The effect of education participation on youth custody: causal evidence from England

The negative relationship between education and crime is well documented for many coun- tries. In England, continued participation in education beyond the compulsory minimum school leaving age of 16 is strongly associated with a lower probability of experiencing custody in later teenage years, however the non-random selection of young people into continued participation means cross-sectional estimates of the relationship are likely to contain considerable bias. This paper estimates the causal effect of continuing in education post-16 on the probability of expe- riencing youth custody at ages 17 and 18, addressing the endogeneity of continued participation by exploiting the natural experiment created by the ‘raising of the participation age’ in England in 2012/13. Unlike previous cohorts who could leave education aged 16, young people starting the final year of compulsory schooling in September 2012 were required to remain in education or training until the end of the school year in which they turned 17, and those starting the final year in September 2013 were required to remain in education or training until age 18. Using this exogenous variation in participation between cohorts we estimate the causal effect of continued participation on custody outcomes at ages 17 and 18 using Two-Stage Least Squares and Re- gression Discontinuity methods. The effect of the law change was to increase the proportion of young people participating in education at age 17 by 1.7pp (1.2pp) for boys (girls), from a base of 82.1% (85.0%) immediately prior to the reform. Despite this increase in participation, there was no identified effect on the probability of custody when aged 17 or 18. This suggests that the 0.64pp (0.04pp) reduction in probability of custody associated with continued participation for boys (girls) estimated by OLS is driven by selection. Results are robust to estimation method and whether the treatment is participation in education or training, participation in school, years of post-16 education or training or years of post-16 schooling.