Applying Secondary Sources to Education

Secondary sources are data that have been collected by someone other than the researcher for purposes other than the current research project. In the sociology of education, secondary data includes a vast range of sources — from government statistics and Ofsted reports to school records, personal documents, and media accounts. Using secondary data avoids many of the practical and ethical difficulties of primary research in schools, but it also raises important questions about validity, reliability, and representativeness.

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Types of Secondary Data in Education

Quantitative Secondary Data

Source	Description	Examples
Official statistics	Data collected by government agencies and public bodies	GCSE and A-Level results by gender, ethnicity, and Free School Meal eligibility; school absence rates; exclusion statistics; university admissions data
School records	Internal data maintained by individual schools	Attendance registers, behaviour logs, internal exam results, SEN registers
Survey data	Large-scale surveys conducted by other researchers or organisations	Youth Cohort Study, Millennium Cohort Study, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)

Qualitative Secondary Data