Understanding how we can close the achievement gap: examining the interaction between early socioeconomic factors and cognitive skills on academic attainment

We are inviting applications for a fully funded PhD studentship which will examine how socio-economic factors and cognitive skills interact in early life to predict foundational skills at school entry in a large and diverse sample of children. The findings from this project will provide a much-needed evidence-base for understanding how we can close the achievement gap between children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds.

The project will be supervised by Dr Emma Blakey (University of Sheffield) and co-supervised by Dr Paul Wakeling (University of York) and will be conducted with the support of a large UK-based multi-ethnic family cohort study (the Born in Bradford project). The PhD student will access existing data from the Born in Bradford project and collect new data to enable longitudinal analysis of the relationships between children’s SES, their family and cultural backgrounds, academic progress and cognitive skills development, from birth to 9 years old (with a particular focus on predictors of children’s emerging maths skills).

The PhD researcher will be part of the Sheffield Cognitive Development lab, and also part of a wider inter-disciplinary collaborative network of researchers from the Universities of Sheffield (Dr Emma Blakey and Dr Dan Carroll), Leeds (Prof Mark Mon-Williams, Dr Amanda Waterman and Dr Liam Hill) and York (Prof Kate Pickett). The network, entitled ‘Inequalities in Cognitive Development’, is funded by the ESRC White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership and comprises three studentships in each of the institutions. These studentships will offer unique insights into the developmental pathways by which inequalities in children’s academic attainment and wellbeing emerge, and use these insights to inform culturally sensitive evidence-based improvements in public policy.

Candidates must have a minimum UK Upper Second Class Honours or equivalent in psychology or a related cognate discipline.

The following skills and experiences are also considered highly desirable:
(1) prior experience of research design and, in particular, utilising quantitative methods;
(2) prior experience of collecting data from children in community-based settings;
(3) training in research data management and an interest in developing advanced skills in statistical analysis of longitudinal datasets.

The successful candidate will be based at the University of Sheffield. There will also be some meetings and potential data collection in Bradford, West Yorkshire.