KS4 PI and Parental Occupation Research Summary

Parental occupation is measured by a question recommended by the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) that captures the occupation of the main household earner when an applicant was aged about 14. These occupations are categorised into three categories by the SMC – professional, intermediate and lower socioeconomic. The SMC recommends parental occupation as the best measure for monitoring socioeconomic background within a workforce.

The CRS’s focus is on identifying candidates for early entry roles who have experienced disadvantage, which is different to the SMC’s focus on workforce monitoring. Rare did not initially include parental occupation within the CRS for a few reasons. Firstly, we identified other measures, such as free school meals, as being a more accurate measure of disadvantage when recruiting for early entry roles, and therefore developed a basket of measures to use within the system. Secondly, parental occupation is not easily verifiable, as it relates to someone other than the applicant. Thirdly, the original recommendation question was too complex as it involved four parts which risked negatively affecting response rates. The SMC changed its recommendation to a single question in 2020 for this reason. Finally, the question can be confusing for applicants who do not know how to categorise their parents’ occupations therefore there is a risk that not all answers will be accurate.

The simplified parental occupation question combined with Rare’s growing dataset from its clients meant that we were able to generate a dataset large enough to confidently trial parental occupation over the past 18 months. Our research revealed the following things:

The CRS flags already had significant overlap with the parental occupation measure.
Parental occupation on its own does not capture all forms of disadvantage considered within the CRS, in some cases missing candidates eligible for free school meals, candidates who have spent time in local authority care and candidates who have attended low performing schools.
In some cases, students with parental occupations considered to be lower socioeconomic are not in fact disadvantaged, and in a minority of cases, could be considered to be advantaged.

Our modelling suggests that by allowing parental occupation to generate a socioeconomic flag when combined with disadvantaged postcode and/or significant term time work commitments, the CRS will now flag a significant majority of students selecting lower socioeconomic parental occupations, whilst avoiding flagging students who are not in fact disadvantaged.