School subject choices and social class differences in entry to higher education : comparing Scotland and Ireland

The existing literature on differentiation in secondary education and its consequences for social inequalities in educational attainment has mainly focused on students’ assignment into different formal school tracks (e.g. Bol et al. 2014; Brunello and Checchi 2007; Hanushek and Wößmann 2006; Horn 2009; Horn 2013). With a few exceptions (Ayalon 2006; Iannelli 2013; Van de Werfhorst, Sullivan and Cheung 2003), social stratification research has largely neglected the role of internal differentiation within secondary schools, such as allocation to, or take-up of, different subjects, in shaping social inequalities in life course outcomes