Educational Pathways and Work Outcomes of Disabled Young People in England lies at the intersection of disability studies and social stratification research.

Our aim is to better understand the pathways through which adolescent disability is translated into educational and occupational disadvantage.

In order to achieve this, we will explore how disability influences young people's educational attainment, aspirations, and choices. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of disability with social class, and we will also investigate variation of trajectories and experiences by different types of impairments/disabilities.

We will employ a mixed-methods research design.

We will conduct secondary analyses of existing nationally-representative datasets to highlight different trajectories of disadvantage and variation by key contextual factors.

We will also collect qualitative longitudinal data in order to fully disentangle processes that perpetuate disadvantage linked to disability status. We will be collecting information from disabled young people themselves, moving away from existing practices that rely on teachers or parents.

We aim to produce a novel conceptual framework for the sociological understanding of disability differentials in educational and occupational attainment, challenging perspectives that consider disadvantage as a natural consequence of disability.