essay about education mismatch

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• Published: 07 May 2021

Mapping the (mis)match of university degrees in the graduate labor market

• Manuel Salas-Velasco   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0618-5619 1  

Journal for Labour Market Research volume  55 , Article number:  14 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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This paper contributes to the scarce literature on the topic of horizontal education-job mismatch in the labor market for graduates of universities. Field-of-study mismatch or horizontal mismatch occurs when university graduates, trained in a particular field, work in another field at their formal qualification level. The data used in the analysis come from the first nationally representative survey of labor insertion of recent university graduates in Spain. By estimating a multinomial logistic regression, we are able to identify the match status 4 years after graduation based on self-assessments. We find a higher likelihood of horizontal mismatch among graduates of Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Pharmacy, and Languages and Literature. Only graduates in Medicine increase the probability of being adequately matched in their jobs. It may be hypothesized that horizontal mismatch is more likely among those graduates in degree fields that provide more general skills and less likely among those from degree fields providing more occupation-specific skills. Other degrees such as Business Studies, and Management and Economics Studies increase the probability of being vertically mismatched (over-educated). Vertical mismatch preserves at least some of the specific human capital gained through formal educational qualifications. However, some workers with degrees in Labor Relations and Social Work are in non-graduate positions and study areas unrelated to their studies. The paper also shows that graduates in the fields of health sciences and engineering/architecture increase the probability of achieving an education-job match after external job mobility.

1 Introduction

In most economies, there is a connection between the educational attainment of the labor force and the jobs performed by the workers. In general, job titles are defined in terms of educational requirements that coincide with the levels of formal education. Of particular interest is to analyze whether the tasks assigned to different positions can be performed effectively with the qualifications provided by the education system or, on the contrary, there is no connection between the contents of the educational curriculum and the contents of the jobs. Footnote 1 The (mis)match between the level of formal education and the level required for the job has been, indeed, the focus of substantial research in the labor and education economics literature since the appearance of Freeman's ( 1976 ) book The overeducated American. See, for surveys of the literature, Leuven and Oosterbeek ( 2011 ), McGuinnes ( 2006 ), and Sloane ( 2003 ); for a meta-analysis, Groot and Maassen van den Brink ( 2000 ).

In this article, we focus on the labor market for university graduates. The paper contributes to the understanding of the mismatch between professional (academic) degrees and labor market positions. Most theoretical and empirical studies of education-job mismatch have focused predominantly on graduate over-education (e.g., Dolton and Vignoles 2000 ). Over-education (or vertical mismatch) appears when graduates work in non-graduate jobs. However, this article focuses on another type of education-job mismatch that has received less attention in the literature: the unrelatedness of a worker’s field of study to his or her occupation at their formal qualification level, also referred to as horizontal mismatch. Relative to vertical mismatch, there are much fewer published studies of horizontal mismatch—see Somers et al. ( 2019 ) for a recent systematic literature review. In the latter paper, it is evidenced that, unlike vertical mismatch, there are still no theoretical models that explain the phenomenon. Nonetheless, the empirical evidence suggests that the likelihood of horizontal mismatch is among other things determined by the extent to which employees possess general skills as opposed to occupation-specific skills (Somers et al. 2019 ). In the labor market for university graduates, the issue of horizontal mismatch is considerably less studied than vertical mismatch (or over-education) mainly due to the lack of relevant data on fields of studies of university graduates. Horizontal mismatch (or field-of-study mismatch) occurs when graduates, trained in a particular field, work in another field at their formal qualification level. For example, a person earning a degree in Mathematics working as a computer-aided design technician. Robst ( 2007 ) was one of the first papers devoted to the horizontal mismatch. In this study, some of the majors with the highest prevalence rates of mismatch between work and degree fields included English and foreign languages, social sciences, and liberal arts. “Typically, these majors provide more general skills than occupation specific skills” (Robst 2007 , p. 402). On the contrary, computer science, health professions, and engineering had low prevalence rates. “Most of these majors focus on skills that apply to relatively specific occupations” (Robst 2007 , p. 402). The specific human capital cannot be easily transferred to other sectors, and graduates in these fields are less likely to search for a job in other sectors. They are more likely to work in a job that is directly related to their field of study in order to use specific human capital, which was accumulated during university studies. Graduates of these fields are therefore less likely to be horizontally mismatched.

Because the number of empirical studies on horizontal mismatch among university graduates is limited, this paper contributes thus to the scarce existing literature on the topic by providing the taxonomy of educational mismatch in the labor market for university graduates and investigating its incidence among Spanish higher education graduates based on self-assessments. In addition, the map of degrees done in this article according to the education-job (mis)match is important for the educational policy given that higher education is highly subsidized in Spain. The article is also novel in the sense that it incorporates methodological improvements that we comment below. Two well-cited papers by Robst ( 2007 ) and Nordin et al. ( 2010 ), published in the same journal, already addressed the mismatch between the individual’s field of education and his/her occupation (horizontal mismatch). Robst’s ( 2007 ) match/mismatch measure was based on subjective answers to the question of whether the job the college graduate held was closely related, not related, or somewhat related to his/her highest degree field. In Nordin et al. ( 2010 ), the authors crossed 34 occupations with 29 different fields of education in a table and made the same classification. Nonetheless, both papers present drawbacks. In Robst ( 2007 ), the author used an ordered logit model which indicated whether a major had a higher or lower likelihood of being horizontally mismatched, but the author did not distinguish whether the undergraduates were occupying college-level occupations or they were filling typical high school graduate positions. Footnote 2 The implications for educational policy and the labor market are different. In the case of Nordin et al. ( 2010 ), the authors only presented a table with the fields of education and the shares of matched, weakly matched, and mismatched individuals (there is no econometric model). In their percentages, they did not distinguish either whether the graduates were in positions typical of graduates or lower-level positions. Some results were striking. For example, 80% of men and 75% of women with a degree in Biology were mismatched. In this last classification, among other occupations, the authors included teachers of upper secondary education. However, according to the proposal we make in this paper, they would be well-matched because they are occupying university positions in a related field, i.e., teaching Biology. Our paper contributes thus to improving the deficiencies of those publications by focusing on the Spanish labor market for recent university graduates. In particular, the article aimed to determine which degree fields (narrow fields of education) were associated with being horizontally mismatched in the labor market for higher education graduates in Spain: when graduates are employed in a graduate job that is not related to their field of study. By estimating the likelihood of being horizontally mismatched (field-of-study mismatch), we also simultaneously estimate the probability of being vertically mismatched (over-education), and full job mismatched (i.e., field-of-study mismatch and over-education). The taxonomy that we propose allows us to better identify situations of educational mismatch in the graduate labor market. Besides, the multinomial logit model of the probability of education-employment matching that we suggest allowed us to draw a map of university degrees according to the type of (mis)match. This is also a novelty. Additionally, our article aimed to study external labor mobility that takes place in the early stages of graduates' working lives. A good match between graduates' degrees and their jobs will likely happen after job turnover.

For the analysis carried out in this paper, we used individual-level data from the first survey of labor insertion of university graduates in Spain. The Encuesta de Inserción Laboral de titulados Universitarios (EILU 2014) is a nationally representative random sample of Spanish universities and university graduates. A total of 30,379 graduates from the class of 2010 were surveyed 4 years after graduation. Footnote 3 The survey asked workers directly whether their particular qualification was appropriate for the work that they did. Many Spanish university graduates were employed in jobs that neither required a degree nor made use of expert knowledge learned at the university. The degree of fit between the qualifications obtained by graduates and their job characteristics can be considered one important performance indicator in higher education. This latter is an expensive investment—it is highly subsidized in Spain—and the highest return for society is obtained when individuals are well-matched to employers such that the knowledge and skills that were acquired through higher education are optimally utilized on the labor market. Therefore, research on the study of the labor market for graduates and their educational (mis)match is justified. In the discussion section of this article, the reader will find more arguments.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section  2 outlines the empirical framework behind the measurement of vertical and horizontal education-job mismatch in the graduate labor market. In Sect.  3 , we describe the data set drawn from the National Statistics Institute of Spain. We also identify four types of education-job mismatch according to the most appropriate level of formal education and study area to perform a job, and we provide summary statistics on the incidence of mismatch among Spanish higher education graduates. In Sect.  4 , we introduce the econometric models of the probability of being (mis)matched in the first and current job, on the one hand, and the probability of being well-matched after external job turnover, on the other hand. Section  5 shows the results of the econometric analysis. Section  6 provides a discussion and some policy implications. Section  7 concludes the paper.

2 Empirical measurement

Job mismatch can be defined as the discrepancy between the qualifications that individuals possess and those that are wanted by the labor market. But when we talk about qualifications, we can refer either to the formal qualification (formal education) or to skills or competencies (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, 2014 ). In the first case, formal qualification is “the formal outcome (certificate, diploma or title) of an assessment process which is obtained when a competent body determines that an individual has achieved learning outcomes to given standards and/or possesses the necessary competence to do a job in a specific area of work” (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, 2014 , p. 202). Footnote 4 In the second case, the term qualification refers to “knowledge, aptitudes, and skills required to perform specific tasks attached to a particular work position” (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, 2014 , p. 202). Skill mismatch arises when workers have higher or lower skills proficiency than those required by their job. If their skills proficiency is higher than that required by their job, workers are classified as over-skilled; if the opposite is true, they are classified as under-skilled (Pellizzari and Fichen 2013 ). Likewise, educational mismatch arises when workers’ levels of formal education are higher or lower than the required levels of education of their employment. This mismatch is also known as a vertical mismatch. Over-education (or over-qualification) and under-education (or under-qualification) are the two types of vertical mismatch. Footnote 5 Over-education exists when a worker is employed in a job that requires a lower level of education than that possessed by the worker. Under-education exists when a worker has a lower level of education than required for the job (e.g., Chevalier 2003 ; Duncan and Hoffman 1981 ; Hartog 2000 ; Leuven and Oosterbeek 2011 ; Mavromaras et al. 2013 ; Park 2018 ; Sicherman 1991 ). In this regard, it should be noted that educational mismatch can imply skill mismatch, but skill mismatch does not imply necessarily educational mismatch (Allen and Van der Velden 2001 ). For example, when working in a position below one’s level of study, skills learned in formal education may not be fully used; over-education would be synonymous with being over-skilled. Footnote 6 Let's think of a medical graduate working as a dental assistant. But, if this medical doctor works in a hospital as a surgeon but s/he says that would perform the job better if s/he possessed additional skills, s/he would have a skills deficit, but s/he would not be under-educated.

Nonetheless, vertical mismatch of education (mismatch of the level of education and job) is not the only form of educational mismatch. In this article, we suggested two other educational mismatches. On the one hand, the horizontal educational mismatch, when the own level of education matches the requirements of the job but the type of education is not appropriate for the job. For example, an economics major working as an engineer might be considered to be working in a job unrelated to the degree field (Robst 2007 ; Tao and Hung 2014 ). On the other hand, vertical and horizontal educational mismatch, when the highest level of education held by a worker does not match the required level of education for his or her job, and also the type/field of education is inappropriate for the job. However, the study of skill mismatches is beyond the scope of this paper and our database, unlike surveys such as REFLEX, does not contain detailed information on skills acquired and required by jobs.

2.1 Measuring vertical education-job mismatch Footnote 7

Over-education can be assessed subjectively by asking the respondent to give information on the minimum educational requirements of the job and then comparing this with the individual’s acquired education or by simply asking the respondent whether or not they are over-educated (McGuinness, 2006 ). Dolton and Vignoles ( 2000 ) used data from the National Survey of 1980 Graduates and Diplomates to measure the incidence of over-education in the UK graduate labor market. They concluded that a significant proportion of British graduates were over-educated in the 1980s. The question used to measure over-education was: What was the minimum formal qualification required for (entering) this job? A graduate in a job requiring sub-degree level qualifications (or no qualifications at all) was defined as over-educated. Results showed that 38 percent of all graduates surveyed were over-educated in their first job. This proportion fell to 30 percent by the end of the survey period, 6 years later (Dolton and Vignoles 2000 ). Over-educated graduates earned significantly less than peers in graduate jobs (Dolton and Vignoles 2000 ).

More recently, in the 2012 and 2015 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), employed workers aged 25–64 reported their level of educational attainment (formal qualification) and the level needed for the job. In the first case, the survey question was: Which of the qualifications (ISCED-97) is the highest you have obtained (education that has been completed)? To identify vertical mismatches, the answers given to this question are compared with the responses to the question: Talking about your current job. If applying today, what would be the usual qualifications (ISCED-97) , if any, that someone would need to GET this type of job? Among workers with a university qualification (ISCED 5A or 6), 75 percent (OECD average) reported being in a well-matched situation. However, over 34 percent of workers in England (UK), Korea, Estonia, and Japan reported being over-qualified for their job (which means having qualification of ISCED 5A or 6 while working in a job needing ISCED 5B or below). In the case of Spain, 24 percent of university graduates reported being in the latter situation (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2018 ).

An alternative approach to analyzing the mismatch between education and jobs consists of determining the educational requirements of the occupations from some objective measurement. In particular, over-education can be assessed based on information either about the average or modal education level within the occupation of the worker (realized matches/statistical approach) or about educational requirements coming from an a priori assumed correspondence between education and occupations such as ISCO or DOT classifications (job analysis/normative approach) (Kupets 2016 ). Footnote 8 For example, Rumberger ( 1987 ) obtained an objective measure of the degree of educational mismatch once he converted the educational requirements of each occupational category of the DOT into equivalent years of schooling and compared the result with the years of schooling that workers actually had in those occupations. Footnote 9 Regarding the mode-based statistical approach, if an employee’s educational attainment is higher (lower) than the modal education level of individuals working in the same occupation, he/she is classified as over-educated (under-educated) (e.g., Kampelmann and Rycx 2012 ; Kiker et al. 1997 ). As to the mean-based statistical approach, over-educated workers are those whose educational attainments are greater than one standard deviation above the mean within their specific occupation; workers whose educational attainments are more than one standard deviation below the mean are defined as under-educated (e.g., Groot 1993 ; Verdugo and Verdugo 1989 ). Footnote 10 All of these studies were based on the total employed workforce. Focusing more recently on workers who had completed tertiary education, Rossen et al. ( 2019 ) employed a variant of the realized matches approach coding a person as being over-educated if his/her highest educational attainment level was higher than the benchmark education level of his/her occupation group at the two-digit ISCO level. As a benchmark, they applied in their main analyses the 80th percentile of the levels of education within each occupational group. They made use of the 2016 wave of the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) for 21 EU countries. Furthermore, the sample was restricted to respondents aged 20–34 years. Over-education as a vertical inadequacy was about 28% in total. The highest rates were measured for France, Austria, Italy, and Greece where more than 35% of workers were over-educated, whereas the lowest rates were observed for Estonia, Belgium, and Latvia with rates below 20%.

2.2 Measuring horizontal education-job mismatch

Horizontal mismatch measures the extent to which workers, typically graduates, are employed in an occupation that is unrelated to their principal field of study (McGuinness et al. 2018 ). In the subjective self-assessment method, respondents are asked how closely their educational field is related to the work they do.

In one of the first studies on horizontal mismatch, Robst ( 2007 ) studied the relationship between college majors and occupations in the United States. Using data from the 1993 National Survey of College Graduates, the following question was used to examine the education-job match: To what extent was your work on your principal job related to your highest degree field? Was it closely related, somewhat related, or not related? Fifty-five percent of individuals reported that their work and field of study were closely related, but 20 percent of the sample reported their field of study and work were not related (completely mismatched). College-educated workers in jobs unrelated to their field of study earned less than their well-matched peers (Robst 2007 ). However, a limitation of Robst's work is that the author did not exclude from the analysis undergraduates working in positions that only require a high school or less education. For example, PIAAC data revealed that 22 percent of U.S. workers with a university qualification (ISCED 5A or 6) would be holding a position requiring less formal qualification (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2018 ). Surely, the wage effects of mismatch by degree field found by Robst ( 2007 ) would be different.

In Europe, using representative samples of European university graduates graduating in 2000 (REFLEX survey) and 2003 (HEGESCO survey), Verhaest et al. ( 2017 ) determined the match status 5 years after graduation based on self-assessments. The vertical educational mismatch was based on the survey question: What type of education do you feel was most appropriate for this work? A graduate is considered to be over-educated if his/her educational level exceeds the appropriate level. The horizontal educational mismatch was based on the survey question: What field of study do you feel was most appropriate for this work? Possible answers were: (1) exclusively own field, (2) own or related field, (3) a completely different field, or (4) no particular field. They considered horizontal mismatch if they answered (3) or (4). By combining the two types of mismatches, they got four categories: pure match, mere vertical mismatch, mere horizontal mismatch, and pure mismatch. On average, 74.2 percent of graduates were well-matched 5 years after graduation. The average incidence of horizontal mismatch was just over 10 percent but close to 16 percent in Poland and Estonia, and above 18 percent in the UK. In Spain, the incidence of horizontal mismatch was 4.5 percent.

2.3 Limitations

The different measures proposed in the literature to estimate the required education for a job—based on worker self-assessment, realized matches, and job analysis—often give different results of the incidence of the over-education. Footnote 11 Self-assessment methods may be biased because they rely on the objectivity of respondents. But an objective approach is also surrounded by controversy. Since the objective measure reflects an average requirement associated with all jobs in a particular occupation, it may not reflect the requirement associated with the particular job held by the respondent. Also, the statistical mode-based method suffers from the misclassification problem: over-educated workers may be classified wrongly as well-matched if the number of higher educated workers in a given occupational group increased significantly and pushed the modal level of education up even in the absence of changing job tasks/requirements. In the standard deviation-based measure of over-education, the boundary of a standard deviation is quite arbitrary. For a broad discussion of the advantages and disadvantages, see for example Hartog ( 2000 ), Leuven and Oosterbeek ( 2011 ), and Verhaest and Omey ( 2006 ), among others. Footnote 12

Even though the normative/statistical approach has its limitations, it is more or less feasible to measure the vertical mismatch. But an objective approach would be too complex to measure the horizontal mismatch, that is, the discrepancy between the graduate's field of study and that most appropriate for the job. Footnote 13 Despite the potential disadvantage that employees’ perceptions of the horizontal (mis)match are by definition subject to self-report bias (Banerjee et al. 2019 ), a potential advantage of this approach is that graduates’ field of study is directly compared with the content of their jobs. “The individual assessments, while perhaps subjective, are expected to provide important information” (Robst 2007 , p. 401). This will be the approach taken in this paper.

3 Description of data and matching procedure

3.1 eilu2014 graduate survey.

In Spain, universities follow a career system, which means that students begin their studies with their major already selected and take courses that are pre-assigned for their entire major, with only a few electives available each year. In the educational curriculum prior to the Bologna reform of 2010, there were two basic types of university programs: short-cycle programs called diplomaturas , which were more vocationally oriented and lasted 3 years (e.g., Nursing); and long-cycle programs called licenciaturas , which lasted 4, 5, or 6 years (e.g., Economics, Law, and Medicine, respectively). Also, other degrees awarded were engineering degrees and Architecture (5 years on average) and technical engineering degrees and Technical Architecture (3 years on average). Footnote 14 A nationally representative sample of university graduates of these degrees was surveyed between September 2014 and February 2015 by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE). Using a combined method of obtaining information—direct interviews (Web and telephone) and use of administrative data, approximately 30,000 university graduates of the 2009/2010 academic year were interviewed. Specifically, 30,379 university graduates from Spanish universities were interviewed in the Encuesta de Inserción Laboral de titulados Universitarios (EILU2014): 86% had studied at a public university and 14% at a private university. By gender, 40.3% of the graduates were men, and 59.7% were women. Table 1 shows the description of the sample according to wide groups of university degrees and Table 2 displays the description of the sample according to broad branches of knowledge. Footnote 15

3.2 The taxonomy of educational mismatch in the labor market for Spanish higher education graduates

Let us focus on the study of educational mismatches in the employment of the university graduates surveyed. The EILU2014 questionnaire contained an employee self-assessment of the level and type of education most appropriate for the first job after graduation Footnote 16 and the current job, that is, the job at the time of being surveyed (around 4 years after finishing the university studies). Footnote 17 We developed two measures of job matching among university graduates. For our first measure, we used the following question to determine whether or not an occupation required a degree: Q1. What is, or was, the most appropriate level of education to carry out this work? Respondents could select from the following education levels: A1. A university degree. A2. Tertiary vocational education. A3. High school. A4. Middle-high school .

Our second measure of matching assessed the quality of the education-job match by determining whether or not the field of study of the individual's degree was related to the job that the interviewee was performing. Subjects were asked to indicate: Q2. What do you think is, or was, the most appropriate study area for this work? They had several options: B1. Exclusively the area of studies of my degree. B2. Some related area. B3. A totally different area. B4. No particular area.

Following Verhaest et al. ( 2017 ), we cross-tabulated the answers to the first question about whether employers requested a university credential vs. a sub-degree level qualification for the job, and the answers to the second question about whether graduates hold positions of their area of specialization vs. unrelated to their field of study. We identified four situations of educational mismatch in Fig.  1 : adequate match (no mismatch), horizontal mismatch, vertical mismatch, and vertical and horizontal mismatch (double mismatch). Footnote 18 First, graduates were considered well-matched (no mismatch) if they responded A1, and B1 or B2 . Second, we identified the horizontal educational mismatch when the type of university education was not appropriate for the job, but the level of formal education matched the requirements of the job (if they responded A1, and B3 or B4 ). Third, the educational mismatch was measured as vertical when the acquired level of education was higher than the level of education more suitable to perform the job, although the area of studies was related to the university degree (if they responded A2 or A3 or A4, and B1 or B2 . Finally, the vertical and horizontal mismatch was considered when the attained level of education was lower than the appropriate, and the type/field of education was inappropriate for the job (if they responded A2 or A3 or A4, and B3 or B4 ).

Higher education graduates’ degrees and their jobs: the education-job match

To provide a better sense of our matching classification, Table 3 shows these measures of educational mismatch. We found that about 57–66% of graduates were adequately matched in their jobs in terms of formal (and type of) university education. Around 6–7% were horizontally mismatched. But a considerable percentage of graduates (37% and 26%, first and current jobs, respectively) worked in jobs that didn’t require a university degree. Footnote 19

Examination of the data in Table 3 revealed that educational mismatch is a significant phenomenon in the labor market for higher education graduates in Spain. University graduates accept jobs that do not require a university degree and/or do not match their specialties. Footnote 20 As a result, qualified human resources in Spain are severely misallocated. Although the survey data (EILU2014) appeared to indicate that there was a slight reallocation of university degrees in the labor market 4 years after leaving university, the reality is that the percentage of mismatched graduates in the labor market remains high and does not seem to have changed in the last 10 years (Fig.  2 ). This goes to point out that the educational mismatch is a structural problem in the Spanish labor market, with an ever-increasing number of graduates that is not able to absorb an economy with a high rate of youth unemployment and a business environment characterized by small firms where graduates cannot make full use of their university knowledge. However, the problem of educational mismatch not only affects the Spanish case. It is also relevant in countries such as Estonia and the United Kingdom (Fig.  2 ). Some explanations: (i) supply of educated labor exceeds demand (McGuinness 2006 ); or (ii) imbalances in composition (individuals studying in fields where there is little demand) (Ortiz and Kucel 2008 ).

Educational (mis)match in Spain and Europe in 2005, 5 years after graduation. Eurostat (Reflex project). Percentages

Nonetheless, an in-depth analysis of the reasons for education imbalances in the Spanish labor market was outside the scope of this paper. Our objective was to identify, in the first and current jobs, which university degrees were more likely to fall in each of the four squares in Fig.  1 . Since all possible states are covered, which are disjoint and at this level of analysis their order is irrelevant, an appropriate estimation method is offered by the multinomial logit model.

4 Methodology

4.1 a multinomial logit model of job matching.

A multinomial logit model (MLM hereafter), also known as multinomial logistic regression, is suitable for our analysis of the educational (mis)match across Spanish university degrees. Our response variable had four categorical outcomes that did not have an ordered structure: appropriate match (no mismatch), horizontal mismatch, vertical mismatch, and vertical and horizontal mismatch ( j  = 1,2,3,4, respectively).

The MLM considers the probability of a certain event j as (McFadden 1974 ) Footnote 21

This model provides the probability that an individual with specific characteristics x is in group j . In this paper, the predictor variables used were university degrees (narrow fields of education). Footnote 22 Several control variables were also included in the regressions.

The natural normalization in our case was \({\beta }_{4}=0\) , with the probability to j th outcome be defined as Footnote 23

And for the baseline category (vertical and horizontal mismatch), we would have

However, if we wish to draw valid conclusions about the direction and magnitude of the relationship between an independent and dependent variable in an MLM, we should calculate marginal effects (Bowen and Wiersema 2004 ). The marginal effects are defined as the slope of the prediction function at a given value of the explanatory variable and thus inform us about the change in predicted probabilities due to a change in a particular predictor.

In this article, we used as the dependent variable in the MLM the four categories of educational mismatch already shown in Table 3 , both in the first job (a variable that we labeled as mismatchfirstjob ) and in the current employment (labeled as mismatchcurrentjob ). As predictor variables, we introduced university degrees. In the survey, there were up to 123 different degrees, which were grouped into 27 categories (narrow fields of education) in the regressions. Besides, we considered gender and internship while studying as control variables for the first job; for the current position, gender, having a Master's degree, and age. Footnote 24 Table 7 (Appendix) showed the descriptive statistics.

4.2 A binomial logit model of external labor mobility

As we have anticipated in the introduction, this article also aimed to study the empirical relationship between educational mismatch and job mobility. According to the “job matching theory,” mismatched employees might try to improve their fit by changing jobs until an optimal match is reached (Jovanovic 1979 ). Jovanovic’s ( 1979 ) search-and-matching model of the labor market suggested that employees change jobs more often at the beginning of their careers. The number of jobs (measuring the number of times the individual has changed employer) is an indicator of job mobility in general, either voluntary or involuntary. The EILU2014 dataset contains data on job turnover. We were able to identify whether or not graduates who were mismatched to their jobs after graduation achieved an education-job match after moving to other positions in other companies (external mobility). Footnote 25

To examine the factors that explained the job matching, we estimated a binomial logit model (or binary logistic regression). The reduced form for this model would be (McFadden 1974 )

where Y is the dependent (dichotomous) variable; the x row vector contains the independent or explanatory variables (including a constant); and β is the vector of parameters to be estimated. Furthermore, it is assumed that the non-observed ɛ’s follow a distribution of logistic probability.

Our dependent variable was gotmatching which took a value of 1 if the graduate was mismatched in his/her first job and, after moving to another job (employer), s/he achieved the matching. It took the value of 0 otherwise, that is, if the graduate was mismatched in the first job and after moving to another company was still mismatched. Footnote 26 We restricted the analysis to wage-earners—in both, first job and current job. In relation to the explanatory variables, and given that the sample for the analysis was reduced considerably, we included university degrees according to broad fields of knowledge and types of degrees. Our explanatory variable of interest was the number of different employers for whom the university graduate had worked during his/her “short” working life. In addition, gender was included as a control variable.

5.1 Education-job mismatch among Spanish university graduates

This section shows the results of the estimation of the MLM. Footnote 27 Two types of analysis have been carried out. The first one corresponds to graduates’ initial job after leaving university. The second analysis corresponds to the educational mismatch in their employment at the moment of being surveyed. However, the sign of the estimated model coefficients does not determine the direction of the relationship between an independent variable and the probability of choosing a specific alternative (Bowen and Wiersema 2004 ). “If we are interested in inferring the true nature of the relationship between a predictor and the dependent variable in an MLM, we must acknowledge that coefficients […] are potentially misleading” (Wulff 2015 , p. 316). Instead, to be able to draw valid conclusions about relationships, scholars must rely on other interpretational devices such as predicted probabilities and marginal effects (Wulff 2015 ). Footnote 28 In this respect, Tables 8 and 9 (Appendix) show the estimated marginal effects in the first job and current employment, respectively. Footnote 29 And Tables 4 and 5 show the predicted probabilities for some selected degrees.

Let's focus first on the educational mismatch in the first job. Table 8 shows the estimated marginal effects. A clear advantage of marginal effects is that they provide us with rich and intuitively meaningful information not available through the interpretation of coefficients. However, in order not to tire the reader with the interpretation of all marginal effects, Fig.  3 shows in the four quadrangles of education-job mismatch the university degrees for which the estimated marginal effects in Table 8 are positive and show statistical significance at 5%. The results reveal that occupations requiring more specific human capital exhibit a lower probability of educational mismatch. Thus, we have three degrees that have the highest likelihood of obtaining an education-job match: Medicine, Nursing, and Veterinary (Fig.  3 ). For example, having finished Medical Studies increases the average probability of being well-matched in the first job by 0.5364; or having finished Nursing Studies is associated with an increase of 0.1850 in the average probability of being well-matched in the first job after graduation (Table 8 ). Footnote 30 These results are in line with published works focusing on horizontal mismatch among university graduates (e.g., Nordin et al. 2010 ; Robst 2007 ). In contrast, a horizontal mismatch may find it harder to preserve any specific human capital that is encompassed within a type of qualification, though general human capital may have a role to play here. We find that graduates in History and Philosophy, and Political Science and Sociology, increase the probability of being horizontally mismatched (Fig.  3 ).

Mapping the (mis)match of university degrees for higher education graduates in Spain in their first job

However, as seen in Fig.  3 , the vast majority of graduates occupy positions for which, according to them, a university degree was not necessary. On the one hand, we find that graduates with some degrees such as Engineering, and Management and Economics Studies, increase the probability of being vertical mismatched. On the other hand, other university degrees such as Biology, Fine Arts, Journalism, or Social Work increase the probability of being vertical and horizontally mismatched (Fig.  3 ). For example, having finished Fine Arts is associated with an increase of 0.2007 in the average probability of being doubly mismatched (Table 8 ). Nevertheless, an important distinction between the two types of mismatch is that a vertical mismatch can preserve some of the specific human capital that is encompassed within a type of academic qualification. The engineering or economics fields impart certain job-specific skills that are clearly understood in the job market. But in the case of the full job mismatch (i.e., over-education and field-of-study mismatch), graduates end up in non-graduate positions which contents are not related to their field of study.

Table 4 shows the predicted probabilities of being (mis)matched in the first job after graduation for some selected degrees of Fig.  3 . Footnote 31 For example, the probability that a Spanish graduate is adequately educated in his or her first job is 67%, but that it increases to 83% for Nursing Studies and up to 96% for Medicine. The probability of being horizontally mismatched is 7%, but it rises to 27% for History and Philosophy. The probability of being vertically mismatched is 6%, but it increases to 27% for Business Studies. Finally, the probability of being vertical and horizontally mismatched is 20%, but it rises to 45% for Fine Arts. Footnote 32

Let's focus now on the current job. As we said, the correct way to interpret the effect of the explanatory variables on the probability of the different situations of job matching is to obtain the marginal effects of the regressors which are shown in Table 9 . Figure  4 shows the map of degrees according to their educational (mis)match. It shows only degrees for which the estimated marginal effects in Table 9 are positive and show statistical significance at 5%. Finally, Table 5 shows, for the current job, the probability of being well-matched (78%), horizontally mismatched (2%), vertically mismatched (6%), and vertically and horizontally mismatched (14%). Footnote 33 It is remarkable the important increase in the probability of being well-matched and how the double mismatch has also been significantly reduced. Footnote 34

Mapping the (mis)match of university degrees for higher education graduates in Spain in their current job

First, workers with a degree in Medicine increase, again, the probability of being well-matched in their current jobs. The predicted probability of a perfect match is 99% (Table 5 ). It is also noteworthy that engineers and technical engineers, who were vertically mismatched in their first job (over-educated), are no longer in their current job. As discussed below, they increase the probability of achieving an educational match after job turnover. One likely mechanism behind the results is the type of human capital individuals acquired during their university education. Medical doctors and engineers have highly specialized skills which are to a large extent occupation-specific and their transferability across jobs is limited. Although specialized majors earn a premium on average—specific majors’ graduates earn the most at almost every age (Leighton and Speer 2020 ), a natural concern is that they may be riskier than general fields. Skills that are valuable but not transferable may leave a worker vulnerable to sector-specific shocks or economic downturns and may reduce his/her probability of finding employment (Leighton and Speer 2020 ).

Second, several degrees have gone from being cataloged as vertically mismatched to be cataloged as horizontally mismatched. There is still a resource misallocation of the human capital in terms of formal qualifications; however, graduates are now carrying out jobs which demand a degree, although without requiring specific university specialties. Typically, as Robst ( 2007 ) suggested, those degrees provide more general skills than occupation-specific skills. This would be the case of History and Philosophy, Journalism, Languages and Literature, Political Science and Sociology, Mathematics, Pharmacy, Chemistry, or Physics (Fig.  4 ). For example, the predicted probability of horizontal mismatch in the current job is 25% for History and Philosophy, 15% for Political Science and Sociology, and 14% for Journalism (Table 5 ). Some of those degrees, usually considered "specific," actually produce graduates with highly versatile skills. For instance, a Bachelor of Mathematics aims to increase the student’s ability in analytical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and problem-solving that is necessary for work in mathematically oriented careers (e.g., actuarial analyst, data analyst, game designer, or investment analyst). Footnote 35 In fact, according to the REFLEX survey, the most required competencies in the Spanish graduate labor market are mainly transferable skills, “in other words, skills learned in one context that are useful in another” (Salas-Velasco 2014 , p. 509).

Third, Table 9 and Fig.  4 show that there are workers in jobs not requiring a degree that remain mismatched 4 years after graduation. There are university graduates who are still over-educated; this is the case, for example, of Business Studies (28%), and Management and Economics Studies (19%). In the case of Social Work (45%) or Labor Relations (40%), graduates are still vertical and horizontally mismatched. The probability of being mismatched is shown in parentheses (see Table 5 ). An interesting result of our study is that some degrees that are often thought of as "broad," entailing general human capital that can be used in different occupations, actually produce skills that are quite specialized (e.g., Bachelor of Economics).

Regardless of how much graduates and employers invest in job search, the initial match is unlikely to be perfect (Allen and Van der Velden 2005 ). As a result, the adjustment mechanisms employed by agents are of great importance. One way of adjusting to initial mismatches is by learning new and/or specific skills. In our study, the probability of getting an education-job match increases if a master's degree was completed (Table 9 ). Also, the probability of being (mis)matched relates to graduates’ age. Being under 30 years old is associated with an increase of 0.0502 in the average probability of being well-matched in the current job (Table 9 ). On the contrary, the probability of being horizontally mismatched relates to graduates 35 years of age or older. Therefore, the mismatch is increasing in age. This is a result also found in the literature (Somers et al. 2019 ). In general, it seems that the lowest rates of mismatch do happen at young ages (Bender and Heywood 2011 ). Younger Spanish graduates are most likely to make the transition from a state of mismatch to a state of a match in the early stages of their careers.

Lastly, we would like to point out that the role that ability and other unobserved individual characteristics play in the matching process remained to be tested. “Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity might be important if the probability of educational mismatch is correlated with innate ability” (Bauer 2002 , p. 222). We know that some degrees such as Medicine and STEM degrees (college programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) attract students with higher average ability and the dispersion around the mean is lower. Therefore, as was predictable, they are occupying typical graduate positions (high-skilled jobs) 4 years after graduation; and the well-match vs. horizontal mismatch will depend on the relative specificity of college majors and the transferability of skills across occupations. However, there are many other degrees where the heterogeneity of the students admitted by universities is much higher, and some of our results could be a result of ability differences between individuals. For example, in Fig.  4 , a degree in Sports Science increases the probability of being both horizontally and vertically mismatched; a degree in Political Science and Sociology increases the probability of being both horizontally and completely mismatched, and a degree in Tourism Studies increases the probability of being in the three boxes of educational mismatch. However, we could not investigate this issue in-depth due to the limitations of the database; it does not even have the average grade of the academic record that could approximate the ability. In addition, as one of the reviewers very well points out, it is unclear a priori whether the educational mismatch is a "good" or a "bad" thing for workers. To resolve this question, one should look at whether educational mismatch causes a wage penalty or increases the risk of unemployment. However, these last two aspects are outside the scope of this paper. We hope to give an answer in future research, as long as there is information that allows it. Footnote 36

5.2 Analysis of educational mismatch and external labor mobility

Many university graduates have likely changed jobs since graduation, and labor mobility has allowed them to get an education-job match. Thus, turnover patterns can be informative on the nature of the matching of workers to jobs. A binomial logit model of external labor mobility was presented in Sect.  4.2 . The estimated marginal effects are shown in Table 6 . Footnote 37 The results indicate that keeping everything else constant, the greater the number of employers for whom a graduate has worked, the higher the probability of achieving a job match. The coefficients associated with gender do not show statistical significance in both regressions (Models I and II). However, in comparison with hard science degrees, graduates in the fields of health sciences and engineering/architecture increase the probability of achieving an education-job match after job turnover. Conversely, individuals graduating with arts and humanities degrees—also social and legal sciences degrees—reduce the likelihood of achieving the job match after job mobility (Table 6 , Model I). In particular, having a university degree in the field of health sciences represents an increase of almost 18 percentage points in the probability of achieving an education-job match after external labor mobility. This probability also increases appreciably if the individual is an engineer/architect (4.3 percentage points). On the other hand, the probability of obtaining a good fit is significantly reduced if the worker obtained a degree in the field of arts and humanities (decreases almost 15 percentage points), and if he/she obtained a degree in the field of social and legal sciences (decreases by about 5 percentage points). If we focus on the typology of university studies, we see in Table 6 (Model II) that engineering degrees and Architecture, also technical engineering degrees and Technical Architecture (surveyors), increase the probability of achieving a job match after job turnover, compared to a licenciatura .

The results in Table 6 suggest that the relative specificity of college majors is associated with a lower probability of being mismatched after job turnover. But the question that arises is: how many times does a university graduate have to change jobs to get a good match? Using the estimates shown in Table 6 , Tables 10 , 11 (Appendix) show the probability of achieving the job match according to the number of times the graduate changes employer. For example, in Table 10 , the likelihood of obtaining a job match if the individual changes only one time is 23.4%. But it would be necessary to "buy" ten jobs to have a high probability (68.4%) of achieving the job matching (result based on model predictions). Footnote 38 The latter may be possible in an economy such as the United States where the labor market is characterized by significant flexibility and mobility, but not in Europe, and less in Spain. It is unlikely that an average Spanish university graduate can change employer ten times in four years. Among other things, because employment opportunities are limited and labor mobility is relatively low in the Spanish labor market. In fact, in the sample used in Table 6 , the average job turnover was 2.85. Footnote 39 Therefore, educational mismatch likely becomes a permanent phenomenon in the job market for Spanish graduates.

6 Discussion

The mismatch between the educational requirements for various occupations and the amount of education obtained by workers is large and growing significantly over time (Vedder et al. 2013 ). Countries that have a relative over-supply of highly skilled workers show higher levels of over-education for graduates (Verhaest and Van der Velden 2012 ). This mismatch between education and employment has been the focus of substantial research (e.g., Groot and Maassen van den Brink 2000 ; McGuinness 2006 ). More attention has been paid recently to the so-called horizontal mismatch as well, that is, the mismatch between a worker’s field of study and the content of his/her job (e.g., Robst 2007 ; Verhaest et al. 2017 ).

Education-job mismatches are almost inevitable in the early years of the career of university graduates. New graduates rarely have the exact skills employers require. This is not (necessarily) a reflection on the shortcomings of higher education. Some skills are best learned on the job, and higher education is expected to do more than providing a narrowly described set of directly utilizable competencies (Allen and Van der Velden 2005 ). Moreover, individuals having attended different undergraduate programs have different stocks of human capital that can be differentially valued by employers resulting in an initial mismatch for some university degrees. Also, the lack of work experience of recent graduates stops them from occupying positions of their educational level. It is then likely that many fresh college students accept a position below their educational level because they can obtain practical skills and experience that can be used in different higher-level positions or jobs. The “theory of career mobility” already predicted that “it will be rational for some individuals to spend a portion of their working careers in occupations that require a lower level of schooling than they have acquired” because “more educated individuals are more likely to move to a higher-level occupation” (Sicherman and Galor 1990 , pp. 177–178). Thus, (vertical) mismatch would be a temporary phenomenon, which would greatly reduce the need for policy intervention.

In the case of Spain, according to the EILU2014 graduate survey, around 13 percent of university graduates were in non-graduate jobs just after leaving the higher education institutions (HEIs), and just over 9 percent remained in mismatched jobs four years after graduation. They were indeed carrying out jobs related to their studies (over-educated but matched in the field of study). But, why offer subsidized university degrees if these jobs can be carried out with, for example, higher-level vocational training (post-upper secondary school level)? Surrounding countries such as Switzerland, with a lower offer of university degrees and an excellent dual system of vocational education and training (VET), have a lower incidence of educational mismatch among their university graduates (see Fig.  2 ). Footnote 40 According to the European Commission, the phenomenon of over-qualification in Spain coexists with the need for more qualified workers mainly with a VET background (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training 2015 ). Nonetheless, the Spanish secondary education system remains academic and university-oriented. There have been attempts to reform the formal VET system, but it is still less popular (lower social recognition) than the Baccalaureate; and it attracts, although not always, students with lower academic ability.

The situations that perhaps should concern us the most are those of complete educational mismatch. Almost 17 percent of Spanish graduates were in non-graduate positions unrelated to their studies four years after graduation. From the point of view of educational production, these situations constitute a clear (external) inefficiency because their studies have been useless: “external efficiency implies that the results of educational processes are desirable for society (social utility)” (Salas-Velasco 2020 , p. 163). These degrees may have a high component of education consumption and/or are being demanded by students with less academic ability. In these cases, perhaps better school guidance would be desirable for them to pursue vocational training studies instead of university degrees that are more costly to society. Also, because they are in low-wage occupations, they will not be able to return to society via taxes that society gave them. There is perhaps a "matching problem" here in the individual's choice of alternative educational paths.

We cannot give magic recipes to improve the matching of fresh graduates with their jobs in the Spanish labor market. In the first years of their professional careers, the educational mismatch may be due to the fact that they earned a degree but lack the skills or competencies that are needed to perform high-skilled jobs. Using information from the REFLEX survey for Spanish higher education graduates, Salas-Velasco ( 2014 ) showed that non-cognitive skills are more demanded in job positions than cognitive skills. However, our graduate survey does not contain information on competencies, unlike the REFLEX survey, so this aspect cannot be analyzed. The mismatch may also be related to the search activity of recent graduates. University graduates with higher ability are, in general, more ambitious and involved individuals, and search more or more efficiently. Getting a good education-job match would thus be related to greater ability. But our survey also does not contain information on the ability of recent graduates, so we have not been able to explore this hypothesis either.

The optimal transition from university to employment, in terms of speed and quality, is also influenced by variables as important as the structure of the labor market, the productive model of the economy, and the business cycle. In this regard, it is necessary to highlight the business dimension of Spanish firms. In small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and family businesses, an education-occupation match can hardly be achieved even four years after obtaining a university degree when workers have already gained skills from the labor market and/or have learned to do a better job search. Medium and large companies are those that offer highly qualified jobs, and also possibilities for promotion through well-defined career ladders. Therefore, if the average business size in Spain does not increase in the following decades, situations of educational mismatch will continue to exist for many university degrees. In the case of physicians and nurses, their good educational match is due not only to the fact that they have specific human capital (highly specialized skills which are to a large extent occupation-specific and their transferability across occupations/sectors is limited) but also because their “only” employer is a very large company: the public sector. Thus, we hypothesize that the education-job match is more likely in monopsonistic labor markets; when there is only one employer of a certain type of work and the human capital demanded is specific for the positions offered by the monopsonist—together with a regulation for the access and exercise of the profession. On the other hand, the business cycle is also important. The unemployment of tertiary education graduates in Spain was 24 percent in 2014, the year in which the graduates of our survey were interviewed. Footnote 41 This should be noted in interpreting the importance of the mismatch. In all likelihood, graduates surveyed had no choice but to accept non-graduate jobs and/or disconnected from their fields of education. Hence, the mismatch is involuntary. Future graduate surveys should be used to check if a more favorable labor market in terms of employability improves the education-employment adjustment among graduates.

The map of degrees done in this article according to the education-job (mis)match is important also for the educational policy given that higher education is highly subsidized in Spain. We can raise some questions that can be answered in future research. Should we change the map of university degrees offering only those that really allow a good education-job fit? Is there a rationale for policies promoting access to higher education even in the presence of a mismatch? Should vocational education be enhanced by guiding students properly about their educational choices after completing compulsory education? Is the horizontal mismatch acceptable? After all, graduates are occupying highly qualified positions although, in principle, they do not use the specialized knowledge gained in college. The answers will depend on the value that society places on higher education and its willingness to pay for it. Some studies have found that there are significant non-monetary benefits from higher education that accrue even to mismatched graduates, including better self-reported health, and external benefits for the rest of society (e.g., Green and Henseke 2016 ). However, the questions that remain are whether those non-monetary benefits outweigh the monetary returns and whether society is willing to subsidize investments in higher education from which a lower tax collection is expected—as graduates work in lower-skilled and lower-paying jobs—as well as a reduction in the GDP growth through the waste of human capital and the implied reduction in productivity (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2016 ). Footnote 42

7 Conclusion

This paper examines the education-job (mis)match in the labor market for university graduates. The topic is relevant and pertinent given the amount of resources that both individuals and society allocate to the production of highly qualified workers. As the main novelty, this article studies the horizontal mismatch which has been less studied in the literature, that is, when university graduates hold jobs at their formal qualification level but not related to their field of study. The paper contributes to the existing literature on this topic by providing the taxonomy of educational mismatch in the labor market for university graduates and investigating its incidence among Spanish higher education graduates based on self-assessments. In addition, the map of degrees done in this article according to the education-job (mis)match is important for the educational policy given that higher education is highly subsidized in Spain. The article is also novel in the sense that it incorporates methodological improvements on some already published papers.

In this work, we use a subjective self-evaluation of a sample of 30,379 Spanish university graduates from the class of 2010, surveyed four years after graduation. Graduates inform us, on the one hand, whether or not their current (initial) positions need (needed) a university degree and, on the other hand, what is (was) the most appropriate study area or field of education for these positions. Tabulating the answers to both questions, we identify four situations of educational mismatch: appropriate match, horizontal mismatch, vertical mismatch, and vertical and horizontal mismatch. By estimating a multinomial logistic regression, we categorize university degrees in each of these four categories. Some results were expected. University degrees that entail specific human capital (e.g., Medicine, Nursing, Veterinary, and engineering/architecture degrees) are more likely to match education-occupation. Other degrees that involve a general human capital that has value across various occupations (e.g., hard science degrees such as Mathematics, Physics, or Chemistry, and liberal arts degrees such as History, Literature, or Sociology) increase the probability of being horizontally mismatched. In this case, we do not believe there is a severe misallocation of human resources since workers are occupying graduate positions. It is almost impossible to establish a one-to-one relationship between the field of study and occupation for those graduates whose degrees allow more flexibility in terms of their careers. Other results are more worrying in terms of the "waste" of university educational output. Some degrees (e.g., Business, and Management and Economics) increase the probability of being vertically mismatched (over-educated) in the first and current jobs. The excessive production of graduates in business and economics at Spanish universities reflects this education-work mismatch. In these situations, workers use in some way the human capital acquired during their university education. We should ask ourselves whether it would not be better to promote vocational education and training in many of these cases. It is cheaper to produce vocational skills, and individuals are more likely to be well-matched in their jobs. The situation is even worse for workers in non-graduate positions and study areas unrelated to their studies (e.g., Social Work). In these cases, it would be necessary to consider whether we really should produce this type of degree at the university.

The paper also shows that many university graduates change jobs and job turnover allows them to get a better match between their degrees and their jobs. Thus, turnover patterns can be informative on the nature of the matching of workers to jobs. The estimation of a binary logistic regression has allowed us to investigate this question. The results indicate that an important percentage of graduates (30%) who were mismatched in their first job become well-matched in their current employment after moving to a different firm. But the results also show that a recent graduate needs “to buy” several jobs to achieve an education-job match.

An important question that arises in this paper is that if workers with a Bachelor’s degree are over-qualified for their jobs and people with non-college education have the same earnings as those with BAs in an occupation, it is hard to justify the time and costs of going to college. But we should recognize that formal education, although important, is only one aspect of job matching. Moreover, going to college has non-monetary benefits for individuals in terms of better health, habits of life, open-mindedness, etc. that should also be taken into account in this type of studies.

Availability of data and materials

The data used for the analysis are available at the Instituto Nacional de Estadística repository: https://www.ine.es/dynt3/inebase/es/index.htm?padre=2785&capsel=2876

In any case, it is not an easy duty to define which education is appropriate for each job since the educational requirements of the positions differ among companies and change over time.

For example, in 2010, only 62 percent of U.S. college graduates had a job that required a college degree (Abel and Deitz 2015 ).

The sample in the EILU2014 was restricted to ISCED-97 5A level (Bachelors and Masters or equivalent) graduates. ISCED stands for International Standard Classification of Education.

Although education is often used as a proxy for skills, the two terms have different meanings (International Labour Organization 2014 ).

In practice, the terms over-qualification and over-education are used interchangeably. The same for under-education and under-qualification.

Over-educated or over-qualified: an individual has completed more years of formal education than the current job requires. Over-skilled: an individual is unable to fully use acquired skills and abilities in the current job. See Quintini ( 2011 ).

When the measurement is limited to university graduates, the group with the highest level of education, under-education is not possible and vertical mismatch has the same meaning as over-education. However, in our analysis carried out in this paper, vertical mismatch (over-education) is a more restrictive concept in the sense that it includes university graduates whose work does not require a university degree but is related to their field of study.

ISCO stands for International Standard Classification of Occupations (International Labour Office), and DOT stands for Dictionary of Occupational Titles (U.S. Department of Labor).

The author was discussing the United States. The DOT was last updated in 1991, and it is rarely used. Today, occupations are classified using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system—a United States government system of classifying occupations—and data are provided through the Occupational Information Network, known as O*NET.

Although the main advantage of this method resides in the fact that it requires little information, since it is enough to know the educational level of the workers, nevertheless the boundary of a standard deviation is quite arbitrary.

The statistical method usually yields significantly lower estimates of over-education (e.g., Leuven and Oosterbeek 2011 ).

In practice, researchers use one method or another depending on the available data.

Nordin et al. ( 2010 ) built 29 different fields of education and created 34 different occupations. They "subjectively" constructed a matrix of fields of education-occupations matching.

Licenciaturas and engineering degrees/Architecture were equivalent to the Master's degree in the American system of higher education. With the reform of Bologna, all the degrees (called grados ) have a duration of four years, equivalent somehow to the American Bachelor's degree. Some exceptions are Architecture (5 years) and Medicine (6 years).

The database contains 30,379 responses from graduates interviewed only once (a single cross-sectional dataset). This figure is the total number of observations in the raw data.

The interviewees were asked to exclude occasional/sporadic employment.

The appropriate level is preferable to the often-used alternative of the required level. The latter may partly measure formal selection requirements whereas the former is more likely to refer to actual job content (Allen and Van der Velden 2001 ).

Figure  1 is a simplification to illustrate educational mismatch. We took real examples referring to the current occupation of Spanish university graduates four years after graduation.

The sub-samples in Table 3 included only wage-earners workers. From the total sample of 30,379 graduates, self-employed workers were excluded (around 7% in the first job and about 10% in the current job). The important reduction in the number of observations in the current job was mainly due to the fact that around 22% of graduates were still in their first job at the time of being surveyed and they were not asked questions Q1 and Q2. The rest of the cases not considered was due to missing values (around 7% in the first job and about 4% in the current job), and individuals who were not asked questions Q1 and Q2 because they basically never had worked (around 6% in the first job and about 3% in the current job).

In Table 3 , to the question of what was the most appropriate study area for the job, the majority of horizontally mismatched graduates (77.6%/80.0%) stated “a totally different area” and 22.4%/20.0% “no particular area” (first job/current job).

The multinomial logit model is also described in Greene ( 2012 ).

They would be our explanatory variables of interest.

The probability of mismatch is compared to the probability of mismatch in the reference category.

Age was referred to December 31, 2014, and it was already in intervals in the database. In relation to the Master's degree, we do not know when it was awarded, so we have chosen to use this information only in the current job.

The data collected did not allow us to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary separations. Internal labor mobility (intra‐firm mobility) is outside the scope of this paper given the limitations of the database.

A permanent job separation involves a change of employers for the worker (Jovanovic 1979 ).

The estimates were made using the statistical program Stata/SE 15.1.

The marginal effects in our research were calculated using the average marginal effects (AME) approach, which relies on actual values of the independent variables (the covariates were all dichotomous).

For the global contrast of the estimated models, the Chi-square test was used. The null hypothesis is that all the coefficients of the equation, except the constant, are null. In the first job: Wald chi2(84) = 3228.82; in the current job: Wald chi2(90) = 36,479.40. In both cases, the associated p-value was very low (less than 0.001). The result of this test allows us to reject the null hypothesis accepting both models as good.

In comparison with the reference category.

These probabilities have been calculated using the command margins in Stata/SE 15.1.

The probabilities estimated in Table 4 practically did not change when considering women. Gender was not statistically significant in the estimates of the first job.

In parentheses, probabilities for the individual of reference. These probabilities change according to the degree (see Table 5 ).

As two reviewers point out, one of the limitations of self-assessment-based educational mismatch measurement is that matches could improve over time because people convince themselves that the match is better.

https://www.prospects.ac.uk/

In any case, the questionnaire asked the salary (in wide intervals) only for the first job. But this information is not available in the database made public.

For the global contrast of the estimated models, the Chi-square test was used. The null hypothesis is that all the coefficients of the equation, except the constant, are null. In Model I: Wald chi2(6) = 393.15; in Model II: Wald chi2(7) = 265.35. In both cases, the associated p-value was very low (less than 0.001). The result of this test allows us to reject the null hypothesis accepting both models as good.

“Job shopping refers to the period of experimentation with jobs and accompanying high rates of mobility, which typically occurs at the beginning of the working life” (Johnson 1978 , p. 261). According to the “theory of job shopping,” workers search for a high-quality match (e.g., Anderson et al. 1994 ). In connection with this idea, McGuiness and Wooden ( 2009 ), using Australian longitudinal data, identified mismatched workers (over-skilled in their study) as moving rapidly between jobs but also relatively unconfident of finding an improved job match.

The average number of different employers since graduation was 3.53 among those workers who got a good education-job fit.

Although it is also true that youth unemployment is much higher in Spain.

According to Eurostat ( https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat ), unemployment rates in 2014 (second quarter) of tertiary education graduates (ISCED-97 levels 5 and 6) aged 25 to 29 years old were 37%, 24%, and 10% in Greece, Spain, and the EU-28, respectively.

“For the economy as a whole, total output then depends on how workers are assigned to jobs” (Sattinger 1993 , p. 831).

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Salas-Velasco, M. Mapping the (mis)match of university degrees in the graduate labor market. J Labour Market Res 55 , 14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12651-021-00297-x

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• Education-job mismatch
• Higher education
• Horizontal mismatch
• Job turnover
• Multinomial logistic regression
• Spanish university degrees

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, education and skill mismatches: wage and job satisfaction consequences.

International Journal of Manpower

ISSN : 0143-7720

Article publication date: 9 August 2013

This paper aims to highlight the relevance of examining education and skill job‐worker mismatches as two different, although simultaneous, phenomena of the labor market. Most previous literature does not take into account skill mismatch, and a number of papers deal with both kinds of mismatches as equivalent.

Design/methodology/approach

Spanish data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) survey for the year 2001 are used to examine the degree of statistical association between both education and skill mismatches, and to estimate wage equations as well as job satisfaction equations, considering satisfaction with pay, with the type of job and overall job satisfaction, in order to analyze the consequences of both types of mismatches from the workers’ viewpoint.

The statistical analysis shows that education and skill mismatches are weakly related in the Spanish labor market. The econometric analysis reveals that skill mismatches appear as key determinants of workers’ job satisfaction, while education mismatches have much weaker impacts, if any, on workers’ job satisfaction; however, both skill and education mismatches have negative impacts on wages.

Practical implications

The analysis points out that the research strategy that considers education mismatch as a proxy for the study of the effects of skill mismatch is rather weak because skill and education mismatches appear to capture different aspects of the accuracy of the job‐worker pairing, and, therefore, they have separate consequences for workers, both in monetary and non‐monetary terms. Skill mismatches are perceived by workers as a much more relevant problem than education mismatches. The wage and job satisfaction consequences of skill mismatches are strongly negative; to the contrary, education mismatches show much weaker effects.

Originality/value

The paper emphasizes that neglecting the effects of skill mismatch along with those of education mismatch in the analysis of the monetary and non‐monetary consequences of inadequate job‐worker pairing can lead to erroneous interpretations of the facts.

• Education mismatch
• Skill mismatch
• Job satisfaction

Badillo‐Amador, L. and Vila, L.E. (2013), "Education and skill mismatches: wage and job satisfaction consequences", International Journal of Manpower , Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. 416-428. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-05-2013-0116

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Are Minority Students Harmed by Affirmative Action?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, matthew m. chingos matthew m. chingos former brookings expert, senior fellow, director of education policy program - urban institute.

March 7, 2013

Affirmative action is back in the news this year with a major Supreme Court case, Fisher v. Texas. The question before the Court is whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause permits the University of Texas at Austin’s use of race in its undergraduate admissions process. The Court may declare the use of racial preferences in university admissions unconstitutional when it decides the case in the coming months, potentially overturning its decision in the landmark Grutter case decided a decade ago.

Accompanying the general subject of affirmative action in the spotlight is the “mismatch” hypothesis, which posits that minority students are harmed by the very policies designed to help them. Justice Clarence Thomas made this argument in his dissent in the Grutter case: “The Law School tantalizes unprepared students with the promise of a University of Michigan degree and all of the opportunities that it offers. These overmatched students take the bait, only to find that they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition. And this mismatch crisis is not restricted to elite institutions.”

The mismatch idea is certainly plausible in theory. One would not expect a barely literate high-school dropout to be successful at a selective college; admitting that student to such an institution could cause them to end up deep in debt with no degree. But admissions officers at selective colleges obviously do not use affirmative action to admit just anyone, but rather candidates they think can succeed at their institution.

The mismatch hypothesis is thus an empirical question: have admissions offices systematically overstepped in their zeal to recruit a diverse student body? In other words, are they admitting students who would be better off if they had gone to college elsewhere, or not at all? There is very little high-quality evidence supporting the mismatch hypothesis, especially as it relates to undergraduate admissions—the subject of the current Supreme Court case.

In fact, most of the research on the mismatch question points in the opposite direction. In our 2009 book , William Bowen, Michael McPherson, and I found that students were most likely to graduate by attending the most selective institution that would admit them. This finding held regardless of student characteristics—better or worse prepared, black or white, rich or poor. Most troubling was the fact that many well-prepared students “undermatch” by going to a school that is not demanding enough, and are less likely to graduate as a result. Other prior research has found that disadvantaged students benefit more from attending a higher quality college than their more advantaged peers.

A November 2012 NBER working paper by a team of economists from Duke University comes to the opposite conclusion in finding that California’s Proposition 209, a voter-initiated ban on affirmative action passed in 1996, led to improved “fit” between minority students and colleges in the University of California system, which resulted in improved graduation rates. The authors report a 4.4-percentage-point increase in the graduation rates of minority students after Proposition 209, 20 percent of which they attribute to better matching.

At first glance, these results appear to contradict earlier work on the relationship between institutional selectivity and student outcomes. But the paper’s findings rest on a questionable set of assumptions, and a more straightforward reanalysis of the data used in the paper, which were provided to me by the University of California President’s Office (UCOP), yields findings that are not consistent with the mismatch hypothesis.

First, the NBER paper uses data on the change in outcomes between the three years prior to Prop 209’s passage (1995-1997) and the three years afterward (1998-2000) to estimate the effect of the affirmative action ban on student outcomes. Such an analysis is inappropriate because it cannot account for other changes occurring in California over this time period (other than simple adjustments for changes in student characteristics).

A key problem with the before-and-after method is that it does not take into account pre-existing trends in student outcomes. This is readily apparent in Figure 1, which shows that the graduation rates of underrepresented minority (URM) students increased by about four percentage points between 1992-1994 and 1995-1997, before the affirmative action ban. The change from 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 was smaller, at about three percentage points. The NBER paper interprets this latter change as the causal impact of Prop 209, but this analysis assumes that there would have been no change in the absence of Prop 209. If the prior trend had continued, then graduation rates would have increased another four points—in which case, the effect of Prop 209 was to decrease URM graduation rates by one percentage point.

Adjusting for student characteristics does not change this general pattern. The adjustment makes no difference in the pre-Prop 209 period, but explains about 36 percent of the increase in the immediate post-Prop 209 period (which is consistent with the NBER paper’s finding that changes in student characteristics explain 34-50 percent of the change). But if the 1992-1994 to 1995-1997 adjusted change was four points, and the 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 adjusted change was one point, then Prop 209 might be said to have a negative effect of three percentage points.

None of these alternative analyses of the effect of Prop 209 should be taken too seriously, because it is difficult to accurately estimate a pre-policy trend from only two data points. The bottom line is that there probably isn’t any way to persuasively estimate the effect of Prop 209 using these data. But this analysis shows how misleading it is in this case to only examine the 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 change, while ignoring the prior trend.

Second, the NBER paper finds that less-selective universities produce better outcomes among minority students with weaker academic credentials. This must be the case in order for “mismatch” to exist, but it runs counter to most prior research on the subject. The one exception is a 2002 study by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger, which found no impact of college selectivity on earnings except among students from low-income families. However, the methodology of the Dale-Krueger study severely limits the relevance of its results for students and policymakers.

In order to control for unobserved student characteristics, Dale-Krueger control for information about the institutions to which students applied and were accepted. This takes into account potentially valuable information that is observable by admissions committees but not the researcher. But it is problematic because it produces results that are based on comparisons between students who attended more or less selective colleges despite being admitted to the same set of institutions. As Caroline Hoxby explains : “since at least 90 percent of students who [were admitted to a similar group of schools] choose the more selective college(s) within it, the strategy generates estimates that rely entirely on the small share of students who make what is a very odd choice.” In other words, the method ignores most of the variation in where students go to college, which results from decisions about where to apply.

The problem with the NBER paper is that it uses a variant of the Dale-Krueger method by controlling for which UC campuses students applied to and were admitted by. And the UCOP data are consistent with Hoxby’s argument: in 1995-1997, 69 percent of URM students attended the most selective UC campus to which they were admitted and 90 percent attended a campus with an average SAT score within 100 points of the most selective campus that admitted them (the corresponding figures for all UC students are 72 and 93 percent).

A more straightforward analysis is to compare the graduation rates of URM students with similar academic preparation and family backgrounds who attended different schools. The mismatch hypothesis predicts that URM students with weak qualifications will be more likely to graduate, on average, from a less selective school than a more selective one.

The data show the opposite of what mismatch theory predicts: URM students, including those with less-than-stellar academic credentials, are more likely to graduate from more selective institutions. I calculate graduation rates by individual campus that are adjusted to take into account SAT scores, high school GPA, parental education, and family income. [1] I restrict this analysis to URM students with SAT scores in the 900-990 and 1000-1090 range during the three years before Prop 209, which should be exactly the group and time period when mismatch is most likely to occur.

Figure 2 shows that for both of the low-scoring groups of URM students, graduation rates are higher at more selective institutions. Results for individual institutions vary somewhat, but the upward trend in Figure 2 is clear. I find a similar pattern of results in the period after Prop 209 was passed (not shown). The main limitation of this type of analysis is that it does not take into account unobserved factors such as student motivation that may be associated with admission decisions and student choice of institution. The Dale-Krueger method is meant to address this issue, but for the reasons explained above produces results that are not particularly informative.

A better solution is to find instances of students who attended institutions of differing selectivity for reasons unrelated to their likelihood of success. This is not possible with the UCOP data, but such quasi-experimental methods are used in two other studies that finds a positive relationship between selectivity and student outcomes. In a study published in 2009, Mark Hoekstra used a cutoff in the admissions process at a flagship state university to estimate the impact of attending that university on earnings. This strategy eliminates bias by comparing students who are very similar except that some were just above the cutoff for admission and others were just below. Hoekstra finds that attending the flagship increased earnings by 20 percent for white men.

In a more recent working paper , Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman employed a cutoff-based approach to measure the effect of a Massachusetts scholarship that could only be used at in-state institutions. Students who won the scholarship were more likely to attend a lower quality college, which caused a 40 percent decrease in on-time graduation rates, as well as a decline in the chances of earning a degree at any point within six years.

These two studies do not directly address the mismatch question because they do not focus on the beneficiaries of affirmative action, but they show that taking into account students’ unobserved characteristics leaves intact the positive relationship between selectivity and student outcomes that has been consistently documented in the many prior studies that are less causally persuasive.

To truly put the mismatch theory to rest, rigorous quasi-experimental evidence that focuses on the beneficiaries of preferential admissions policies is needed. But the current weight of the evidence leans strongly against the mismatch hypothesis. Most importantly, not a single credible study has found evidence that students are harmed by attending a more selective college. There may well be reasons to abolish or reform affirmative action policies, but the possibility that they harm the intended beneficiaries should not be among them.

[1] Specifically, I estimate the coefficients on institutional dummy variables after including these control variables. For the controls I include dummy variables corresponding to the categories used in the UCOP data, as well as dummies identifying missing data on each variable so as not to lose any observations. The adjusted graduation rate for each institution is calculated as the difference in its coefficient estimate and Berkeley’s coefficient estimate plus Berkeley’s unadjusted graduation rate for the indicated group of students (i.e. Berkeley’s adjusted and unadjusted graduation rate are thus equal by construction).

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Economic and Social Reports Trends in education–occupation mismatch among recent immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher, 2001 to 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.25318/36280001202400500002-eng

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Immigrants contributed much of the growth in the number of Canadians with a bachelor’s degree or higher from 2016 to 2021

Education–occupation match has improved for recent immigrants since 2016.

• The decreases in education–occupation mismatch since 2016 were widespread among recent immigrants

Acknowledgments

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Selecting immigrants with high levels of education increases their chances of economic success. Immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher are more adaptable to changes in the labour market and have steeper growth in employment earnings than those with a trades or high school education (Picot, Hou, & Qiu, 2016). However, many immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher have occupations that underutilize their skills, which can reduce their employment income, productivity and well-being (Cornelissen & Turcotte, 2020).

From 2001 to 2016, the Canadian workforce with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by 1.7 million people, but only half of these workers were absorbed into high-skilled occupations ( i.e. , jobs that required a bachelor’s degree or higher). This trend towards education–occupation mismatch among workers with a degree was concentrated among recent immigrants as younger Canadian-born people experienced a modest decrease in their mismatch rate over this period (Hou, Lu, & Schimmele, 2019).

As firms have adopted new technologies and automated tasks, the percentage of Canadians employed in managerial, professional and technical occupations has grown. The pace of this change in demand for high-skilled workers accelerated after 2018 (Frenette, 2023). Since the mid-2010s, the earnings gaps between immigrants and Canadian-born workers have narrowed, after widening from 2000 to 2015 (Crossman, Hou, & Picot, 2021). This improvement was likely because of stronger labour demand, as well as policy changes that better aligned the selection of immigrants with labour demand and other factors that increase their chances for economic success. These changes in labour demand may have improved the rate of education–occupation match among immigrants.

This article updates the trends in education–occupation mismatch documented by Hou, Lu and Schimmele (2019) with census data from 2001 to 2021. Education–occupation mismatch is defined based on the educational requirements for occupations in the National Occupational Classification (NOC). Note  Occupations were classified as those that require a bachelor’s degree or higher (high-skilled occupations), some postsecondary education (medium-skilled occupations), or a high school education or less (low-skilled occupations). Note  Workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher who are employed in low-skilled occupations are considered to be overeducated for their jobs, those employed in medium-skilled occupations are marginally overeducated and those employed in high-skilled occupations are education–occupation matched. Note 

The study focuses on the outcomes of recent immigrants who have been permanent residents of Canada for 10 years or less in a given census year. The rate of education–occupation match of recent immigrants with a degree is an indicator of their long-term prospects for economic integration. In Canada, workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher who have low-skilled occupations early in their careers have increasingly lower chances of transitioning to high-skilled occupations over time (Chen & Fougère, 2014; Cornelissen & Turcotte, 2020).

From 2016 to 2021, the number of Canadians aged 25 to 64 years with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased from 5.2 million to 6.0 million people, continuing the long-term expansion of the population with a high level of educational attainment (Table 1). This occurred because of an increase in the percentage of Canadians with a degree, as well as population growth. Immigrants accounted for 60% of the growth of Canadians with a degree. Growth in the number of Canadians with a degree from 2016 to 2021 was higher among recent immigrants (+25%) and established immigrants (+28%) than among Canadian-born people aged 25 to 34 years (+11%) or those aged 35 to 64 years (+10%).

As in other census years since 2001, immigrants had a higher level of educational attainment than the Canadian-born population in 2021. About 55.3% of recent immigrants and 39.8% of established immigrants had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 32.6% of Canadian-born people aged 25 to 34 years and 24.8% of Canadian-born people aged 35 to 64 years.

Among people aged 25 to 64 years with a bachelor’s degree or higher, 79.1% of recent immigrants and 80.5% of established immigrants were employed in May 2021. The employment rate of recent immigrants with a degree was higher in 2021 than in 2016 or in any other census year since 2001. By contrast, the employment rate of established immigrants with a degree was lower in 2021 than in previous census years. The employment rates of Canadian-born people with a bachelor’s degree or higher were consistently higher than those of recent and established immigrants.

Employment growth was more concentrated in high-skilled occupations from 2016 to 2021 than in the previous 15 years for both recent immigrants and younger Canadian-born workers (aged 25 to 34 years) with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Note  Among recent immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher, 59% of employment growth from 2016 to 2021 was in high-skilled occupations, compared with 32% from 2001 to 2016. Note  Relative growth of employment in high-skilled occupations was higher for younger Canadian-born workers with a degree from 2016 to 2021 (+90%) and in the previous 15 years (+61%).

In the 2016-to-2021 period, the total number of workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher grew 15.9%, but their employment in high-skilled occupations grew even more, at 17.8%. With the stronger demand for high-skilled workers, the total overeducation rate in Canada decreased from 14.8% in 2016 to 13.5% in 2021, while the education–occupation match increased 1 percentage point (Table 2). This finding was opposite to the trend over the 2001-to-2016 period, when the match rate decreased from 64.2% to 60.2%.

This change in labour demand reversed the trend towards education–occupation mismatch among recent immigrants. The overeducation rate of recent immigrants decreased from 31.1% in 2016 to 26.7% in 2021. Note  Their rate of education–occupation match concurrently increased from 40.0% in 2016 to 44.4% in 2021.

Even with these improvements, a large percentage of recent immigrants with a degree were in mismatched occupations in 2021, and their rate of education–occupation match was lower than it was 20 years earlier. Furthermore, the disparity in education–occupation match between recent immigrants and young Canadian-born workers was larger in 2021 than it was 20 years earlier. In 2021, the overeducation rate of recent immigrants was more than double that of young Canadian-born workers.

Longer duration of residence in Canada decreased the disparity in education–occupation match with Canadian-born workers, but the gap in overeducation was still large for established immigrants who have been permanent residents of Canada for over 10 years. In 2021, 17.1% of established immigrants were overeducated for their occupations, a small decrease from the 2016 rate. Education–occupation match among established immigrants was unchanged from 2016 to 2021, after decreasing from 2001 to 2016.

The decreases in education–occupation mismatch since 2016 were widespread among recent immigrants Note 

About two-thirds of recent immigrants in 2021 had a degree from a foreign institution, Note  and this was a key correlate for their high rate of education–occupation mismatch. The overeducation rate of recent immigrants with a foreign degree was 24 percentage points higher than that of younger Canadian-born workers, while it was less than 2 percentage points higher for recent immigrants with a Canadian degree. Overeducation has decreased since 2016 for recent immigrants with a foreign degree and those with a Canadian degree.

In 2021, the overeducation rate of recent immigrants was highest among those from Southeast Asia (54.7%) and lowest among those from Northern Europe (7.3%). Note  A large share of those from Southeast Asia were admitted as caregivers (31.4%), a subgroup that had a very high overeducation rate (69.2%). The decrease in overeducation since 2016 occurred for recent immigrants from all source regions but was largest for those from South Asia (from 35.6% to 26.9%), which was the leading source of new immigrants. There were also relatively large decreases in overeducation among recent immigrants from Central and South America (from 30.0% to 23.9%) and East Asia (from 22.5% to 17.6%).

The overeducation rate also decreased to a large extent for recent economic immigrants in the Federal Skilled Worker Program (from 26.7% to 19.9%) and Provincial Nominee Program (from 36.6% to 31.6%). The overeducation rate of recent immigrants in the Canadian Experience Class was relatively low and decreased from 14.1% to 12.4%. These decreases in overeducation occurred alongside the introduction of the Express Entry System in 2015 and other changes in immigrant selection that were designed to improve the economic outcomes of immigrants. Overeducation decreased to a smaller extent among other economic immigrants, family-sponsored immigrants and refugees.

In sum, the stronger demand for high-skilled workers since 2016 and changes in immigrant selection reversed the trend towards education–occupation mismatch among recent immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Despite this improvement, many recent immigrants with a foreign degree encounter disadvantages in the Canadian labour market that contribute to a high rate of education–occupation mismatch.

Christoph Schimmele and Feng Hou are with the Social Analysis and Modelling Division, Statistics Canada.

The authors thank René Morissette for his suggestions for improvement on an earlier draft of this study.

Chen, X., & Fougère, M. (2014). How persistent is the occupation-education mismatch in Canada? International Scholarly Research Notices .

Cornelissen, L., & Turcotte, M. (2020). Persistent overqualification among immigrants and non-immigrants . Insights on Canadian Society . Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 75-006-X.

Crossman, E., Hou, F., & Picot, G. (2021). Are the gaps in labour market outcomes between immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts starting to close? Economic and Social Reports , 1 (4), 1–19.

Frenette, M. (2023). The changing nature of work since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic . Economic and Social Reports , 3 (7), 1–11.

Hou, F., Lu, Y., & Schimmele, C. (2019). Recent trends in over-education by immigration status . Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series , No.  436. Statistics Canada Catalogue no.  11F0019M.

Picot, G., Hou, F., & Qiu, H. (2016). The human capital model of selection and immigrant economic outcomes. International Migration , 54 (3), 73–88.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Equity? Equality? How Educators Can Tell the Difference

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Today’s post is the latest in a series on the difference between equity and equality .

‘Every Student Doesn’t Need the Same Thing’

Karen Baptiste, Ed.D., a senior consultant at McREL International, is a former special education teacher, instructional coach, and director who now works with K–12 schools across the United States to support improved teaching and learning. She is a co-author of The New Classroom Instruction That Works :

It’s common for educators to believe and teach that everyone should be treated fairly and equally. Having been a special education teacher, and being a person of color, I understand the impact on a child’s life when we treat everyone equally.

Equality, in general terms, is the belief that everyone should get the same treatment, the same resources, and the same starting point. That would be OK if our society did not rank race, gender, (dis)ability, religion, etc. Unfortunately, people of color have dealt with racism and oppression for hundreds of years, and they have not had equal treatment, fairness, nor the same starting point. When teachers say they want equality, what they are saying is that they want all of their students to be treated the same and, therefore, do not see or acknowledge the differences among their students.

When an educator says they believe in equality over equity, they overlook their students’ unique characteristics, abilities, and traits that make them who they are and alleviate themselves from the responsibility of having to address their students’ needs. Most people want to avoid discomfort, especially when the topic of race is surfaced. There is fear of getting it wrong or being accused of being a racist, so it’s easier to say “I treat all of my students the same.”

Equity acknowledges and addresses the unique needs of each student, and it is what we need to work toward. Because of my dark skin, and because of my gender, and because of the texture of my hair, and because of the language I speak, I am born into a world where I am too often dismissed and seen as inferior, not just in school but at work, when buying a home, shopping at the grocery store, traveling, and engaging in any part of living life. There is no part of our lives that has gone untouched by racism and/or discrimination. People of color are still fighting today to be seen and heard as an equal, valued member in the world. Until that happens, we can’t talk about equality.

Equity says I see you.

Equity says I want to understand you.

Equity says I accept your Black and brown skin.

Equity says there is nothing wrong with you or your existence in the world.

Equity says I recognize your learning needs and I am willing to learn the best ways to teach you and provide you with the resources that you need to be successful so that you can feel equal in this space.

Every student doesn’t need the same thing. Equality pushes for everyone to get the same thing, while equity is about giving every student what they need to be successful. Let’s set aside the topic of race momentarily and think about the grave outcomes if we treat students with special needs equal to their peers without special needs. What if the expectation during physical education class is to run two laps in a specified time? Students who use a wheelchair cannot realistically meet that expectation. This is why the federal law requires children designated for special education services to have an individualized education program, because their needs are not equal; they do not need equal treatment, they need equitable treatment and resources in order to access a quality education. Now, think about your student in class who needs to use manipulatives during a math lesson while other students can do mental math.

All students learn differently and can meet mastery when equity becomes part of your practice. Some might consider this pedantic when discussing equality and equity, but it’s not. Providing students with the resources they need to be successful provides them with the psychological safety that is sometimes missing in classrooms but gravely needed.

‘Equity Is Not an Initiative’

PJ Caposey is the Illinois Superintendent of the Year and is a best-selling author, having written nine books for various publishers. PJ is a sought after presenter and consultant who has a widely read weekly newsletter available at www.pjcaposey.com :

Sometimes, I think the concept of equity compared to equality is very difficult and complex. Other times, I think it is straightforward and people out of an act of willful ignorance choose not to understand. I work hard to keep a positive mindset, so my intent in this is to provide six practical examples to demonstrate the difference and how it plays out in schools.

• A student’s grandmother is in the hospital, and their attendance suffers, so you modify some assignments to ensure you are measuring their progress toward standards but limiting the volume to best meet the student’s needs. EQUITY
• A student’s grandmother is in the hospital, and their attendance suffers, and you keep them responsible for the exact work everyone else must complete. EQUALITY
• A student struggles to read and has a documented disability, so their tests are read to them. EQUITY
• A student struggles to read and has a documented disability, but you provide zero assistance to them because it would not be fair to the other students. EQUALITY
• A district analyzes their data and creates plans to close achievement gaps by paying special attention to those groups not performing well. EQUITY
• A district analyzes their data and creates improvement plans that are equally applied to all students. EQUALITY
• Based on benchmark assessment results, some students are placed in intervention groupings to support their learning needs. EQUITY
• Despite assessment results, all students receive the exact same instruction throughout the course of the day. EQUALITY
• All students who wish to participate in Advanced Placement courses are allowed to do so despite previous performance if they attend an in-person meeting articulating the demands of the course. EQUITY
• Only students who have a 3.2 grade point average and have had less than five missing assignments per year on average are allowed to participate in Advanced Placement courses without any exceptions. EQUALITY
• Some staff members have advanced degrees in reading so their professional development requirements around the new reading curriculum are altered to acknowledge their expertise. EQUITY
• All staff members are required to attend the same professional development regardless of prior knowledge or expertise. EQUALITY

My point in sharing these very realistic examples of equity versus equality is twofold. I have come to the realization that we “DO” equity far more than some people would elect to realize. Second, even those who are reluctant to embrace the fact that schools should have an equity focus typically want schools to make equitable decisions when it comes to them or their children. From that statement, feel free to extrapolate what you will.

I will leave with one last thought on the topic. Equity is not a goal. Equity is not an initiative. Equity is a mindset and a lens through which we make innumerable decisions every single day. Whenever we consider how we can best serve an individual student or lead an individual staff member by meeting them where they are at and helping them to get where they need to be, we are operating with an equity mindset.

‘Equity Empowers’

A retired teacher and speaker, Denise Fawcett Facey now writes on education issues. Among her books, Can I Be in Your Class focuses on ways to enliven classroom learning:

The words “That’s not fair” have become a virtual children’s anthem. Heard from homes to playgrounds to classrooms, those three words—spoken almost in the cadence of a song—are the outcry of kids everywhere, conveying their frustration over what they perceive as unequal treatment when things don’t go as they expected. Although we tend to ignore that all-too-common outburst, the early sense of justice that underlies it just as often informs adult concepts of equality as well, fostering an expectation that everyone will be treated the same. However, there is a striking difference between appearing to treat everyone equally and ensuring that everyone has the equity offered by an equal opportunity.

In an educational setting, affording everyone an equal chance at success means equity supersedes equality. From differentiation in teaching methods to the hiring of teachers, among other factors, here are four differences between equality and equity:

• Differentiation. Just as we don’t expect all students to wear eyeglasses in the name of equality, we shouldn’t expect all students to learn in the same way, either. Differentiation settles that. Providing what each student needs for optimal learning, it might be as simple as eyeglasses, preferential seating, or extended time for assignments. However, the chance to present mastery in multiple ways or to use books and other resources that are culturally relevant are also means of differentiation. Although the content area is the same for all students, as are the myriad tools available (there’s your equality), each uses the tool that enables that student to achieve success. That’s not only differentiation. It’s equity.
• Admission to gifted classes. While white, able-bodied students of a certain intellectual ability and socioeconomic level generally have an equal opportunity to be admitted to classes for gifted students, admission tends to exclude students of color as well as students with physical disabilities and those of lower socioeconomic levels, all of whom have eligible students among them. Equality makes certain that all schools have classes for gifted students. Equity goes beyond that, seeking to identify gifted students among those underrepresented groups within each school and assuring that they also gain admittance to gifted classes once identified.
• Hiring diverse teachers. It’s easy to point with pride to teachers of color in a district or to teachers who use wheelchairs, believing them to be reflections of equality and diversity. However, how many are there? And where are these teachers placed? Equality merely says there are some of each. Equity provides an equal opportunity for ALL teachers to teach at any school, not simply affording them an interview at the “better” schools with no hope of being hired nor relegating these teachers to schools designated “inner city” or “low achieving.” Equity also ensures that the number of teachers outside the dominant group is at least representative of their numbers in that community.
• A seat at the table. Much like hiring practices, opening a committee or group to people not normally invited is ostensibly equality. After all, this type of equality frequently involves having “one of each kind,” so to speak, with representation from various racial and ethnic groups and possibly from different ability groups as well. However, it’s certainly not equity as the newly invited are expected to be grateful for the invitation, not to be bold enough to participate as equals. Without affording these participants a genuine voice, it’s educational tokenism that solely allows one to be present. Equity, on the other hand, balances power, legitimizing each person’s voice.

Returning to that childhood question of fairness, equity is the true answer for both students and educators. Offering an equal playing field for success, equity empowers, placing everyone on equal footing.

Thanks to Karen, PJ, and Denise for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

It’s not unusual for districts, schools, and educators to confuse “equality” with “equity.” What are examples, and ways, you would help them understand the difference?

Part One in this series featured responses from Jehan Hakim, Mary Rice-Boothe, Jennifer Cárdenas, and Shaun Nelms.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email . And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 12 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here .

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Guest Essay

Higher Education Needs More Socrates and Plato

By Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Harun Küçük

Dr. Emanuel and Dr. Küçük are on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Emanuel is a professor and the vice provost for global initiatives and Dr. Küçük is an associate professor of the history and sociology of science.

The right attacks colleges and universities as leftist and woke. Progressives castigate them as perpetuating patriarchy and white privilege. The burdens of these culture war assaults are compounded by parents worried that the exorbitant costs of higher education aren’t worth it.

No wonder Americans’ faith in universities is at a low. Only 36 percent of Americans have confidence in higher education, according to a survey by Gallup last year, a significant drop from eight years ago. And this was before colleges and universities across the country were swept up in a wave of protests and counter-protests over the war in Gaza.

But the problems facing American higher education are not just the protests and culture war attacks on diversity, course content, speech and speakers. The problem is that higher education is fundamentally misunderstood. In response, colleges and universities must reassert the liberal arts ideals that have made them great but that have been slipping away.

By liberal arts, we mean a broad-based education that aspires to send out into society an educated citizenry prepared to make its way responsibly in an ever-more complex and divided world. We worry that at many schools, students can fulfill all or most of their general education requirements and take any number of electives without having had a single meaningful discussion that is relevant to one’s political life as a citizen.

Over the past century, what made American higher education the best in the world is not its superiority in career training, but educating students for democratic citizenship, cultivating critical thinking and contributing to the personal growth of its students through self-creation. To revive American higher education, we need to reinvigorate these roots.

In Europe and many countries elsewhere, colleges and universities have undergraduates specialize from Day 1, focusing on developing area-specific skills and knowledge. College students are trained to become doctors, lawyers or experts in international relations, English literature or computer science.

In the United States, European-style specialization for medical, legal, business or public policy careers is the purpose of post-collegiate professional schools. Traditionally, the American college has been about imparting a liberal arts education, emphasizing reasoning and problem solving. Those enduring skills are the critical ingredients for flourishing companies and countries.

Historically, students arriving on American college campuses spent a majority of their first two years taking classes outside their projected majors. This exposed them to a common curriculum that had them engage with thoughtful writings of the past to develop the skills and capacity to form sound, independent judgments.

Over the past half century, American colleges and universities have moved away from this ideal , becoming less confident in their ability to educate students for democratic citizenship. This has led to a decline in their commitment to the liberal arts, a trend underscored in the results last year of a survey of chief academic officers at American colleges and universities by Inside Higher Ed. Nearly two-thirds agreed that liberal arts education was in decline, and well over half felt that politicians, college presidents and university boards were increasingly unsympathetic to the liberal arts.

Today, there is almost no emphasis on shared courses among majors that explore and debate big questions about the meaning of equality, justice, patriotism, personal obligations, civic responsibility and the purpose of a human life. Majors that once required only eight or 10 courses now require 14 or more, and students are increasingly double majoring — all of which crowds out a liberal arts education. Ambitious students eager to land a prestigious consulting, finance or tech job will find it too easy to brush aside courses in the arts, humanities and social and natural sciences — the core of a liberal education.

The devaluing of the first two years of a shared liberal arts education has shortchanged our students and our nation. Educating young adults to be citizens is why the first two years of college still matter.

To that end, the so-called Great Books have long been the preferred way to foster citizenship. This approach is not, contrary to critics on the left and right, about sanctifying specific texts for veneration or a mechanism for heritage transmission.

Books by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman as well as Wollstonecraft, Austen, Woolf, Baldwin, Hurston and Orwell are worthy of introductory collegiate courses for students of all majors. These writers address the fundamental questions of human life. They explore the ideas of self-determination, friendship, virtue, equality, democracy and religious toleration and race that we have all been shaped by.

As students address those big questions, the Great Books authors provide a road map as they challenge and criticize one another and the conventional wisdom of the past. The Socrates of Plato’s dialogues is the exemplar — asking about beliefs and then subjecting them to respectful but critical analysis and skepticism.

These books are best studied in small seminar discussions, which model and inculcate in students democratic behavior. This discourse is an antidote to the grandstanding in today’s media and social media.

The teacher is less an expert in specific writers and more a role model for intellectual curiosity, asking probing questions, offering critical analyses and seeking deeper understanding. In an idealized Socratic fashion, these discussions require listening at length and speaking briefly and, most important, being willing to go where the argument leads.

Parents who are paying for college might question the value of spending $80,000 a year so that their son or daughter can read Plato, Hobbes and Thoreau instead of studying molecular biology or machine learning. But discussing life’s big value questions in seminars gives students personal engagement with professors that can never be reproduced in large lecture halls. Discussions among students on their deepest thoughts cultivates curiosity and empathy, and forges bonds of friendship important for citizenship and fulfilling lives.

Although we like to set ourselves apart from the past by appeals to modernity, the fundamental questions that we find ourselves asking are not always modern, and the latest answer is not always right. But how would you know how to think beyond the readily presented check boxes if you haven’t done the work of laying things out and putting them back together for yourself?

War was no less a concern for Thucydides, Tacitus and Thoreau than it is today. Discussing Great Books allows students to gain distance from the daily noise and allows their reason to roam free among principles and foundations rather than becoming absorbed in contemporary events. Our biggest problems are often best addressed not by leaning in but by stepping away to reflect on enduring perspectives.

Liberal arts education is not value neutral. That is why it is indispensable today. Freedom of thought, critical reasoning, empathy for others and respectful disagreement are paramount for a flourishing democratic society. Without them, we get the unreasoned condemnations so pervasive in today’s malignant public discourse. With them, we have a hope of furthering the shared governance that is vital to America’s pluralistic society.

Ezekiel Emanuel and Harun Küçük are on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Emanuel is a professor and the vice provost for global initiatives and Dr. Küçük is an associate professor of the history and sociology of science.

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• Society and culture
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Inclusive Britain second update report – May 2024

Updated 24 May 2024

© Crown copyright 2024

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected] .

Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.

This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inclusive-britain-update-report/inclusive-britain-second-update-report-may-2024

Ministerial foreword

Our United Kingdom is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-faith success story. 

That story is written and rewritten from generation to generation. 

The chapter we write together as a nation today is shaped by the rich plurality of perspectives and traditions comfortable and at home in modern Britain.

It is that range of perspectives, different ways of understanding the same problems, which will help us address many of the long-term challenges the UK faces.

I am unsurprised that polling shows that the vast majority of British people from ethnic minority backgrounds feel that the UK is a better place to live as a minority than many other major western democracies including the USA, Germany, and France. 

The patriotic instinct of ethnic minorities who say this is the best country to live in reveals that our national identity transcends difference without a painful memory of segregationist laws, an ethnic definition of citizenship, or constitutional battles over religious dress. 

This does not mean that ethnic minorities like me should be more ‘grateful’ to be in the UK than anyone else. 

It is also not to say that this is a society which has eliminated hate towards ethnic minorities. Demonstrations on our streets this year and last have seen the ugly spectre of antisemitism rear its head. 

Pride in our national identity rests on not only a past we can all relate to, and a culture we can celebrate today, but on the confidence that we share a future in which opportunity is open to all.

That’s what underpinned Inclusive Britain – our response to the work of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, chaired by the celebrated educationalist Lord Sewell CBE.

It is a cross-government plan which advances opportunity while tackling unfair ethnic disparities across education, employment, health and the justice system. Every action is based on targeting real-world problems with real-world solutions. 

We’ve made tangible progress since the first publication 2 years ago, completing 62 out of the 74 actions to date. 

Beyond the achievements we outlined in our update to Parliament last April, we’ve published findings from the independent Inclusion at Work Panel which address equality, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace, where ethnic minorities can often feel unheard or unfairly treated.

We’ve announced a package of support for ethnic minority mothers who, like me, have given birth using the NHS, because they have a higher risk of poor outcomes. We have deployed £50 million of funding for researchers to find new, evidence-based ways to tackle maternal health disparities, an issue I care passionately about and is often misunderstood. 

We’re seeing many of the stubborn, most entrenched disparities in our society narrowing. 

Entry into university has increased for every single ethnic group since 2010, with ethnic minority pupils achieving higher acceptance rates than their white peers. 

In our NHS, workforce diversity is higher than ever before, with nearly 25% of staff from an ethnic minority background.

In our justice system and our police forces, we now have the highest proportion of ethnic minority officers, judges, and magistrates since records began.       

The state can always learn from the individuals who work so hard to be less dependent on it. 

The work ethic and impatience of many of the new arrivals to the UK have resulted in better lives for immigrants and their children over the ages. 

That determination and hunger is something we in government must learn from. We should not use progress or a positive record to reduce our efforts to promote opportunity. 

That’s why we are committed to doubling down on our efforts to complete the remaining actions in Inclusive Britain, while embarking on a wider project to understand the role of trust in our public institutions and its effect on ethnic disparities, too. The events of the last year, especially the conflict in Gaza, have shown that we must do more to build community cohesion and nurture a sense of belonging and pride for everyone who calls the UK home. 

The Inclusive Britain action plan may be all but delivered. Our work, however, cannot end here. 

My own story, as someone who is, to all intents and purposes, a first-generation immigrant – and now the Government’s Minister for Women and Equalities – has instilled in me a deep commitment: to ensure that every community, in every corner of the UK, can be confident they have a fair shot at success and an equal opportunity to realise their full potential.

Kemi Badenoch  

Minister for Women and Equalities

Introduction

On 17 March 2022, we published Inclusive Britain, our response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (the Sewell Commission) which sets out a comprehensive action plan to tackle persistent, unfair ethnic disparities, promote unity and build a fairer Britain for all. It committed the government to 74 tailored actions to tackle long-standing disparities in education, health, criminal justice and in the workplace.

We undertook to report back to Parliament on our progress in delivering this action plan. In April 2023 we published our first update report to Parliament, at which point we had successfully delivered 32 of the 74 actions. 

One year on, we have now delivered 62 of the actions. We continue to strive to complete the remaining 12 actions, some of which are longer-term commitments. 

This report summarises the progress we have made since we published Inclusive Britain and gives examples of how that progress is making a real difference to people’s lives.

The report follows the structure of Inclusive Britain, and highlights progress made under the 3 main themes:

trust and fairness - building confidence in our institutions and in British meritocracy

opportunity and agency - promoting equality of opportunity, encouraging aspiration and empowering individuals 

inclusion - encouraging and instilling a sense of belonging to a multi-ethnic UK which celebrates its differences while embracing the values which unite us all

Annex A summarises the progress we have made against all 74 actions.

1. Trust and fairness

Inclusive Britain concluded that too many people from ethnic minority backgrounds feel that the ‘system’ is not on their side. To build trust, it found that people must be confident they will be treated fairly and not discriminated against on the basis of their ethnicity.

The ‘Trust and Fairness’ chapter in Inclusive Britain includes a number of important commitments to tackle racism and discrimination and, in particular, harmful online abuse. It also includes actions to address concerns about use of police powers such as stop and search, to promote fairer pay and to tackle long-standing health disparities.

The first Inclusive Britain update report highlighted the substantive progress made in these areas. This included introducing our groundbreaking Online Safety Bill (now the Online Safety Act 2023), stopping use of the term ‘BAME’ in all government communications, developing a framework to measure online abuse, improving the stop and search process, and publishing new guidance to help employers rigorously measure and address any ethnicity pay gaps within their workforce. 

We have continued this progress in the last 12 months, with key activity summarised below.

Report responsibly on race

As Inclusive Britain made clear, reporting on news and issues around ethnic minorities needs to be done sensitively, accurately and responsibly in order to maintain trust of communities, as well as the rest of civil society and public institutions.

Inclusive Britain included a commitment to better understand the language and terminology with which people from different ethnic backgrounds identify in order to encourage responsible reporting of issues of race and ethnicity (action 7).  Last year, the Cabinet Office Equality Hub published alongside the update report qualitative research commissioned from Basis Social into the use of language and terminology relating to people’s ethnic identity . 

The Equality Hub also asked IFF Research to undertake a rapid review of the way race and ethnicity data is reported in the media in relation to particular ethnic disparities. IFF used the government’s Standards for Ethnicity Data , developed under action 6, to inform its work. Key findings include: 

Most of the 32 media articles that were sampled reported race and ethnicity statistics correctly. In the instances that data was incorrect, this appeared to be a genuine error.

These articles did not always provide the underlying detail of the data set, which could provide important context. 

The articles frequently included links to the relevant research or published statistics, but did not usually provide detail on their methodology and limitations. 

The articles often provided anecdotes, opinions and quotes interspersed with statistical data. This could lead to the impression that the data supported those statements, even when that was not the case.

Instances of accurate reporting were found when the organisation publishing the data provided an accessible summary of research findings, methodology and limitations, for example in the accompanying press release. 

IFF Research expects to publish a summary of these findings in due course.

To improve the way government statistics are communicated to the public and help inform media reporting, the Equality Hub will build on the government’s Standards for Ethnicity Data to provide guidance for government departments and public bodies on communicating ethnicity data and analysis in press releases and media summaries. This will help improve consistency and accessibility when such findings are published, and facilitate the accurate reporting of complex statistics.  

Improve understanding of migration outcomes

The Sewell Commission highlighted that migration patterns may have shaped ethnic disparities by influencing the way in which different groups have integrated into communities, accessed jobs and where they reside in the UK among other things. In order to improve our understanding of the role of immigration in potentially driving disparities, Inclusive Britain committed us to launching a new, cross-government analytical programme to identify and fill gaps in our evidence and understanding in relation to social mobility, skill and role mismatching and health outcomes of immigrants (action 9). 

As part of the first update report, the Equality Hub published an analysis (in partnership with the University of Essex) of the outcomes in the labour market for ethnic minorities by immigrant generation status . The paper explored how being a first- or second-generation migrant impacts the likelihood of being unemployed or economically inactive across different ethnic groups.

Since then, our focus has been on 3 other areas of research:

occupation and education mismatch

social mobility

reviewing the so-called ‘healthy migrant effect’ 

The combined findings of these areas of research demonstrate that it is highly likely that migration does interact with current ethnic disparities in this country. In particular, migrant outcomes appear to strongly link to ethnic disparities via the barriers faced by first-generation migrants, and where these barriers are subsequently passed on to second-generation migrants.

Following this report, the Equality Hub expects to publish a summary of the results from all 4 strands of analytical work under this action. We will also consider the findings and how they impact policy-making in these areas.

Strengthening bonds of trust between people and their police force

Inclusive Britain acknowledged the need to improve confidence in policing, particularly among the black ethnic group. It committed the Home Office and policing partners to develop a new national framework for how police powers, such as stop and search and use of force, can be scrutinised at a local level (action 10). 

In August, the Home Office published a draft of the framework (‘Community Scrutiny Framework: National Guidance for Community Scrutiny Panels’) for consultation. The framework recommends national guidance standards for the effective community scrutiny of local public-police interactions, by Community Scrutiny Panels (CSPs), so that communities and the police are better engaged in understanding each other. 

The draft framework also considers the sharing of body-worn video (BWV), a further commitment in Inclusive Britain (action 13). BWV is a further means of ensuring that police powers are used correctly and sharing footage with local scrutiny panels will help to improve communities’ understanding of legitimate police use of powers such as stop and search, while at the same time helping police forces to identify and address poor practice. 

The consultation on the framework concluded last October and the government’s response will be published in due course. The framework will also be amended in light of this exercise and will be published in due course.  

Improve stop and search

Inclusive Britain acknowledged the concerns that some ethnic minority groups are disproportionately subject to stop and search. In the year ending March 2023, people from a black ethnic group were searched at a rate 4.1 times higher than that of those from a white ethnic group across England and Wales. This is down from 4.8 times higher in the previous year, and down from 5.5 times higher in the year ending March 2021. People from the Asian or Asian British group were searched at a rate 1.4 times higher than their white peers, down from 1.8 times higher in the year ending March 2021.  

Inclusive Britain committed to further work to understand why these disparities persist. This includes improving the way stop and search data is reported (action 14). 

In the last update report we highlighted the additional stop and search data that the Home Office had published in September 2022, including an interactive tool that allows much clearer presentation of stop and search data and comparison between Police Force Areas (PFAs). For the latest annual bulletin (year ending March 2023), published in September, the Home Office included a range of new data including:

stop and search outcomes by ethnicity by PFA

better signposting to PFA data to enable users to compare data more easily - for example between stop and search rates and arrest rates after stop and searches

ethnicity (and age, and sex) population data for PFAs to add further context to the stop and search rates

In March last year, the Home Office shared information packs with individual forces containing summaries of the rates and disparities at which each ethnic group is searched in each PFA, and showing where the force ranks compared with neighbouring forces, most similar forces and all other forces across England and Wales.

Future publications of stop and search statistics by the Home Office will continue to explore further ways to better contextualise data on ethnic disparity such as expanding the commentary to include analysis of object “find rate” by ethnic group. This data may provide greater understanding of the effectiveness and use of stop and search powers.

Under action 15, we also committed to working with policing partners to consider a range of metrics for stop and search rates at PFA level in order to identify and, where necessary, challenge disparities at a local level. Our view is that the best way of ensuring this is for local scrutiny panels to consider the annual stop and search data for their particular force and, where necessary, challenge any disparities at a PFA-level. This will be reflected in the draft national framework for how policing powers can be scrutinised at a local level (see action 10 above).  

Taken together, these measures will allow for much more meaningful interrogation of the stop and search data - both at a national and local level - and ensure that police forces are held to account for their use of stop and search powers and for any ethnic disparities in their usage.

Identify and tackle health disparities

The government is committed to delivering its levelling up mission to narrow the gap in Healthy Life Expectancy by 2030 and increase Healthy Life Expectancy by 5 years by 2035. In January 2023, we announced plans to develop and publish a new Major Conditions Strategy which will explore how we can tackle the key drivers of ill-health in England (action 19). 

The DHSC published its initial report, Major Conditions Strategy: Case for change and our strategic framework , in August 2023 which set out what it has learned so far, and shared what it plans to focus on next during the development of the final strategy. 

The report acknowledged that whilst overall life expectancy was higher among ethnic minority groups than white and mixed groups, there remain significant other health differences between ethnic groups. For instance, diabetes prevalence is 3 to 5 times higher in ethnic minority groups compared to the white British population. The initial report states that the Major Conditions Strategy will consider disparities from multiple angles including ethnicity, geography, deprivation and sex to improve health outcomes. 

Inclusive Britain also highlighted the role of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities in leading cross-government work to address the causes of health disparities (action 21) which often disproportionately affect certain ethnic groups.  We know that factors such as eating healthier foods, drinking alcohol in moderation and quitting smoking are some of the best ways to tackle health disparities. 

To address this, the DHSC has taken a number of measures including restricting the placement of less healthy food in shops, provided the largest ever single increase in drug and alcohol treatment and recovery funding in England, and are now investing an additional £70 million per year in local Stop Smoking Services to help people to quit smoking.

Another major initiative is our 10-year plan, ‘From Harm to Hope’, to cut crime and save lives by reducing the supply and demand for drugs and delivering a high-quality treatment and recovery system. As part of this we are investing an additional £780 million over 3 years to produce a world-class treatment and recovery system to reduce drug and alcohol-related harms.

Review potential racial bias in medical devices 

In February 2022, the then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care appointed Professor Dame Margaret Whitehead, professor of public health at the University of Liverpool, and a panel of experts to conduct a review into the extent and impact of potential ethnic and other unfair biases in the design and use of medical devices. This followed concerns raised about the way medical devices and technologies are designed and used, and the impact of ethnic background on a patient’s diagnosis and treatment. For example, the review considered concerns about the use of pulse oximeters, and in particular the accuracy of readings for those with darker skin tones or different skin pigmentation. 

The review examined 3 types of medical devices that may be particularly prone to bias:  

optical medical devices, including pulse oximeters

artificial intelligence-assisted medical devices 

polygenic risk scores

The panel reported in March 2024 concluding that there is a risk for bias across the medical device lifecycle - from conception and development all the way through to deployment and use of devices in the NHS and the home - and made a number of recommendations. They concluded that such bias often arose from misguided but well-intentioned reasons, rather than being intentionally discriminatory.

The government response to the review, which was published simultaneously, welcomes the report and endorses its main argument that, unless appropriate actions are taken, biases can occur throughout the entire medical device life cycle. The response outlines what is being done to address each of the report’s 18 recommendations.

Many of the report’s recommendations align with or build upon ongoing or planned work across government, including improving data in the NHS through the Data saves lives: reshaping health and social care with data policy, and improving participation of ethnic minorities in clinical research studies (see below). The report also aligns with recommendations made in the ‘ First do no harm ’ report of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review and the resulting government work. 

The first ever Medical Technology Strategy , published in February 2023, sets out a range of actions to make sure the health and care system can reliably access safe, effective and innovative medical technologies to deliver the best outcomes for patients. This includes action to ensure medical devices are safe and clinically effective for all, regardless of ethnicity, sex, or any other attribute.

Identify the cause of maternal health disparities

One of the more significant health disparities is the poorer outcomes for mothers and babies from black, Asian and mixed ethnic groups and those living in the most deprived areas of the country. The latest data shows that black women are 2.8 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women and we recognise that more needs to be done to address these disparities. The Maternity Disparities Taskforce, co-chaired by the Minister for Women, Mental Health and Women’s Health Strategy and NHS England’s National Maternity Lead for Equality, continues to bring together experts from across the health service, government and the voluntary sector. The Taskforce explores and considers evidence-based interventions to tackle maternal disparities and are producing a pre-pregnancy resource for ethnic minority women and those living in the most deprived areas. The resource will support women to make informed choices about their health and wellbeing prior to pregnancy. 

The Taskforce met again in September 2023 and January 2024 to discuss ongoing work to tackle negative disparities and the successful implementation of the guidance for local maternity systems, [footnote 1] which has now been implemented in every NHS England Local Maternity and Neonatal System.

Alongside this, the Secretary of State for Health and Social care announced in January that improving care before, during and after pregnancy is one of the government’s top priorities for implementing the Women’s Health Strategy in 2024. She announced the first NIHR challenge , backed by £50 million in funding, which will task researchers and policymakers with finding new ways to tackle maternity disparities. This funding call will bring together a diverse consortium, funding research and capacity building. The aim is to increase the evidence base to address maternity disparities, facilitating a multidisciplinary whole systems approach to address uncertainties across research, innovation and implementation.

In addition, the NIHR Policy Research Programme has invited applications for a single research project to assess whether the medical devices used during the pregnancy and neonatal period are contributing to the disparities in maternal and neonatal outcomes, and to understand how such devices might be adapted.

One of the criticisms of the government’s approach is that we are not listening to ethnic minority mothers about their experience of maternity services in England. This year, the Equality Hub has delivered a series of events with ethnic minority mothers and health care practitioners to better understand the barriers and drivers of confidence in maternal care services. The findings of this exercise will be used to seek ways to improve the experience for mothers in the future and ensure that the voices of mothers and practitioners are heard alongside policy development.

Encourage greater ethnic minority participation in clinical research and trials

Inclusive Britain committed to increasing ethnic minority representation in research projects and clinical trials as a way of building trust in specific health interventions, such as vaccination programmes, and to ensure the research’s integrity and relevance to the UK’s diverse population. The clinical research system, which is embedded across the NHS, can also help life science companies connect with broader and more diverse patient groups, attracting more research to the UK and ensuring new health interventions benefit everyone. 

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) funds research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), whose mission is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. NIHR is committed to widening access and participation of under-represented groups both in its own research and in the wider research landscape.

The NIHR Clinical Research Network supports patients, the public and health and care organisations across England to participate in high-quality research. In the 2023/24 financial year it allocated £6.4m minimum spend of its annual funding to Local Clinical Research Networks (LCRNs) to expand clinical and applied research to under-served communities with major health needs. As part of this work, 32 projects are focussed on improving accessibility to research for ethnic minority groups. 

Supporting the South Asian Biobank

The NIHR funded work with community groups ‘The Peel Project’ and ‘Women Accede’ to support community champions who have co-produced activities and events to raise awareness of health and care research opportunities at local mosque outreach events and community health fairs. 

The Peel Project was set up to provide support services to the community in Hull with an emphasis on youth and ethnic minority groups. Women Accede are a local community group focussing on women’s issues, especially those from ethnic minority backgrounds. These groups helped promote studies such as the ‘LOLIPOP 100k’ study, linked to the South Asian Biobank, which is recruiting a cohort of participants to investigate the mechanisms underlying heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity and other major medical problems over time. Thames Valley and South Midlands LCRN has been working with the Wycombe Islamic Society, the Karima Foundation and community champions to assist the LOLIPOP research in designing bespoke awareness materials to increase participation in the study amongst the Muslim community.

NIHR is also committed to improving the diversity of research volunteer registries. Research registries of public volunteers enable researchers to identify potential participants to invite to join their clinical trials and wider research. Activities were undertaken at a national and a community level to boost registration of people from ethnic minority groups onto the Vaccine Research Registry and the ‘Join Dementia Research’ registry. NIHR is planning to undertake targeted work to drive registration of under-served communities into ‘ Be Part of Research ’ when this service is publicly launched - expected by the autumn. As part of the launch campaign, NIHR will identify ethnically diverse areas for the placement of advertising, send texts from GPs, work with community engagement groups and ensure diverse case studies.

NIHR has continued to promote the INCLUDE Framework , a tool that helps researchers take action to consider which ethnic groups should be included in their research studies and what challenges there may be to making this possible. In addition, the NIHR has developed a number of learning resources directed towards researchers and research participants to encourage ethnic minority participation and is developing a Research Inclusion Learning Framework.

2. Opportunity and agency 

This theme in Inclusive Britain is about giving people equal access to opportunity and the chance to fulfil their potential. It is based on the commitment that no-one’s destiny should be determined by their race or background.

The Opportunity and Agency chapter included a number of actions aimed at giving children the best possible start in life, throughout their schooling and into higher education. It also included commitments to improve career choices, improve progression out of low pay, help ethnic minority entrepreneurs and tackle disparities in the criminal justice system.

The first Inclusive Britain update report highlighted a number of important actions that were delivered in the first year including publishing the Children’s Commissioner for England’s review into how public services can better understand the needs of children and families, measures to increase the number of ethnic minority children who are adopted, publishing an ambitious schools white paper to raise attainment levels, and sharing the findings of a pilot scheme designed to equip the next generation of ethnic minority entrepreneurs with the skills they need to succeed. 

Our progress over the last 12 months is summarised below.

Improve adoption rates for disadvantaged children

We are committed to increasing the number of ethnic minority children who are adopted (action 26). The percentage of harder to place children, such as those from ethnic minorities, waiting 18 months or more to be adopted has decreased from 86% in March 2021 to 80% in December 2023. [footnote 2] Since 2019, the DfE has funded a national recruitment campaign to find more adoptive parents. In the latest national adoption week (October 2023) the campaign included a particular focus on recruiting more ethnic minority adopters. 

The Black Adoption Project is a partnership between 4 Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) covering 24 London boroughs and a consultancy (Laurelle Brown) to improve opportunities and outcomes for black children. The project is progressing well with strong links being made to a range of organisations and community groups. RAAs are now starting to see more enquiries from prospective black adopters because of this work. 

RAA leaders have developed a strategy to influence all aspects of their work and the services they provide to adopters and children. The first phase of work will focus on: the experiences of black children who need adoption; the experiences of black families who wish to adopt; and the representation of black workers across RAAs. In the next phase of the project, Adopt London will pilot ways to improve the adoption system for black children and families, evaluate the impact of these changes and undertake more research into this issue.

DfE is also taking steps to improve the availability of ethnicity data about adoptions. For the first time, it will publish more detailed adoption data with ethnicity breakdowns as part of the headline statistics this summer. 

Enable better quality learning

Inclusive Britain committed the DfE and the RDU to investigate the strategies used by those multi-academy trusts who are most successful at bridging achievement gaps for different ethnic groups and raising overall life chances (action 30). 

This research was published in November . It sought to answer 3 main questions:

Where schools and trusts have closed attainment gaps between pupils from different ethnic groups, has this been the result of a deliberate strategy?

What practices have schools and trusts used to close attainment gaps and foster a sense of belonging for all pupils, including those from different ethnic groups?

Can we draw practical lessons about closing attainment gaps between pupils from different ethnic groups from the work of schools and trusts?

On the first question, the researchers found:

The trust and school leaders that participated in this research stated consistently that they did not use ethnicity as a factor to identify pupils who needed intervention to close attainment gaps, basing interventions instead on the educational needs of individual pupils.

Trust and school leaders described a range of practices, broader than focusing on attainment gaps, which related to building the ethos of a school and fostering a sense of belonging among its pupils. This included a deliberate focus on pupils’ ethnicity, as well as on their culture, religion, nationality, language and broader experiences linked to socio-economic status, immigration and mobility.

Trust and school leaders attributed the narrowing and closing of attainment gaps between ethnic groups to whole-school approaches and targeted, pupil-level interventions.

Trust and school leaders described 2 broad sets of practices to close attainment gaps. 

The first related specifically to initiatives such as:

having an ethos of high expectations for all pupils, coupled with swift identification of need and intervention to address barriers to learning;

strong systems for capturing and analysing pupil-level data, which they saw as vital to identifying and addressing gaps in and barriers to learning;

having agreed age-related expectations and a common assessment process to track the progress of individual pupils and identify who might need additional support; and

specific intervention programmes targeted at the educational needs of individual pupils, such as literacy and reading, oracy, and raising aspirations for life beyond school.

The second set of practices related to promoting a culture of inclusion and a sense of belonging between pupils and their schools. Examples of these practices included:

supportive leadership and staff – trust and school leaders described how they had sought to build leadership and staff teams that pupils from different cultures could relate to and feel supported by

celebrating cultural diversity – trust and school leaders described how they celebrated the cultural identities of staff and pupils and made these a core part of the life of the school

community engagement – trust and school leaders described proactive approaches to building strong relationships with parents and the wider community

pupil voice – trust and school leaders described approaches to strengthening pupil voice overall, identifying shared goals and experiences.

On the final question about practical lessons to close attainment gaps, the research found 3 broad points: 

There are practical lessons about how to narrow and close attainment gaps. These lessons are not specific to different ethnic groups, but rather they relate to the “basics” of effective school improvement.

There is not a universal, one-size-fits-all approach to these practices. Instead, trust and school leaders emphasised the importance of adapting these approaches to reflect the local context and the community served by a school. This requires engagement with pupils, parents/carers, staff and the wider community, and sensitivity in, for example, community engagement, pupil voice, and the celebration of cultural events and practices within school.

However, trust and school leaders suggested that using broad labels to describe pupil groups can be helpful when looking at the macro level and identifying potential disparities. They considered that a more nuanced and individual approach is needed when identifying and seeking to overcome pupils’ barriers to learning. They considered that this was important in making a reality of the ethos of high expectations for all pupils, and in avoiding negative stereotyping of pupils based on their ethnicity.

Building strong relationships with parents and local leaders to improve pupil outcomes

Trust and school leaders described the importance of building strong relationships with parents and the local community to understand pupil’s needs. For example, one of the schools noticed a drop-off in the performance of a group of Somali boys, which contrasted with the high performance of Somali girls in their school. Following conversations with religious and community leaders, the school was able to identify that boys were often given more freedom to go out than girls potentially leading to poorer attendance and concentration at school, and apply a more targeted programme of intervention and support to address their under-performance. 

School leaders also used similar approaches to building on parents’ aspirations for their children. This included conversations to avoid their expectations placing a limit on pupils’ aspirations (for example, where parents may have lower expectations of young women) and events to help parents to understand different pathways to further and higher education.

Improve advice for young people in police custody

At present, an individual in police custody has to ‘opt in’ and ask for the independent legal advice to which they are entitled. Inclusive Britain committed the Ministry of Justice to working with police forces that are rolling out an automatic ‘opt-in’ for children to receive free independent legal advice in police custody (action 40). 

In February 2022 the Presumption of Legal Advice (POLA) scheme was first rolled out by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), starting in Brixton and Wembley police stations. Since then, the scheme has been rolled out to all custody suites in London. Other police forces in England and Wales have since adopted the scheme, including Northumbria, Surrey, Sussex and Thames Valley.  

Work is ongoing to understand the impact of the scheme, particularly on uptake of legal advice and time spent in police custody, as well as the potential for national roll-out. 

In May 2023, the Nuffield Foundation also published new research examining the impact of legislation on detention and questioning of young suspects. This showed the number of children receiving legal advice has increased from 45% in 2009 to 80% across 2019 to 2021. [footnote 3]

Presumption of Legal Advice in the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS)

The MPS has rolled out POLA across all its custody suites in London and is continuing to engage with the scheme as part of its ‘Child First’ approach.

The uptake of legal advice across MPS custody suites remains at almost 100%. For Brixton and Wembley, this is an increase from 65% prior to POLA being first introduced in these police stations in February 2022.

To create opportunities for improved outcomes and to build upon this approach, MPS will now include an intervention by a police Inspector within the first hour of a child’s detention in custody. Currently this does not take place until 6 hours following the initial detention.

The intention of this intervention is to ensure that effective progress is made on a child’s case from the outset. The MPS hopes this will lead to more accurate and time sensitive investigations, and increased transparency and efficiency.

Increase the number of young ethnic minorities in apprenticeships

Inclusive Britain committed to increasing the number of people from an ethnic minority background participating in apprenticeship schemes (action 48). Over the past year, we have seen the number and proportion of apprenticeships started by people from a minority ethnic background increase. For the academic year 2022 to 2023, there were 51,110 ethnic minority starts (15.2% of total starts), compared to 50,400 (14.4%) in 2021 to 2022.

This academic year, we have also increased the number of schools the Apprenticeship Support and Knowledge (ASK) programme engages with that have high proportions of students from an ethnic minority background. The ASK programme, which is funded by the Department for Education (DfE), aims to support schools and colleges to increase awareness of apprenticeships, traineeships and technical qualifications. Since September 2023, the programme has funded 288 activities attended by more than 9,000 students in over 50 schools with a high proportion of ethnic minority pupils.  

The DfE has also published additional breakdowns on attainment by ethnicity and other characteristics . This increases transparency within our education system and will allow individuals to monitor trends over time.

Between January and March 2024, the Office for Students made over 80 funding awards to universities and colleges from the first 2 waves of the Degree Apprenticeship Development Fund . These training providers will use the funding to grow the overall number of degree apprenticeships as well as the range of apprenticeships available, and to widen participation to under-represented and disadvantaged groups, including through engagement with ethnic minority students.

Potential future earnings for students in higher and further education

Employment opportunities and earnings potential play an important role in enabling social mobility. In February 2023, the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) published research on the Labour market value of higher and further education qualifications . It found that:

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are disproportionately less likely to attend universities or study subjects associated with higher earnings when compared to their wealthier peers with similar grades.

Students with lower socio-economic status have less access to information about the earnings outcomes associated with specific courses.

Information about who is enrolling in a degree - where they’re from and their background - is important to accurately understand prospective student’s future earnings.  

Building on this work, the SMC will publish an accessible version of its Labour market value of higher and further education qualifications research in due course. The accessible report will set out insights into the potential earnings associated with various higher and further education qualifications, categorised by subject and institution. In 2025, the SMC will also publish a new set of benchmarks that looks at the extent to which universities are supporting social mobility. This will use recent data and take into account the differing academic requirements of more selective universities.

Building on the SMC’s research, [footnote 4] the Department for Education has commissioned the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) to develop a new way to accurately and fairly measure the impact that different higher education courses and providers have upon graduates’ future earnings. The IFS will develop options for how this earnings metric could be used in the Office for Students’ regulatory approach to incentivise providers to improve or withdraw courses that offer poor salary outcomes. Crucially, it will control for students’ backgrounds to avoid unfairly penalising providers that admit students from disadvantaged backgrounds who may achieve poorer salary outcomes in the future for reasons beyond a provider’s control, which may include geographic, financial and cultural factors.

3. Inclusion

Inclusive Britain acknowledged that not everyone shares a strong sense of belonging to the UK. Fostering a stronger sense of inclusion is therefore at the heart of the Inclusive Britain strategy. This means striving for a society based on shared values and a shared history.

The ‘Inclusion’ chapter in Inclusive Britain set out a number of commitments to foster this sense of inclusion, including policies to make schools more inclusive, improving diversity among the judiciary, making police forces more representative of the communities they serve, and promoting inclusion in the workplace.

The first Inclusive Britain update report revealed considerable progress in implementing these actions. This included working with the Equality and Human Rights Commission on guidance for schools on how to ensure hair or hairstyle policies are not unlawfully discriminatory, issuing new guidance for employers on how to use positive action in the workplace and publishing our Artificial Intelligence regulation white paper that addresses concerns about the potential for bias and discrimination in algorithmic decision-making.

We have continued to make excellent progress on the remaining actions over the last 12 months. This is summarised below.

Create a more inclusive history curriculum

A key part of the Inclusive Britain strategy is that all children should grow up feeling a strong sense of belonging to this country. They need to see themselves as integral parts of the rich, diverse mosaic of traditions, faiths and ethnicities which make up the UK today. We recognise there is good teaching in schools in this area, but also know more can be done to support the teaching of a high-quality, knowledge-rich and diverse history curriculum. 

To address this, the DfE appointed a model history curriculum expert panel in July 2022 to lead work on a new model history curriculum for Key Stages 1 to 3 (action 57). The Panel, chaired by Dr Michael Kandiah (Lecturer in Contemporary British History at King’s College London), has been working to develop a new model curriculum that will stand as an exemplar for a knowledge-rich, coherent approach to the teaching of history, and will cover the major contributions made by different groups that have made this country what it is today. Work on the model history curriculum continues to progress and it is due to be published in 2024.

The Government has also established Oak National Academy as an Arm’s Length Body which is strategically aligned but operationally independent from the Department for Education. Oak works with teachers across the country, giving them and their pupils access to high-quality digital curriculum resources which are free, optional and adaptable. As part of this, Oak has developed a history curriculum for primary and secondary history (Key Stages 1 to 4). Oak’s full curriculum packages and lesson resources for history will be available by autumn 2024. 

Reinforce impartiality in the public sector

Inclusive Britain committed to new guidance to civil servants promoting the values of tolerance and equality, particularly when engaging on issues relating to diversity and inclusion (action 62).

On 15 May we issued Guidance on Diversity and Inclusion and Impartiality for Civil Servants . The guidance reminds civil servants of their obligations under the Civil Service Code, and is designed to ensure that they retain the confidence of ministers and the public by upholding the Code’s values while carrying out their duties. It does so through helping civil servants to consider whether impartiality may be impacted in the delivery of diversity and inclusion activity and the steps they need to follow to maintain impartiality.

The guidance will help civil servants to ensure that all perspectives are discussed in an objective way and to avoid the promotion of partisan political views or presenting contested theories as fact. The guidance also sets out how civil servants can ensure impartiality in use of language and communications.

Alongside this, we announced the outcome of our comprehensive review on equality, diversion and inclusion (EDI) spend across the Civil Service. This included new guidance to enact greater control over EDI spend and activity across the Civil Service , providing assurance and alignment with government priorities. 

In particular, the guidance includes measures to support departments to: 

cease all external EDI spend in the Civil Service unless signed off and cleared by Ministers 

ensure overall EDI spend is commensurate with agreed organisational priorities 

ensure robust evaluation of any EDI activity undertaken 

Make police forces more representative of local communities

It remains important that police forces across England and Wales are representative of the local communities that they serve (actions 64 and 65). A key opportunity to deliver improvements to representation was provided by the Police Uplift Programme (PUP), which concluded in March 2023. The PUP was an opportunity to attract the best talent into our police forces, from all ethnic backgrounds, as part of this unprecedented recruitment drive.

From the outset, PUP communications were designed to show policing as an inclusive career that is open to people from all backgrounds. The Home Office included real officers in the campaign who represented local forces from across England and Wales giving a local focus to the national recruitment drive.

Police forces across England and Wales recruited 20,947 additional officers under the PUP and there are now more than 149,000 police officers in total in England and Wales, more than the previous peak before the PUP, in 2010. As a result of this recruitment drive, as at 31 March 2023 there were more ethnic minority officers (12,086, excluding white minorities) than ever before. This figure represents 8.3% of all officers, also a record figure, up from 6.9% in March 2019. 

Now that the PUP has concluded, the lessons learned and insights around effective activity to recruit a locally representative workforce, with an understanding of local areas and people, have been embedded in business as usual products and processes. This includes the Police Uplift Hub, a valuable online resource for all forces that contains learning, insights and best practice from the PUP recruitment campaign which is now being used by forces to support ongoing recruitment and retention activity.  

In 2023, a new Online Assessment Process (OAP) was also made permanent by the College of Policing, replacing previous assessment process for new recruits. This has led to an improvement in outcomes for ethnic minority candidates. 

Improve judicial diversity

Inclusive Britain included actions to increase diversity among the judiciary and the magistracy. These commitments included working with the Judicial Diversity Forum (JDF) [footnote 5] to increase the pool of applicants and ensure the very best talent is promoted through the professions and on to the bench (action 67) and launching a revised, more streamlined recruitment process for magistrates (action 68).

The latest judicial diversity statistics, published in July 2023, [footnote 6] showed the proportion of judges who identified as being from an ethnic minority background had increased from 7% in 2014 to 11% in 2023. 18% of new entrants to the judiciary in 2022 to 2023 were from an ethnic minority background, and ethnic minority candidates were recommended for appointment in Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) legal selection exercises in 2022 to 2023 in line with their representation in the eligible pool. [footnote 7]

The MoJ leads and coordinates the Pre-Application Judicial Educational (PAJE) programme, in collaboration with JDF partners, which supports lawyers from under-represented groups, including those from ethnic minority backgrounds, who are considering applying for a judicial appointment. Since the launch of PAJE in April 2019, it has supported 877 participants, 59% of which have been from an ethnic minority background. Overall, for all lawyer types, Asian and black PAJE participants have been shortlisted and appointed for judicial roles at higher rates than those who had not completed PAJE over the last 3 years.

The Targeted Outreach programme was re-launched in April 2023 to support improved outcomes for JAC target groups, including those from ethnic minority backgrounds. Of the 449 candidates on the programme, 60% are from an ethnic minority background (of which, black candidates make up 17% of candidates overall). As of March 2024, 31% of candidates that have been on the programme for at least 12 months and have made at least one application have been successfully recommended for appointment, resulting in a total of 104 recommendations reached by 86 candidates. 

The proportion of ethnic minority judges in the senior courts remains low and this will take longer to address.The Judicial Diversity and Inclusion Strategy is reviewed annually and commitments clarified for the year ahead.  Work on the following is planned or underway: 

targeted outreach to lawyers from sectors known to have greater diversity, such as the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, Crown Prosecution Service and Government Legal Departments

hosting interns from diverse backgrounds who have access to High Court and Court of Appeal judges in collaboration with Bridging the Bar

evaluation of all outreach activity to enable gaps and opportunities to be identified

The judicial diversity statistics show that as of 1 April 2023, 13% of all magistrates were from an ethnic minority background, a 5 percentage-point increase from 2014. In total, 24% of all magistrate applications submitted in 2022 to 2023 were from ethnic minority individuals.

Promote inclusion in the workplace

Action 69 in Inclusive Britain committed the government to establishing an independent Inclusion at Work Panel with a remit to develop and disseminate resources to help employers drive fairness in the workplace. Action 71 committed the government to using evidence from the Panel’s work to develop a new, voluntary ‘inclusion confident scheme’ to improve diversity and inclusion (‘D&I’) practice and progression in the workplace.

The Panel was appointed in June 2023, convening experts from the private, public, and third sectors and met a range of people with knowledge and interest in this topic. Drawing on gathered insights, and their existing expertise, the panellists established consensus around a set of shared principles, designed a high-level framework, and recommended an evidence tool. 

The Panel reported on 20 March and recommended that:

The government endorses a new framework which sets out criteria employers might apply to their D&I practice, for effectiveness and value for money

The government funds, and works with, a research partner to develop a digital tool similar to the Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘ Teaching and Learning Toolkit ’. This will allow all leaders and managers, in every sector, to assess the rigour, efficacy, and value for money of a range of D&I practices. It will also ‘nudge’ commercial or activist providers of interventions to evaluate and prove impact

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) explains and clarifies the legal status for employers in relation to D&I practice, with particular focus on the implication of recent rulings for HR policies and staff networks

The Panel did not recommend introducing a new Inclusion Confident Scheme at this stage for 2 reasons: 

The Panel assessed the range of existing similar or directly relevant schemes, and their efficacy. Many already cover the concept of inclusivity in some way. The Panel felt that introducing another accreditation or compliance scheme risks duplication and perverse incentives.

The Panel felt that the very broad and subjective definitions of ‘inclusion’ make a precise and useful scheme near impossible. This is because definitions of diversity, equity and inclusion are contested and can even be – legitimately – mutually exclusive. 

The government is considering the most effective way to take the recommendations forward and will provide an official response in due course. We will also draw on relevant findings in this report as part of the HM Treasury review of EDI spending across government. 

4. Next steps 

We remain committed to an Inclusive Britain, one where everyone can reach their full potential, no matter where they come from or what they look like. 

This work does not stop here. We will continue to deliver the remaining Inclusive Britain actions including:

launching the new, national framework for how the use of police powers – including stop and search and use of force – are scrutinised at a local level

publishing our Major Conditions Strategy setting out how we can tackle the key drivers of ill-health in England

continuing our work to address the causes of maternal health disparities for ethnic minority women

developing a new set of benchmarks for measuring social mobility at universities

launching our model history curriculum that will set out a knowledge-rich, coherent approach to the teaching of history, and will cover the major contributions made by different groups that have made this country what it is today

developing a digital tool to allow all leaders and managers, in every sector, to assess the rigour, efficacy, and value for money of a range of D&I practices

Alongside this, we will continue our work to improve the collection and publication of data on ethnicity, to tackle entrenched ethnic disparities and deliver on the overarching aims of Inclusive Britain. This includes our ongoing research to understand why certain ethnic minority groups have lower levels of trust in key UK institutions.

Annex A: Progress by action 

To enable EHRC to increase its vital work in tackling race discrimination and disadvantage, the Cabinet Office will invest in EHRC enforcement activity to challenge race discrimination through investigations and supporting individual cases.

To improve good practice in equality law across Britain, EHRC will also support a wider range of organisations to comply with equality law and develop policies and processes that support equality of opportunity for all. 

Progress update

The Cabinet Office continues to fund the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC’s) statutorily independent work through its annual budget.

The EHRC launched a landmark Race Legal Support Fund designed to tackle race discrimination and help victims seek justice. Since they opened the fund in November 2021, the EHRC have supported 45 cases covering a wide variety of race discrimination issues across a range of private and public sector organisations. 

To clamp down on racist abuse online, DCMS and the Home Office will introduce the world-leading Online Safety Bill as soon as possible. Companies that fail to comply with their legal duties in the Bill could face fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their qualifying annual global turnover, or business disruption measures. 

The Online Safety Act received Royal Assent in October 2023. Our aim is to have the regime operational as soon as possible and we are working closely with Ofcom to ensure this.    

Under the Act, platforms will have to put in place systems and processes to reduce the likelihood of exposing users to illegal content or activity and will have to quickly remove illegal content once alerted to its presence. They will not be allowed to promote such content in their algorithms. The Act also protects children from harmful or inappropriate content.

Ofcom will be taking a phased approach to implementation of the duties under the Act, and this is already underway. Ofcom have consulted on their draft Codes for illegal harms and the government expects these to be finalised by the end of 2024. Draft Codes for children’s safety duties will follow in Spring. These Codes will set out the steps companies can take to fulfil their duties.

To improve our understanding of online harms, RDU will engage with service providers, international organisations and experts to better measure and monitor online abuse. This programme of work will also consider how specific events, such as high-profile football matches, can act as instigators for online abuse. 

The Equality Hub led a programme of engagement with other government departments and external bodies and conducted a literature review on online abuse. These findings enabled RDU to develop a framework for measuring online abuse for use within government which was shared across government.

To improve online transparency, RDU will lead a review into online misinformation to better understand how different groups are accessing and interpreting information online. The review will provide a series of data and policy recommendations to strengthen the government’s understanding and ability to tackle online abuse. 

The Equality Hub undertook a literature review of misinformation to better understand how different groups are accessing and interpreting information online. The review found that:

ethnic minorities are more likely to use social media to receive information that their white peers, putting them at greater risk of misinformation

establishing clear messaging through trusted voices and via social media can help dispel misinformation

improving online media literacy can empower individuals to recognise misinformation and trusted online media sources

Our findings, alongside our recommendations, will be published in due course.

To communicate more effectively on racial issues and to avoid lumping together different ethnic minority groups, the government has stopped using the term ‘BAME’ in its own communications and will encourage other public sector bodies to do the same. 

We have stopped using the term ‘BAME’ in government communications and have taken a number of steps to embed this across the public sector.

To ensure more responsible and accurate reporting on race and ethnicity, the RDU will by the end of 2022 consult on new standards for government departments and other public bodies on how to record, understand and communicate ethnicity data. 

The Equality Hub consulted on a draft set of standards in summer 2022 and subsequently published the standards for ethnicity data in April 2023. The standards describe best practice when collecting, analysing and reporting ethnicity data.

Since publication, Equality Hub analysts have promoted the standards across government, receiving positive feedback. The Hub is also working with the Office for Statistics Regulation to review the use and impact of the new standards.

The RDU will lead work to:

engage with people from different ethnic groups to better understand the language and terminology that they identify with

review how media coverage of race and ethnicity issues impact the communities being covered

develop recommendations which will encourage responsible and accurate reporting on race issues by June 2023

Last year, alongside our update report, the Equality Hub published qualitative research commissioned from Basis Social into the use of language and terminology relating to people’s ethnic identity . 

We also commissioned IFF to undertake a rapid review to consider how race and ethnicity data is reported in the media.

To improve the presentation and to assist the interpretation of data on ethnic disparities, the RDU will consult by summer 2022 on a set of proposals to reform the Ethnicity facts and figures website, with a view to maintaining a smaller range of the most useful data sets. 

Work has continued on making the changes to Ethnicity facts and figures and streamlining the datasets in response to our consultation. The changes should improve the impact and utility of the website, help its users to understand the drivers and factors behind disparities, and minimise the risk of misinterpretation and incorrect conclusions being drawn. Main changes include:  

more timely updates without compromising the quality of the datasets

adding useful information and wider research relevant to the website pages that are considered of high interest by users

updating over 60 pages to provide a more holistic picture of each subject and allow users to identify patterns and similarities across these measures more efficiently

To identify and fill evidence gaps about the social mobility, skill and role mismatching and health outcomes of immigrants, the RDU will lead a new, cross-government analytical work programme with input from external experts in 2022. This will include analysis of the structural issues that immigrants may face in the UK, and understanding the lessons that the government has learned about policy making in this area. 

As part of the first update report, the Equality Hub published analysis (in partnership with the University of Essex) on the outcomes in the labour market for ethnic minorities by immigrant generation status .  Since then, our focus has been on 3 other areas of research:

testing the so-called ‘healthy migrant effect

The police need the powers to tackle crime – but there also needs to be effective local scrutiny of these powers in order to enhance trust and strengthen relations between police and communities. The Home Office, with policing partners including Police and Crime Commissioners, will develop by summer 2023 a new, national framework for how the use of police powers – including stop and search and use of force – are scrutinised at a local level. This framework will ensure that local scrutiny panels are independently-led, reflect the diversity of the areas they represent and give police officers the confidence to use their powers with the backing of local communities.

In August 2023 the Home Office launched a consultation seeking views on the new Community Scrutiny Framework, developed jointly with policing partners and civil society stakeholders. The consultation closed in October 2023 and we will publish our response in due course.

To tackle serious violent crime, which disproportionately affects some ethnic minority groups, the Home Office is bringing into force the Serious Violence Duty which will require local authorities, the police, criminal justice agencies, health authorities and others to work together to understand why violent crime is taking place in their area, and then to formulate and implement a strategy for tackling these drivers of serious violence. 

Since the Serious Violence Duty came into force on 31 January 2023, local partners have completed and submitted their strategies for reducing and preventing violence to the Home Office, who are reviewing how the new duty has been working in practice. Based on the findings of this review, the Home Office will publish updated statutory guidance later this year.

To protect the public and police officers and to give communities confidence that they are being policed fairly, the Home Office will support the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council by autumn 2024 to review and deliver any necessary improvements to police officer training in de-escalation skills and conflict management in everyday police-citizen encounters, such as use of stop and search and use of force powers. 

The new College of Policing Public and Personal Safety Training Curriculum, including de-escalation and communication skills and associated training products, has been made available to all forces since 1 April 2023 and is providing nationally consistent standards of training and delivery.

To improve transparency and promote uptake, the Home Office will identify and seek to remove unnecessary barriers that prevent increased use of Body Worn Video (BWV) and will encourage policing bodies to share guidance and best practice on the use of BWV.

The Home Office, with policing partners, will also explore how best to facilitate the sharing of BWV footage with local scrutiny panels, in order to improve the scrutiny of police decision-making and improve the understanding of legitimate police use of powers such as stop and search. This will feed in to the new framework for scrutinising use of police powers that will be developed by summer 2023.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council updated guidance on the use of Body Worn Video in October 2022. 

In autumn 2023 the Home Office consulted on a  draft Community Scrutiny Framework which included guidance on how scrutiny panels can use BWV for examining use and increasing understanding of police powers. The Home Office will publish the government’s response to the consultation in due course. 

To give greater clarity and context to stop and search data, and reassure the public about its use, the RDU will work with the Home Office, Office for Statistics Regulation and ONS to improve the way this data is reported and to enable more accurate comparisons to be made between different police force areas. 

The last 2 annual bulletins on police stop and search data in England and Wales (published in October 2022 and September 2023) have included a significant amount of new data and an interactive data tool that gives much clearer presentation of stop and search data and allows easier comparison between police force areas.

Since the year ending March 2021, new data collected by the Home Office includes detailed location information and the collection of the age and sex of persons searched. Subsequent publications have therefore included additional analysis of stop and search hotspot areas and further analysis of stop and search by protected characteristics, compared with population distributions.

The Home Office and RDU will work with policing partners and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners to consider a range of metrics for stop and search rates in order to identify and, where necessary, challenge disparities at police force area level. To be clear, a higher rate should not automatically be regarded as a problem, but the reasons should be transparent and explicable to local communities. 

Home Office (HO) will continue to explore further ad-hoc analysis to help contextualise stop and search. 

In autumn 2023 the Home Office consulted on a draft Community Scrutiny Framework which included additional guidance on how panels can use data, such as stop and search rates, to challenge disparities at police force area level. The Home Office will publish their response in due course.

We will address the challenges with ethnicity pay gap reporting to support employers who want to demonstrate and drive greater fairness in the workplace.

The Department for Business, Energy  and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) will publish guidance to employers on voluntary ethnicity pay reporting in summer 2022. This guidance, which will include case studies of those companies who are already reporting, will give employers the tools to understand and tackle pay gaps within their organisations and build trust with employees. 

In April 2023 the Equality Hub published new guidance for employers to help them collect their employees’ ethnicity data, make ethnicity pay calculations, analyse and understand the results and consider evidence-based actions to address any identified disparities.

To close the gap in pay between different ethnic groups working within NHS England, we will commission a new Ethnicity Pay Gap research project. The project will consider the scale and causes of the ethnicity pay gap across the NHS and produce actionable recommendations on how to reduce it.

The NHS is committed to eliminating pay gaps relating to race, disability and sex. 

In June 2023, NHS England published its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion improvement plan for the NHS workforce. This requires employers across the NHS to take action to ensure year on year reductions in pay gaps. 

NHS boards have been asked to track, monitor and put in place improvement plans to tackle pay gaps. Reflecting the maturity of current data sets, plans should be in place for sex and race in 2024, disability by 2025 and other protected characteristics by 2026.

As part of its new assessment framework, and to ensure that healthcare providers are held to account for why ethnic disparities exist in their workforce, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) will be assessing how providers are addressing the experiences, progression and disciplinary actions in respect of ethnic minority staff in their workforce. Once the CQC has evaluated how this new framework has been implemented over 2022 to 2023, the Department  of Health and Social Care (DHSC) will carefully consider whether the concerns raised in the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ report have been addressed.

The CQC continues to make good progress in developing its approach to workforce race equality in NHS Trusts.

The CQC have received the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) data from NHS England and are currently establishing how they can make the data available on their regulatory platform.  

In November 2023, the CQC completed its new workforce experience framework. Work has begun to create guidance and tools to support the operationalisation of the framework in NHS trusts. The interim evaluation for the new framework is expected in summer 2024.

To reduce the gap in health outcomes and tackle current health disparities, DHSC will publish a new strategy in a health disparities white paper for England later in 2022. 

The DHSC published its initial report Major Conditions Strategy: Case for change and our strategic framework in August 2023 which set out what it has learned so far, and shared what it plans to focus on next during the development of the final strategy. The report identified the importance of tackling disparities to improve health outcomes.

To address concerns about the way medical devices and technologies are designed and used, and their impact on ethnic minority patients’ diagnosis and treatment, the Department for Health and Social Care will consider carefully the findings of Professor Dame Margaret Whitehead’s review when this reports in 2023.

In March 2024 the independent review into Equity in Medical Devices was published making 18 recommendations. The government’s response was published alongside the independent review.

To improve life expectancy across all groups and to reduce health inequalities, DHSC established the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities in October 2021. The OHID is leading cross-government work to address the causes of health inequalities (such as deprivation, tobacco, alcohol, diet and physical inactivity) which often disproportionately affect certain ethnic groups, and on the health disparities white paper. OHID’s mission is to improve and level up the health of the nation.

OHID continues to focus on supporting people to live healthier lives, helping the NHS and social care to provide the best treatment and care for patients and tackling health disparities. Initiatives over the last year include:

the largest ever single increase in drug and alcohol treatment and recovery funding in England

rolling out targeted lung cancer screening to those who are at high risk of developing the disease

investing around £300m into the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme in 75 local authorities in England with high levels of deprivation

investing £50 million in research to tackle health disparities in local areas and improve health outcomes across the country.

To improve maternal health outcomes for ethnic minority women, DHSC, the new Office for Health Improvement and Disparities and NHS England and NHS Improvement will consider and support evidence-based interventions to address the current disparities in outcomes through the Maternity Disparities Taskforce. 

In January 2024, DHSC announced that National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) will invest £50 million to help researchers and policymakers to find new ways to tackle maternity disparities.

In January, NIHR also invited applications for new research to explore whether there are disparities in the medical devices used during pregnancy and the neonatal period, and to understand how any disparities could be addressed.

The Maternity Disparities Taskforce continues to coordinate work to improve maternal health outcomes for ethnic minority women, including developing a pre-pregnancy toolkit of resources targeted for ethnic minority women and those living in the most deprived areas.

To reduce the health disparities we have seen during the pandemic, the government will implement the package of recommendations from the Minister for Equalities’ final COVID-19 disparities report, published on 3 December 2021. 

The 17 recommendations from the final COVID-19 disparities report have been implemented or are ongoing commitments. This includes:

in December 2023, NHS England published the NHS Vaccination strategy that brings together all vaccination programmes, and builds on the lessons learned from the COVID-19 vaccination programme

in July 2023, we published the independent research and evaluation reports of the Community Champions and Community Vaccine Champions schemes, which outlines what worked in terms of building trust with local communities and boosting vaccine uptake among ethnic minority and other under-served groups

applying the lessons learned from the Covid-19 vaccination programme to promote uptake of the MMR vaccine among certain ethnic minority groups

To build confidence in future vaccination schemes and other health interventions, the National Institute for Health Research and the NHS Race and Health Observatory will seek to increase ethnic minority participation in clinical trials and research through methods such as promoting the INCLUDE Ethnicity Framework. 

In July 2023 the NIHR and NHS Race and Health Observatory published their statement of intent to work together on the shared ambition to reduce race and ethnic disparities in health and care research to help support the delivery of government and NHS commitments. 

Work within this partnership is identifying new ways to support researchers to take an inclusive approach to research design and delivery. Planned work includes mandating and financing inclusion strategies for all NIHR’s research programmes and infrastructure. This will ensure and monitor that research participants reflect the full diversity of the British populations to tackle health disparities. NIHR Clinical Research Network has also allocated £6.4m to expand clinical and applied research to under-served communities with major health needs in the 2023 to 2024 financial year. As part of this work, 32 projects are focused on improving accessibility to research for ethnic minority groups.

The Children’s Commissioner for England will commence a review in April 2022 to improve the way public services understand the needs of children and families, so every child has the best start in life and the opportunity to reach their full potential. 

The Children’s Commissioner’s findings were set out in Family and its protective effect: Part 1 of the Independent Family Review , published in September 2022, and A positive approach to parenting: Part 2 of the Independent Family Review , published in December 2022. 

An annex entitled Family contact in youth custody was published in March 2023.

To increase the number of ethnic minority children who are adopted, and to reduce the time they have to wait to be adopted, the DfE, together with regional adoption agencies, will work to launch a new drive to match children with adoptive families. DfE will work to ensure that potential adopters are not discouraged to apply because of their ethnicity. 

Regional adoption agencies (RAAs) leaders have developed a Diversity and Equity strategy to influence all aspects of the work and services they provide to adopters and children. The first phase of work will focus on: 

the experiences of black children who need adoption

the experiences of black families who wish to adopt

the representation of black workers across RAAs 

The DfE has continued to fund a national recruitment campaign to find more adoptive parents, with a particular focus on prospective ethnic minority parents.

In line with commitments in the adoption strategy, the DfE will start to modernise data collection and information sharing so that regional adoption agency leaders have access to data which can be used to speed up matching of ethnic minority children with new adoptive families. 

The DfE continues to work with Coram-I to analyse and publish data to improve performance across regional adoption agencies (RAAs). For example, following a detailed analysis of data on ethnic minority children waiting to be matched with new adoptive families, the DfE has agreed with RAA leaders to do a deep dive in Spring 2024 to look at their decision making. This will explore why some ethnic minority children have been waiting a long time to be matched and what changes can be made to RAA matching processes to improve this.

From January to March 2024, the published quarterly adoption performance data will include specific data on ethnic minority adopters and children in the headline measures. This will help focus attention on performance for these children and help drive improvement.

The DfE funded matching projects in London are making good progress and will be evaluated to help extend these approaches nationally. The DfE expects an interim evaluation in April 2024 with a fuller review available in May 2025.

To improve the existing evidence base, the RDU will work with the DfE and other stakeholders to develop and publish, in 2022, a strategy to improve the quality and availability of ethnicity data and evidence about looked after children and their routes out of care. 

The looked-after children data strategy was published in April 2023 and sets out what data is available, areas more data is required and the priority pieces of work that DfE will lead.

To drive up levels of attainment for under-performing ethnic groups, the DfE will carry out a programme of analysis in early 2022 to understand pupil attainment and investigate whether there are any specific findings and implications for different ethnic groups to tackle disparities.

In 2022, the DfE published 2 evidence notes on outcomes by ethnicity both in schools and after leaving school:

Outcomes by ethnicity in schools in England  

Post-16 education outcomes by ethnicity in England

The DfE and the RDU will investigate the strategies used by the multi-academy trusts who are most successful at bridging achievement gaps for different ethnic groups and raising overall life chances. The lessons learnt will be published in 2022 and will help drive up standards for all pupils.

In November 2023 we published the research on how schools narrow attainment gaps between ethnic groups . The study explored whether schools closing the ethnicity achievement gap have done so by focussing on ethnicity, or as a result of other approaches.

The DfE will investigate the publication of additional data on the academic performance of ethnic groups alongside other critical factors relating to social mobility and progress at school level, in post-18 education and employment after education by the end of 2022.

DfE continues to improve the available data on academic performance. Since October 2023, the DfE have published ethnic minority breakdowns:

at local authority level for Key Stage 4 and 16-18 destination measures 

for Key Stage 1 and phonics screening check published at local authority and regional level 

for multiplication tables check published at local authority and regional level 

at local authority level for Higher Education or training destination measures published 

for Key Stage 4 performance published at local authority level 

In July 2023, DfE also added ethnicity breakdowns at local authority level to the longer-term destinations measures, which show the success of schools and colleges in helping young people continue in education, apprenticeships or employment.

The DfE will bring forward an ambitious schools white paper in spring 2022 which will set out a long-term vision for a stronger school’s system. There will be a focus on improving the literacy and numeracy outcomes of those not meeting expected standards because this is one of the most important factors for children’s life chances. Disadvantaged pupils are overrepresented in the cohort not meeting expected standards; a core pillar of the white paper will be providing targeted support for those who need it most, especially the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. We will also look at ways we can target interventions in areas and schools of entrenched underperformance. 

The DfE published the schools white paper: Opportunity for all in March 2022.

In order to tackle disparities in educational outcomes for disadvantaged groups and to ensure that funding streams sufficiently address pupil needs, from September 2021 the DfE has required all schools to publish their strategies for spending money allocated for disadvantaged pupils through the pupil premium and the recovery premium. The funding grant conditions require these strategies to be built around well-evidenced approaches, such as classroom practice that has consistently demonstrated accelerated pupil progress. DfE will not have ethnicity-based funding streams unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Schools whose allocation for pupil premium is based on more than 5 eligible pupils are now required to publish an annual pupil premium strategy statement using a DfE template. The statement should explain how schools plan to spend the pupil premium, and demonstrate that their approach is informed by research evidence, including the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance.

To support schools to populate the template, DfE has developed examples for primary, secondary and special schools, last updated in October 2023.

To maximise the benefits of the pupil premium for disadvantaged pupils, DfE amended the pupil premium conditions of grant for the 2021 to 2022 academic year to require all schools to use their funding on evidence-based approaches. To the extent possible, DfE will investigate the scale of these benefits. 

From academic year 2022 to 2023, schools are required to use their pupil premium in line with the ’menu of approaches’ set by DfE to ensure that pupil premium and recovery premium are focused on effective approaches to raising the educational attainment of disadvantaged pupils. 

The menu of approaches can be found in the pupil premium guidance , published in February 2024. DfE continues to monitor and review the impact of the menu and other reforms.

The DfE will take action to improve the quality of education outside mainstream schools. These proposals are part of the forthcoming schools white paper and the SEND review and measures will be announced in 2022 to deliver significantly improved outcomes for children and young people at risk of being excluded from school or who are in Alternative Provision.

The government’s SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan was published in March 2023 and sets out how the DfE is taking forward reforms to improve alternative provision.

The DfE is currently working with 32 local authorities to test reforms of alternative provision, as part of our SEND and Alternative Provision Change Programme. Improvements made through these reforms will reach children and young people at risk of exclusion as well as those in alternative provision.

The DfE will consult on and publish new and improved guidance on behaviour in schools and on suspensions and permanent exclusions in 2022. Both sets of guidance will help local leaders identify and address any disparities that might exist within suspension and permanent exclusion rates.

In July 2022, the DfE published updated guidance on Behaviour in Schools and Suspension and Permanent Exclusion statutory guidance. These documents provide further clarity and support to head teachers on how to manage behaviour well so they can provide calm, safe and supportive environments which children and young people want to attend.

The DfE will launch a £30 million, 3-year programme to set up new SAFE (Support, Attend, Fulfil and Exceed) taskforces led by mainstream schools to deliver evidence-based interventions for those most at risk of becoming involved in serious violent crime. These will run in 10 serious violence hotspots from early 2022 targeted at young people at risk of dropping out of school: reducing truancy, improving behaviour and reducing the risk of NEET. 

School-led SAFE taskforces continue to be delivered in 10 areas most affected by serious youth violence, reaching over 2,100 children in the academic year 2022 to 2023. There are over 30 ongoing intervention projects covering mentoring, social skills, cognitive behavioural therapy.

Funded until March 2025, taskforces have invested in evidence-based interventions (such as mentoring and social skills training) that reach children early on, to re-engage them in their education and reduce their involvement in serious violence. 

The programme is being independently evaluated and a final report is due in 2026. 

In November 2023, the DfE published a guidance document for tackling serious youth violence through school-based interventions.

Action 38  

DfE will invest £15 million in a 2 year-programme to pilot the impact of co-locating full-time specialists in Alternative Provision in the top 22 serious violence hotspots. 

The Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforces (APST) programme has been extended until March 2025, testing the co-location of a diverse specialist workforce in pilot alternative-provision schools. All 22 APSTs have continued reaching children at risk of serious violence in areas most affected by serious youth violence. Over 4,000 children have been supported since the start of the programme, 79% of whom have Special Educational Needs. 

The programme is being independently evaluated and a final report is likely to be published in summer 2025.

To enable more grassroots, ethnic minority-led and specialist, voluntary or community sector organisations to provide rehabilitative services, the MoJ launched a new Stewardship Fund for 2021 to 2022. We will also provide advice and support to help these organisations bid for funding and following an evaluation of the impact of the stewardship fund we will assess if funding provision can be made on a longer-term basis. 

An evaluation of the Stewardship fund concluded that rather than run a separate fund, His Majesty’s Prisons and Probation Service should ensure that ethnic minority-led and specialist voluntary and community groups be supported through mainstream funding for more resilient provision.

In August 2023, HMPPS also launched the Innovations Grant Programme for the 2023 to 2025 period which will award around £500,00 to ethnic minority-specific projects.

To ensure that ethnic minorities and others receive the legal advice they need when in police custody, the MoJ will support a number of police forces to trial the effect of an automatic ‘opt-in’ to receive independent advice over 2022 and to build trust to see if this reduces disparities. This will assess whether better advice could lead to improved outcomes following arrest, such as better protection of vulnerable individuals, and increased take up of OOCDs.

The Presumption of Legal Advice (POLA) scheme automatically opts children into receiving the free independent legal advice in police custody to which they are entitled. 

The POLA scheme was first trialled by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), starting in Brixton and Wembley police stations in February 2022, and has now been rolled out to all custody suites in London. Other police forces in England and Wales have since adopted the scheme, including Northumbria Police, Surrey Police, Sussex Police and Thames Valley Police.

Work is continuing to understand the impact of the scheme, particularly on uptake of legal advice and time spent in police custody, as well as the potential for national roll-out.

The MoJ continues to support the POLA scheme and is collaborating closely with the forces outlined above to analyse any data being gathered.

To tackle the disproportionate criminalisation of young adults, who are often from ethnic minority and/or deprived backgrounds, we have begun to pilot a number of drug diversion schemes through Project ADDER which have the long-term potential to transform the way we tackle drug-related crime and engagement with youth at risk. We have extended Project ADDER to 8 additional local authority areas, as announced in July 2021. We will also explore ongoing current drug diversion schemes and share what works with other areas.

All 13 sites are continuing to deliver Project ADDER, including increased diversionary activity where appropriate. Between January 2021 and December 2023, Project ADDER enabled over 5,000 Organised Crime Group disruptions, over 35,000 arrests and over 5,000 drug trafficking charges to crack down on illegal drug supply and possession. Project ADDER has also supported almost 13,500 community resolutions for drug possession offences. This allows police officers to deal quickly and proportionately with certain lower-level and first-time offending, as part of an escalatory approach to sanctions. Up until March 2023, 4,966 people in drug treatment benefited from Project ADDER.

Project ADDER provides a range of tools for police and local authorities to help break cycles of addiction and related offending. Drug possession is illegal and for repeat offenders or those that refuse treatment, escalating sanctions including ultimately prosecution remains the right course of action.

An independent evaluation of Project ADDER’s first 2 years of activity has been undertaken and the Home Office will consider lessons learned. Building on programme impacts and learning, the Home Office is focusing on the legacy of Project ADDER, including via Combating Drugs Partnerships, part of the Government’s 10-year drugs strategy “From Harm to Hope”.

To ensure that more people using illegal drugs receive a relevant and proportionate consequence, the Home Office will support a number of police forces with £9 million in funding to introduce, or expand, out of court disposal schemes from summer 2022. 

The Out of Court Disposal (OOCD) expansion project ran between November 2023 and March 2024 in 5 police forces. The project aimed to broaden and bolster existing OOCD use by promoting increased enforcement and diversionary interventions for lower level drug possession offences. 

Drug misuse is illegal and we expect police to take a zero-tolerance approach to drug possession. Police have a range of powers to deal with these offences, including diversion which can include direction to treatment where most appropriate, but also sanctions for those who do not have a dependency. While we support diversion for initial offences, the police should use escalatory sanctions where people refuse to change their behaviour, and of course prosecution remains an option.

To empower pupils to make more informed choices about their studies, the DfE will ensure that Higher Education Institutions support disadvantaged students before they apply for university places. 

All higher education providers who want to charge students over the basic amount are required to rewrite their access and participation plans (APPs) to include greater focus on prior attainment and raising aspirations. Higher education providers will also have to work meaningfully with students before entry to higher education. All providers will have their revised plans in place for September 2025.

The DfE will work with UCAS and other sector groups to make available both advertised and actual entry requirements for courses, including historic entry grades so that disadvantaged students have the information they need to apply to university on a fair playing field.

In May UCAS launched the student-facing version of the Historic Entry Grades tool for the 2025 entry cycle. Following extensive feedback from education partners in 2023, the tool will help students understand the range of grades accepted by universities and colleges. The tool can be accessed on the UCAS website . In October 2023 UCAS also launched a new service to show apprenticeship opportunities listed alongside higher education courses, which means applicants are now able to discover and decide between their options all in one place for the first time.

UCAS also launched the Outreach Connection Service in 2024, a tool to match targeted outreach opportunities with disadvantaged students. This tool will help students explore the pathways available to them and better understand how to access outreach opportunities.

Higher education providers will help schools drive up standards so that disadvantaged students obtain better qualifications, have more options, and can choose an ambitious path that is right for them.

Following the refresh of the access and participation regime announced by the DfE in November 2021, work continues to ensure all higher education providers have their revised plans in place for September 2025. 

In September 2023, OfS also announced a funding competition worth £40m to boost the capacity and equality of opportunity within degree apprenticeship provision in higher education. Funding will be available for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years. As part of the bids for the funding, universities and colleges will need to show how their projects will create more opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Higher education providers will revise and resubmit their Access and Participation plans with a new focus on delivering real social mobility, ensuring students are able to make the right choices, accessing and succeeding on high quality courses, which are valued by employers and lead to good graduate employment.

Higher education providers drafted variations to their APPs  in May to July 2022 to be in place for September 2023.

To improve careers guidance for all pupils in state-funded secondary education, the Department for Education will extend the current statutory duty on schools to secure independent careers guidance to pupils throughout their secondary education.

Through the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Act 2022, DfE extended the legal requirement on state-funded secondary schools to secure independent careers guidance to all pupils throughout their secondary education. This legislation came into force in September 2022.

DfE careers statutory guidance for schools, last updated in January 2023, sets out what is required of schools. DfE has committed to further update the statutory guidance in spring 2024.

To increase the numbers of young ethnic minorities in apprenticeships, the DfE is, since November 2021, working with DWP and partner bodies and employers to engage directly with young people across the country to promote apprenticeships. This will use a range of mechanisms to attract more ethnic minority starts identified in the Commission’s report, such as events in schools with strong minority representation, relatable role models, employer testimonies, data on potential earnings and career progression. It will also explore the impact of factors that influence a young persons’ career choices.

The DfE has continued to work with employers and partner bodies to engage directly with young people across the country to promote apprenticeships. This academic year, the DfE has increased the number of schools the Apprenticeship Support and Knowledge programme engages with that have high proportions of students from an ethnic minority background. Since September 2023, the DfE has funded 288 activities attended by more than 9,000 students in over 50 schools with a high proportion of pupils from an ethnic minority background. 

Between January and March 2024 the Office for Students made 83 funding awards  to universities and colleges from the Degree Apprenticeship Development Fund.

In January DfE launched a major communications campaign Get the Jump: Skills for Life, a new integrated communication and engagement campaign that will target young people aged 14-19 about the full range of options available to them post 16 and post 18. It will help to tackle disparities by featuring a diverse range of young people in the campaign imagery, through case studies, influencers and through media targeting. The DfE will measure and publish participation levels of people from ethnic minorities, including a breakdown by age. This will allow us to track the progress of apprenticeship uptake by ethnic minorities and other under-represented groups in particular sectors.

The volume and proportion of apprenticeship starts by ethnic minority students has increased. For the academic year 2022 to 2023, there were 51,110 ethnic minority starts (15.2% of total starts), compared with 50,400 (14.4%) in 2021 to 2022. In March 2024, DfE published more detailed data on achievement rates for different types of apprenticeships broken down by ethnic groups. 

The Get the Jump campaign ended in December 2023. In January 2024, DfE launched the new ‘Skills for Life’ campaign to inspire more employers, adults and young people (aged 14 to 19) to take their first steps towards taking up government skills and technical education offers. The campaign features the success stories of a diverse range of young people through case studies, influencers and partnerships.

To help high-achieving, disadvantaged students to reach their full potential while studying in higher education, including degree courses or apprenticeships, the DfE will invest up to £75 million to deliver a state scholarship programme.

It is vitally important to support talented, disadvantaged students to succeed in higher education. We want to do this in the way that impacts those who will benefit most and achieve value for money. For example, the DfE has made £276 million of student premium funding available for the 2023 to 2024 academic year to support successful outcomes for disadvantaged students. The DfE will consider whether a scholarship scheme or other form of support will add significant value.

To clamp down on low quality courses, the Office for Students will set minimum acceptable standards for student outcomes and work to ensure universities rewrite their Access and Participation Plans to include more focused and transparent targets.

The OfS introduced revised conditions of registration for quality in 2022, ensuring that every student, whatever their background, has a fulfilling experience of higher education that enriches their lives and careers.

The OfS has implemented new minimum thresholds on student outcomes, covering course continuation and completion rates, and progression to graduate employment or further study. Depending on the context, the OfS may conduct quality assessments where these thresholds have not been met.

The government is consulting on means to incentivise high quality provision and ensure all students enter pathways on which they can excel and achieve the best possible outcomes, including exploring the case for low-level minimum eligibility requirements to access higher education student finance and the possible case for proportionate student number controls.

Our higher education policy statement and reform consultation , published in 2022, sought views on a range of issues including the case for low-level minimum eligibility requirements to access higher education student finance and proportionate student number controls. In July 2023, we published our government consultation response . It set out:

student number controls – the government wants to prioritise provision which offers the best outcomes for students, society and the economy – where the OfS identifies courses which are failing to deliver positive outcomes for students it can impose a range of sanctions, including recruitment limits 

minimum eligibility requirements – we will consider whether minimum eligibility requirements are needed if pockets of poor quality provision exist

To help disadvantaged students to choose the right courses for them and to boost their employment prospects, the Social Mobility Commission will seek to improve the information available to students about the labour market value of qualifications and, where possible, the impact of those qualifications on social mobility. 

As more people than ever proceed onto higher and further education, and are given more choices than before on which qualifications to study, it is crucial that prospective students are equipped with useful, candid information. For these reasons, the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) will  launch an accessible report to improve the information available to young people and those that influence them (teachers, parents, career advisers) on the labour market value of qualifications. 

To build our  understanding of how accessible universities are for people from all socio-economic backgrounds, SMC will also develop a new set of benchmarks for measuring social mobility at universities. The benchmarks will be published in 2025.

To unleash people’s potential, DWP will roll out a new in-work support offer to every Jobcentre from April 2022. The new programme will appoint 37 new specialist Progression Champions to deliver specialist support to Jobcentres and develop tailored progression plans to support working claimants to climb the career ladder.

This action was completed as part of the Inclusive Britain progress update in April 2023. 

The Government has introduced a voluntary In-Work progression offer for low paid Universal Credit claimants. This is being provided by work coaches and focuses on removing barriers to progression and providing advice, such as considering skills gaps and identifying training opportunities. This support is available for people looking for progression opportunities in their current role or support them to move into a new role. 

To deliver effective progression support to working claimants, Jobcentres are being supported by a network of 37 District Progression Leads across Great Britain. Progression Leads work with key partners, including local government, employers, and skills providers to identify and develop local progression opportunities. They also work with partners to address local barriers that limit progression such as childcare and transport.

BEIS will work with Code signatories and their trade associations to pilot data collection on the ethnicity of entrepreneurs applying for finance. This pilot will inform future options for data collection and follow-up actions designed to improve access to finance for ethnic minority entrepreneurs.

The Code partners – British Business Bank, UK Business Angels Association and the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association – successfully completed the first pilot study. The pilot showed a willingness of the industry to engage and provide ethnicity data on a voluntary basis.

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) published the Investing in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurs report in November 2023. The report aims to help to begin addressing the gap in comprehensive data on ethnic minority-led business. Using voluntary data from Code signatories, the report provides a baseline to measure progress and spark industry dialogue to promote increased representation and financing for ethnic minority entrepreneurs in the UK.  

DBT organised an Investing in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurs roundtable in November 2023 to discuss the findings of the report, which was hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Ethnic Minority Business Owners, in partnership with UKBAA and the BBB. The group discussed the findings of the report and considered what further steps could be taken to improve data collection on ethnicity.

To equip entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds with the skills they need to build successful businesses, BEIS is supporting HSBC to develop and launch its pilot for a competition-based, entrepreneur support programme in spring 2022. The programme, which will be run in partnership with UK universities, will equip entrepreneurs with the skills they need for years to come.

This action was completed as part of the Inclusive Britain progress update in April 2023 .

The findings of the pilot were shared with the Department for Business and Trade’s Ethnic Minority Business Group in summer 2023, to showcase the opportunities this pilot programme could provide for other institutions.

To help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history, and their own place within it, DfE will work with history curriculum experts, historians and school leaders to develop a Model History curriculum by 2024 that will stand as an exemplar for a knowledge-rich, coherent approach to the teaching of history.

The Model History Curriculum will support high-quality teaching and help teachers and schools to develop their own school curriculum fully using the flexibility and freedom of the history national curriculum and the breadth and depth of content it includes. The development of model knowledge-rich curriculums continues the path of reform the government started in 2010.

The new Model History Curriculum, which is on track for publication in 2024, will stand as an exemplar for a knowledge-rich, coherent approach to the teaching of history, and will cover the major contributions made by different groups to this country. 

The Department for Education has worked with the experts such as the lead drafter and expert panel to ensure that the Model History Curriculum will support high-quality teaching of history, and demonstrate strong curriculum design.

The DfE will actively seek out and signpost to schools suggested high-quality resources to support teaching all-year round on black history in readiness for Black History Month October 2022. This will help support schools to share the multiple, nuanced stories of the contributions made by different groups that have made this country the one it is today.  

DfE signposted resources to schools through a blog post on the Education Hub .

To equip teachers to make ethical decisions and deliver high-quality education, the DfE will embed new reforms to transform the training and support teachers and school leaders receive at every stage of their career. These measures include national roll-out of the new Early Career Framework and reformed National Professional Qualifications from September 2021.

This action was delivered through the Early Career Framework, introduced in September 2021, supplemented by a reformed suite of National Professional Qualifications.

The DfE will, in collaboration with the Equality Hub, work with leading schools to help them create a resource on pupil hairstyles and uniform policy. This will showcase best practice in uniform policy specific to the diversity of acceptable hairstyles in school to avoid unfair treatment of ethnic minority children whose hair type may not be like the majority. 

In October 2022, the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued guidance for schools on preventing hair discrimination.

This resource, which includes case studies, a decision-making tool, and a video explainer, is available on the EHRC website. DfE is using its regular engagement with schools to monitor how the guidance has been received and will develop additional support if needed in this area.

To help all pupils, but especially the most disadvantaged who are more likely to have fallen further behind in their studies during the pandemic, the DfE will invest almost £5 billion to support recovery for children and young people, with extra help for those who need it most. We are investing over £800 million across the next 3 academic years to fund 40 additional learning hours for 16 to 19 year olds – the equivalent of one extra hour per week in school or college. 

To help all pupils, but especially the most disadvantaged who are more likely to have fallen further behind in their studies during the pandemic, almost £5 billion was made available for education recovery. 

As this additional funding enters the final period of delivery, there are clear long-term benefits for our workforce and students through our extra teacher and staff training, tutoring revolution and extra time in school and colleges. This investment includes:

over £1 billion through the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), with nearly 5 million courses started on the programme since it began

£400 million on teacher training opportunities

nearly £2 billion of direct funding to schools so they can deliver evidence-based interventions based on pupil needs

over £800 million for additional hours in 16 to19 education 

From the academic year 2022 to 2023, students in 16 to19 education have been benefiting from an average 40 additional hours teaching and learning. The DfE estimates this will recover around 1 month’s learning per annum. This funding continues until the end of the academic year 2024 to 2025.

We will develop refreshed guidance on Civil Service diversity and inclusion, with clear advice on impartiality in language and practice.

The UK Civil Service supports the UK Government, Scottish Government and Welsh Government. We will work closely with the Northern Ireland Civil Service in delivering this action.

The DfE will encourage governing bodies to be more reflective of the school communities they serve and will recommend that schools collect and publish board diversity data at a local level. The DfE will also update the Further Education Governance Guide in spring 2022 to include how to remove barriers to representation, widen the pool of potential volunteers and promote inclusivity. 

The DfE published governance guidance for further education (FE) and sixth-form college corporations in June 2022. The guidance reinforces our advice on how best to recruit governors and senior leaders, the importance of diversity and inclusion, and reflects recent changes to statutory and funding requirements.

In April 2023, DfE also issued guidance to encourage schools to collect and publish online diversity data for governing board members.

To help police forces become more representative of their local communities, and benefit from local knowledge and experience, the Home Office, working with the College of Policing, will consider with individual forces measures to ensure that new recruits have a better understanding of the areas and the people they serve, including the feasibility of a local residency requirement where appropriate.

The Police Uplift Programme concluded in March 2023 with the recruitment of an additional 20,947 police officers attributed to the uplift programme.

The recently launched Police Constable Entry Programme (PCEP) training curriculum, published by the College of Policing, is helping to improve new recruits’ understanding of the needs of local communities. The curriculum includes detailed modules on community policing, effective communications, historical community context, relationships with specific communities and community values and policing.

To ensure that the recruitment processes identify and select officers who are reflective of the needs of local communities, the Metropolitan Police Service, working with the College of Policing, is considering additional methods for assessing candidates’ understanding of those needs and will announce its plans later in 2022. Changes would be delivered via a pilot that will be evaluated by the College, with a view to applying learning to its ongoing development of the assessment process. 

A new Online Assessment Process was made permanent from 2023 and is now the standard assessment process used by all 43 forces in England and Wales. This process includes a selection of exercises used to assess candidates’ suitability for policing, such as competencies and values that are important for effective police constables.

To protect police officers and others when exercising their functions, we will double the maximum penalty for common assault or battery committed against an emergency worker from 12 months to 2 years’ imprisonment. 

The relevant provision in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (section 156) came into force in summer 2022.

To broaden the diversity of the judiciary, we will work with the Judicial Diversity Forum to increase the pool of applicants as well as continuing to scrutinise recruitment processes to ensure the very best talent is promoted through the professions and on to the bench. This includes delivering MoJ’s commitments set out in the 2022 action plan. 

The 2024 Judicial Diversity Forum Action Plan was published in January 2024 committing the Ministry of Justice to:

continuing to lead the Pre-Application Judicial Education programme (PAJE)

publishing comprehensive data in the annual Diversity of the Judiciary statistics

work to remove barriers for employed lawyers considering fee-paid judicial office

work to remove barriers for Crown servant lawyers considering a fee-paid judicial office

work to review the barriers faced by professional groups, such as legal academics and those regulated legal professions who are not currently eligible for judicial office.

The PAJE programme supports lawyers from under-represented groups who are considering applying for a judicial role. Evaluation of the PAJE programme showed that for all lawyer types, Asian and black PAJE participants were shortlisted and appointed for judicial roles at higher rates than those who had not completed PAJE over the last 3 years.

Black PAJE participants continue to be appointed for judicial roles at a rate more than double in comparison to the wider pool of black candidates who have not completed PAJE and have applied in the last 3 years.

To broaden the diversity of the magistracy, the MoJ is investing over £1 million this financial year to support the recruitment of new and diverse magistrates, and launched a revised, streamlined recruitment process and inclusive recruitment campaign earlier this year. The new process will enable MoJ to better monitor recruitment information, understand any differences in attraction and success rates between ethnic groups and to identify action to address any issues highlighted by this data. An evaluation of this process will be conducted in 2022. 

To broaden the diversity of the magistracy, the MoJ invested £1 million to support the recruitment of new and diverse magistrates, with a focus on attracting those from under-represented groups. 

The 2023 judicial diversity statistics included data on the diversity of applications and appointments to help identify challenges and target future improvements. In total, 24% of all magistrate applications submitted in 2022 to 2023 were from ethnic minority individuals, and 56% were from women.

An evaluation of the recruitment process has now been concluded and the MoJ is in the process of making further improvements to it, taking action to address issues identified in the data. The MoJ will continue to run marketing campaigns to raise the profile of the magistracy and encourage a broader range of people to apply.

To tackle bias and ensure fairness in the workplace, by spring 2023 the Equality Hub will create an ‘Inclusion at Work Panel’. Made up of a panel of academics and practitioners in business it will develop and disseminate effective resources to help employers drive fairness across organisations. This will go beyond just race and ethnicity to identify actions to promote fairness for all in the workplace and will include a programme of research and workplace trials to provide a robust evidence base and root out poor quality training.

The panel will be supported by the Government Campus, specifically the new Leadership College for Government, to ensure the Government Curriculum defines effective leadership and management standards and products. The UK Civil Service and public sector employers will lead by example in adopting evidence-based practices and trialling new approaches.

In March 2024, the Inclusion at Work Panel published its recommendations to improve diversity and inclusion practice in the workplace.  

The government is considering how it can most effectively take the recommendations of the report forward and will provide an official response in due course. The government will also draw on relevant findings in the report as part of its own review of EDI spending across government.

To support employers and industry sectors to create opportunity for groups that are underrepresented in their workforce, the Government Equalities Office will create new updated guidance on positive action by December 2022 

The Equality Hub published new guidance for employers on positive action in the workplace in April 2023.

Using evidence from the Inclusion at work Panel, and building on the curriculum standards underpinning the Government Campus, and Leadership College within it, the government will develop a new scheme for employers, working with stakeholders in business, civil society and academia, to provide an evidenced framework for improving race equality and progression in the workplace. Organisations will be able to sign-up to the scheme voluntarily, to be live by autumn 2023. 

The Inclusion at Work Panel did not recommend introducing an Inclusion Confident Scheme at this stage. Instead, it recommended an inclusion evidence toolkit - similar to the Education Endowment Foundation teaching and learning toolkit -  to bring together the latest diversity and inclusion (D&I) evidence in a business-friendly format so that  employers can assess the rigour, efficacy, and value for money of a range of D&I practices.

To address the potential risks and opportunities presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, the Office for AI will develop our national position on governing and regulating AI, and set this out in a white paper in 2022. This will include how to address potential racial bias in algorithmic decision-making 

The AI white paper was published in March 2023.

To ensure technological advances do not have a disproportionate impact on ethnic minority groups, the EHRC will advise on the safeguards needed and issue guidance that explains how to apply the Equality Act to algorithmic decision-making. 

EHRC published new guidance in September 2022 guidance on how the Public Sector Equality Duty applies when a public body uses AI.

To enhance transparency and trust, the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation published an algorithmic transparency standard for the public sector. This will be piloted by several public sector organisations before formal endorsement in 2023. The move makes the UK one of the first countries in the world to develop a national algorithmic transparency standard. 

The Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard was piloted with public sector organisations through summer 2022, and an updated version was launched in October 2022 on GitHub.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/equity-and-equality-guidance-for-local-maternity-systems   ↩

https://coram-i.org.uk/resource/asg-q3-2023-2024-headline-measures/   ↩

https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Kemp-Examining-the-impact-of-PACE-on-the-detention-and-questioning-of-child-suspects.pdf    ↩

Labour market value of higher and further education qualifications: a summary report (Social Mobility Commission, updated 9 February 2023)  ↩

https://judicialappointments.gov.uk/equality-and-diversity/diversity-and-equality-measures/judicial-diversity-forum/   ↩

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/diversity-of-the-judiciary-2023-statistics   ↩

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64fae71b1886eb000d976fe6/2023_JDS_tables.ods)   ↩

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Labor Mismatches: Effects on Wages and on Job Satisfaction in 17 OECD Countries

• Published: 03 January 2018
• Volume 140 , pages 369–391, ( 2018 )

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• Lucía Mateos-Romero 1 &
• María del Mar Salinas-Jiménez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5476-0556 1  

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This study analyzes the effects of labor mismatches on wages and on job satisfaction in seventeen OECD countries by distinguishing between educational mismatch and skills mismatch. Using data from PIAAC, the results suggest that whereas educational mismatch shows greater effects on wages, the effects of labor mismatch on job satisfaction are generally better explained by skills mismatches. Both phenomena appear to be relevant for understanding the economic effects of labor mismatch and suggest that educational mismatch is not an accurate proxy for skills mismatch, mainly when the non-monetary effects of labor mismatch are addressed.

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Measuring occupational mismatch: overeducation and overskill in europe—evidence from piaac, imbalanced job polarization and skills mismatch in europe.

Education-Job Mismatch: Implications for Individual Earnings and Aggregate Output

Although the interest of this study focuses on developed countries, the relevance of educational investments is at a crucial juncture in developing countries. Interested readers on some of the key problems faced by developing countries as regards education and labor policies can see the works by Muysken and Nour ( 2006 ), Boccanfuso et al. ( 2015 ) or Kruss et al ( 2015 ), focused on the quality of education and skills formation, or the works by Amin ( 2009 ), Fakih and Ghazalian ( 2015 ), or Brixiova and Égert ( 2017 ), with a greater focus on labor market constraints, labor regulations and institutions.

Previous OECD programs to assess the skills of the adult population were IALS (1994–1998) and ALLS (2003–2006). The PIAAC survey started in 2013 and continues nowadays, thus providing the most recent data in the assessment of the skills of the adult population in OECD countries.

The Jackknife procedure allows to take account of weights included in the PIAAC database for each individual in the sample and its 80 replications when standard errors are estimated. See OECD ( 2013 ) for a detailed description of this procedure.

Hoogerheide et al. ( 2012 ) show that “using the father’s education as an instrument in an income regression is a viable option for solving the endogeneity problem with regard to education”.

All technical information and access to the PIAAC database can be found in http://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/publicdataandanalysis/ . Data from Germany come from Rammstedt et al. ( 2015 ).

The empirical analysis is run for the pool of countries and then grouping these countries in more homogeneous blocs: Nordic (Denmark, Finland and Norway), Mediterranean (Italy and Spain), Continental (Belgium, France, Germany and Netherlands), Eastern (Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Slovak Republic), English-speaking (Ireland and United Kingdom) and Asian (Japan and Korea) blocs.

The use of a dichotomous variable is a very common procedure followed in the literature on job satisfaction (see, for example, Allen and van der Velden ( 2001 ) or Mavromaras et al. ( 2013 )). However, one could alternatively take account of all categories of job satisfaction and run an ordered probit. This alternative has also been followed and the obtained estimates are presented in the “ Appendix ” section as a robustness check.

A detailed discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each method can be found in Hartog ( 2000 ), who concludes that the use of one or another estimation method does not affect the empirical results, so the choice of the method will depend on available information.

With some differences in magnitude, the results for the pool of countries hold for all country blocs being considered. The distributions of educational and skill mismatches for the different blocs of countries are presented in “ Appendix ” section (Table  7 ).

Estimates were also run with literacy scores, obtaining quantitatively and qualitatively similar results (estimations are available upon request). In any case, all 10 plausible values are included to run the estimates.

Estimates for educational and skills mismatch have also been run separately for the different blocs of countries. Nevertheless, since the pattern found for the different blocs is similar to that of the pool of countries, for the sake of space, we only present the estimates for the relevant variables when both types of mismatch are jointly considered. All complete estimates are available upon request.

As shown by Halvorsen and Palmquist ( 1980 ), the interpretation of estimated coefficients for dummy variables in semilogarithmic equations is given by exp(coefficient)-1. We thank an anonymous referee for pointing out this question.

The coefficients of the numeracy skill are hardly to interpret in a direct way. However, since we are estimating a semi-logarithmic model, the elasticity on the average can easily be calculated by multiplying the estimated coefficient by the mean value of the variable.

Since the estimates for these control variables are as expected according to previous literature, and consistent when skills mismatch is considered, we will not extend on these results hereafter.

Talking about labor market flexibility (or rigidity) encompasses different labor market outcomes (e.g. labor adjustment, wages, mobility, labor costs, or unemployment, among others). However, in terms of wage adjustments, the Nordic countries seem to show greater rigidities (Andersen et al. 2014 ), as so do Asian (Hwang 2006 ) and Mediterranean countries (Chenic 2013 ), whereas Central and Eastern European countries (Svejnar 2002 ) and the Anglo-Saxon model (Aceleanu 2012 ) show greater wage flexibility.

Complete estimates from the probit model are presented in “ Appendix ” section (Table  8 ). In addition, the “ Appendix ” section (Table  9 ) also offers the estimates of the ordered probit as a check of robustness for the pool of countries. All these estimates are also available for the different blocs of countries upon request.

We do not extend here in the comment of other control variables since the results are as expected according to previous literature, with a positive and significant effect on the probability of being satisfied for those earning higher wages, those enjoying better health, females, employees with greater experience and those working in the public sector and doing supervisory tasks.

In fact, several studies suggest that workers in East European and Asian countries attach greater importance to external aspects of the job instead of looking at intrinsic job characteristics (Huang and Van de Vliert 2003 ; Borooah 2009 ). For a deeper insight on the cultural and socio-economic characteristics explaining cross-national differences in job satisfaction, see for example Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza ( 2000 ) or Lok and Crawford ( 2004 ).

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Project ECO2014-53702-P). Lucía Mateos-Romero also acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Education for a FPU Program Grant.

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Lucía Mateos-Romero & María del Mar Salinas-Jiménez

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Mateos-Romero, L., Salinas-Jiménez, M.M. Labor Mismatches: Effects on Wages and on Job Satisfaction in 17 OECD Countries. Soc Indic Res 140 , 369–391 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1830-y

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Accepted : 28 December 2017

Published : 03 January 2018

Issue Date : November 2018

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1830-y

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