ABSTRACT
This chapter will investigate between-school differences in pupil prevalence and frequency of offending in relation to compositional measures of school context for each school, based on the pupils' average scores in each school. The chapter will explore the interaction between individual-level pupil characteristics and context-level school characteristics. This is particularly important as it will illustrate how different school contexts affect different types of individual in different ways. Such analysis has wide utility in the policy sphere because it illustrates how different types of contexts influence different types of individuals differently. This approach is likely to lead to better targeted and more successful prevention initiatives and better standards of behaviour in schools. The approach should also address an area long overlooked in criminological research regarding schools, by including how the individual pupil interacts with his or her school environment. One of the strengths of this study is that both school-level data and individual-level data can be analysed to further our understanding and explanation of pupil offending in schools.
