AQRiE Seminar (hybrid): Pathways of disadvantage, attendance and exclusions

Name: AQRiE Seminar (hybrid): Pathways of disadvantage, attendance and exclusions
Start: 2026-02-10T13:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-02-10T14:00:00+00:00
Location: Charteris Land, Room 5.02, University of Edinburgh

Schedule

Tue Feb 10 2026 at 01:00 pm to 02:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Charteris Land, Room 5.02, University of Edinburgh | Edinburgh, SC

This talk examines pathways of disadvantage, attendance, and exclusions to attainment in Scottish secondary schools.
About this Event

Dr Patricio Troncoso (University of Edinburgh) on “Pathways of disadvantage, attendance and exclusions into attainment in Scottish secondary schools". Hybrid seminar.

Abstract: Traditional analyses of educational outcomes often assume a linear relationship between non-attendance and attainment, with policy implications focusing primarily on how to improve attendance to improve attainment. This is an ADR Scotland (part of ADR UK) project that links administrative data from Scotland’s Education Analytical Services, National Health Services, and census records. We followed a cohort of pupils who started primary school in 2008/09 and completed compulsory education in 2018/19 and applied a multilevel mixture regression model to capture heterogeneity in educational pathways. We identified five unobserved groups of pupils with distinct patterns of attendance, exclusions, attainment, and socioeconomic and health-related disadvantages. Our findings suggest that relatively good educational outcomes may be possible without consistently high attendance for some pupils. We conclude that closing the attainment gap requires a multi-layered policy response that considers heterogeneous profiles of non-attendance and the complex interplay of upstream and downstream factors shaping children and young people’s lives, experiences and outcomes.

Speaker: Dr Patricio Troncoso is a Lecturer in Youth Studies at the Moray House School of Education and Sports, University of Edinburgh. He is an applied statistician with a background in Sociology, Public Policy and Education research. His research focuses on a range of children’s outcomes and experiences, including educational inequalities in attainment, school behaviour and attendance, school value-added, social care and protection, mental health as well as social and emotional learning and development.

The email address to contact in case of enquiries: [email protected].

This seminar will be held in hybrid format; online access details will be sent after registration.

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