in which social background, gender, ethnicity and other dimensions of inequality together shape the kinds of trajectories taken by young adults across different institutional settings.