Forecasting the educational-participation rate of 16-year olds in England and Wales : a socioeconomic approach

This paper describes a model of the educational participation rate of 16-year olds in England and Wales which is used to produce forecasts up to 1995/1996. Previous models are briefly reviewed and argued to be inadequate. A new socio-economic model is presented based upon principles of cointegration and general to specific modelling, which satisfies a battery of diagnostic tests. Projections based on the model suggest that there will be a substantial rise in the educational participation rate in the period to 1995/1996. This projected rise is much greater than that suggested by the trend-extrapolation techniques which are more commonly used in this area