Enabling the examination of long-term mortality trends by educational level for England and Wales in a time-consistent and internationally comparable manner

Studying long-term trends in educational inequalities in health is important for monitoring and policy evaluation. Data issues regarding the allocation of people to educational groups hamper the study and international comparison of educational inequalities in mortality. For the UK, this has been acknowledged, but no satisfactory solution has been proposed. To enable the examination of long-term mortality trends by educational level for England and Wales (E W) in a time-consistent and internationally comparable manner, we propose and implement an approach to deal with the data issues regarding mortality data by educational level. We employed 10-year follow-ups of individuals aged 20+ from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS), which include education information from each decennial census (1971–2011) linked to individual death records, for a 1