Does Ethnicity Moderate the Longitudinal Change in Adolescent Educational Expectations for University Study between ages 14-16? Understanding Differences among White, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean Pupils

Previous research has established that adolescent educational expectations for university study differ widely across UK ethnic minorities. This quantitative study explores change in expectations over time and across UK ethnic groups in a psychometric framework using cohort panel data from waves 1-3 of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). An autoregressive longitudinal latent variable structural equation model addresses the above research questions and enables direct tests of the assumptions of invariance, stationarity and equilibrium typically only assumed to hold in similar multi-group comparisons. Results show that pupils’ educational expectations change significantly differently across ages 14-16 in the five ethnic groups reflecting moderation by maternal ethnicity. Expectations at age 14 exert important direct and indirect effects on expectations at age 16 via expectations at age 15. There is a general fall in expectations at age 15. Cross-group differences in latent means and intercepts suggest that in contrast to their white peers, minority pupils recover from this fall at age 16.