Professorial Fellow awarded prestigious British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship
Bess, who is also an Associate Professor of Quantitative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, works on social mobility and educational inequality. Her Fellowship will fund a project called ‘Educational inequalities in Britain revisited’, which will assess the primary and secondary effects of social inequality on educational attainment.
The British Academy Mid-Career Fellowships are awarded to talented researchers from across the humanities and social sciences. They allow academics to focus on a major piece of research for the duration of the Fellowship. Only 33 Mid-Career Fellowships were awarded this year.
Sir David Cannadine, President of the British Academy commented that “By providing researchers with the time and financial support to explore their interests fully, the Mid-Career Fellowships scheme consistently yields fascinating and engaging work, the results of which can be transformational.”
On being awarded the Fellowship, Bess commented: “I am delighted to receive this award, which will allow me to press ahead with a research project that I believe has important policy implications, as well as being of academic interest. We need to know more about why children from relatively disadvantaged social backgrounds make less ambitious educational choices than children from more advantaged backgrounds, even when they have the same level of previous educational attainment. I am also pleased that British Academy is so ready to support research in the field of quantitative social policy.”