Pathways to educational aspirations: resilience as a mediator of proximal resources and risks

Educational aspirations play an important role in educational achievement, understanding more about the factors that shape aspirations should enable educators and others who support young people to better articulate educational ambitions and then to work towards their achievement. Given this, the current paper uses a form of integrative data analysis to examine two issues. First, it identifies that a social ecological measure of resilience mediates the impact which proximal risks and resources have upon young people’s educational aspirations. Second, it establishes that the linkages between these proximal risks and resources, resilience and educational aspirations are similar for young people facing high levels of adversity and young people on more or less normative developmental pathways. The paper draws on a data collected in the first wave of the Youth Transitions Study; a longitudinal mixed-methods investigation of the factors that influence transitions to adulthood for a group of vulnerable teenagers.