Appendix Three Attainment
Assessing the effect of part-time work on pupils' attainment
We recognise the importance of the question of the impact of part-time work on pupils' attainment for many stakeholders, especially teachers. As we have already noted, however, there is evidence from a range of studies that simply having a part-time job is not of itself associated with a negative impact on attainment. These studies have found that it is the number of hours that pupils work that is of critical importance in determining the effect that working part-time is likely to have on their attainment. Working long hours tends to have a negative impact. This is a consistent finding from a range of studies. It might be noted that some studies have found that working for a small number of hours is actually associated with a positive effect on attainment.
In this study, when we modelled the effect of having a part-time job on pupils' Standard Grade attainment, we found that having a part-time job compared with not having one did not have a significant impact on pupils' attainment. Given the previous research this is an unsurprising finding. But to fully assess the effect of working part-time on attainment we needed to consider the number of hours that pupils worked in their part-time jobs before taking their Standard Grades exams, the measure of attainment that we were interested in. However, the brief and the resources allocated to the research constrained us in this respect.
The best way to approach this is through a longitudinal research design but this research does not have a longitudinal element. 19 Given this, we attempted to capture the necessary information by asking pupils who were current or former workers pupils when they had had a part-time job during term-time over the previous years, and how many hours they had worked. Gathering retrospective data like this is always difficult and we found that the response rate to the question on the school stages at which pupils had worked over their time at secondary school was only 45% and was also skewed in several respects. This means that although we have reliable information about the number of hours that current workers were working, and also about the number of hours that former workers had worked, we cannot differentiate between work undertaken before their Standard Grade exams and afterwards. We can say that having a part-time job did not adversely affect pupils' attainment but we cannot fully assess its impact on attainment. However, given the body of evidence on the impact of pupils' working hours on attainment, we would expect the same findings to apply in this case.