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The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision.

Through the specification of a nested logit model, the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption inherent in the multinomial logit (MNL) model is relaxed across multiple unordered outcomes.

The analysis shows that the factors influencing schooling decisions differ for males and females. For females, on average, the key drivers of the schooling decision are expected wage returns based on youth educational attainment, attitudes to school and parental aspirations, rather than local labour market conditions. For males, higher local unemployment rates encourage greater investment in education.

The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is threefold. First, a nested logit model is proposed as an alternative to a MNL. The former can formally incorporate the structured and sequential decision-making process that youths may engage with in relation to the post-compulsory schooling decision, as well as relaxing the restrictive IIA assumption inherent in the MNL across multiple unordered outcomes, an issue the authors discuss in more detail in the Methodology section below. Second, the analysis is based on extremely rich socio-economic data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, matched to local labour market data and administrative data from the National Pupil Database and Pupil Level Annual School Census, which provide a broad set of unusually high-quality measures of prior attainment. The authors argue that such high-quality data and an appropriate model specification allows identification of the determinants of the post-compulsory decision in a more detailed manner than many previous analyses. Third, the data have the scale necessary to consider whether the determinants of post-compulsory schooling decisions vary by gender, a particularly important issue given the differential education participation rates of males and females (e.g. in this cohort, females are about 10 percentage points more likely to go on to higher education in the UK than males), and the gendered choices of occupation (see, e.g. Bertrand, 2011). The work will, therefore, provide recent empirical evidence from England on gender differences in the determinants of education choices.

This chapter provides an overview of the LEGACY project in the UK and its evaluation, focussing on the effectiveness of the different methodologies used for measuring learning gain. The overall impact of the project on participating institutions and the higher education sector as a whole, in terms of capacity building and developing communities of understanding, is also reviewed.

An individual’s identity is defined in the role that they devise for themselves, based on social positions. Examining identity motives can help in understanding what influences one to take on a particular role. Self-esteem is one of the major motivational drivers in determining the role that an individual takes on. Individuals, through self-presentation, are said to be motivated to control the impressions others form of them. In this way, self-concept and fashion innovativeness are linked – with prior research suggesting that those with high levels of fashion innovativeness are also those with a strong sense of self. Where a gap remains, however, in exploring the direction of the relationship between self-concept and being more innovative and fashionable in clothing choices, as well as how individuals reflexively judge their own fashion choices against their perception of others – e.g. can you force yourself to be a fashion leader? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study takes a lived experience approach to examine fashion as a tool in establishing social hierarchies amongst women. The study uses depth interviews with ten women to explore the developed self-concept of women actively engaged with fashion consumption.

The research presents a typology of fashion identities, exploring notions of security, dominance and innovativeness in self-fashioning using clothing.

The research is exploratory, and limited to a sample of ten women. However, the study offers a number of key findings to drive future research in this area.

The research finds that both security of self-concept, in relation to fashion and general self-esteem, as well as insecurity, can motivate women towards fashion independence. This suggests that identity-based marketing is likely to be more successful than lifestyle-based marketing, when selling women’s fashion clothing.

In prior research, self-concept and fashion innovativeness are linked – with prior research suggesting that those with high levels of fashion innovativeness are also those with a strong sense of self. This study finds that those with an insecure sense of self may also exhibit fashion independence, using fashion to acquire social capital.

This paper illustrates the concept that, unlike previous notions of fashion independence and engagement with fashion, these fashion-involved categorisations of behaviour are not always driven by sophistication, confidence, creativity and low fear of risk. Instead, this study has shown that fashion innovativeness can be motivated by an overarching fear of the outcomes of being judged unfashionable.

This study investigates the stability of the “hospital effect” on performance over time by administrative health data as a source of evidence. Using 78,907 heart failure adult records from 117 hospitals in the Lombardy Region (Northern Italy) over three years (2010–2012), we analyzed hospital performance in terms of 30-day mortality and 30-day unplanned readmissions to gather evidence about the stability of the “hospital effect.” Best/worst performers were identified through multi-level models that combine both patient and hospital covariates. Our results confirm that managerial choices affect hospital performance, and that the “hospital effect” is not, contrary to expectations, stable over the short term. Performance improvement/worsening over the three years has been also analyzed.

Since 2011, Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) in Scotland has delivered pre-entry study skills programs, specifically tailored to meet the needs of students with disabilities prior to commencing their studies at university. Following changes in the organizational structure, these programs ceased to exist. Two staff members then decided to collaborate on delivering a new customized program that would contextualize the type of support required by students with disabilities.

The study skills program aimed to increase confidence, engage with support services before the start of the program of study, encourage students to access support as early as possible, and provide useful advice on a range of topics specifically designed to meet their needs.

In this chapter, findings from a small-scale study will be presented that investigated whether a correlation could be drawn between pre-entry support and increased confidence. Although feedback from attendees at the study skills’ workshops has been positive, the impact of this type of support is difficult to quantify. This is partly due to the small numbers of participants and the plethora of student support initiatives at the institution. However, the qualitative outcomes indicate that students have integrated successfully into their degree studies.