Childhood social status in society and school: implications for the transition to higher levels of education

While research into educational inequalities emphasises childhood socio-economic status, this study adds another dimension of status into the analysis; namely, the child's own social position among its peers. The aim was to examine whether socio-economic status and peer status can both be linked to educational transitions and, if so, whether they constitute overlapping paths. In a second step of analyses, the relationship between peer status and adult unemployment was investigated. Data were derived from a longitudinal study using a 1953 cohort born in Stockholm, Sweden. Our results suggest that children with higher socio-economic status and children with higher peer status are consistently more likely than their lower status peers to proceed to the next level of education, and that the effects of socio-economic status and peer status hardly overlapped at all. Furthermore, educational differences by peer status seem to involve consequences for the studied subjects' contemporary labour market opportunities.