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• Students who had dropped out of school (NEETs)
• ESOL students
• Students from low-income families
• Lone parents
• Working class women (in low paid jobs)
• Students from minoritized groups
• Students living in multigenerational/cramped households
• Students with physical disabilities
• Individuals with learning difficulties
• People with chronic illness and/or people who are shielding
• Apprentices (especially Foundation and Modern)
• Individuals with low literacy and numeracy skills
• Long-term unemployed
• Gig economy workers
• Zero-hours contract workers
• Precarious self-employed
• Asylum seekers/refugees
• Key workers.
Ongoing Nuffield Foundation research on educational inequalities
The Nuffield Foundation has a total of 53 projects and news initiatives related to COVID
(Nuffield Foundation 2021b), some of which are from a collaboration with the Education
Policy Institute. While none of these are specific to the FE Sector, they include COVIDrelated
research, low attaining learners, problematical transitions and low-income
families. These are clearly related to the Sector's demographic. Of particular relevance
are five ongoing research projects focused on attainment of 16-24 year olds, transitions
and inequalities in the COVID era.
• Measuring the disadvantage gap in 16-19 education (Tuckett et al., 2021), early findings
show that the current qualification attainment gap between the most and least affluent
students is equivalent to three A Level grades.
• Students who do not achieve a grade C or above in English and Maths - 2019-2021.
(Raffo and Thompson, 2021), seeks to provide early evidence about how recent GCSE
reforms and the introduction of Progress 8 may impact on this group of learners.
• Moving on from initial GCSE 'failure': post-16 transitions for 'lower attainers' and why
the English education system must do better (Lupton et al., 2021), to date reveals the
heterogeneity of the young people who miss the GCSE benchmark and the impact it has
on their access to post-16 pathways.
• Post-16 educational trajectories and social inequalities in political engagement 2020 -
2022 (Janmatt and Pensiero, 2021), is exploring the relationship between socio-