Persistent influence of family socioeconomic status on education in Britain over 95 years

• In Event: Investigating the effects of social context on individual differences in children’s educational outcomes

Abstract

Introduction: In Britain and elsewhere, the influence of family socioeconomic status (SES) on education is already evident in primary school, and it persists and increases throughout the school years, with children from impoverished families earning lower grades and obtaining fewer educational qualifications than children from more privileged backgrounds. Here, we test for the first time the influence of family SES on children’s primary school performance over 95 years in Britain.

Method: We identified 15 birth cohort studies that sampled representative populations from Britain and were born between 1921 and 2011. Each population cohort recorded at least one marker of family SES, including parents’ education, occupation, or income, and one measure of children’s school performance during the primary school years (i.e. between the ages of 5 and 11 years), including teacher reported grades, school exam-based performance scores, and academic and cognitive ability test scores. After excluding those with missing data on family SES or school performance, sample sizes ranged from 240 to 14,923 across population cohorts, with a total of 83,249 individuals included in the analyses. We built standardized summary indices for family SES and school performance that were adjusted for the number of available markers per child in each cohort.

Results: Figure 1 shows the raw correlations between family SES and school performance plotted across the cohorts’ birth years from 1921 through 2011. With exception of the 1980s, representative population cohorts were available for all decades from the 1920s onwards. After adjusting for cohort-specific confounders, correlations between family SES and school performance ranged from a minimum of .18 [95%Confidence Interval .12-.25] to a maximum of .24 [.24-.43]. Across all 15 population cohorts, we estimated the average association between family SES and children’s school performance to be .27 [.21-32.], reflecting a medium effect size.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that children from low SES families have been persistently disadvantaged in education over the past century. The association between family SES and children’s school performance varied little and inconsistently across cohorts’ birth years. We argue that education policies must prioritize equity in learning outcomes over equality in learning opportunities, if they seek to disrupt the perpetuation of social and economic inequality across generations. We speculate that the effect of family SES on children’s education will only noticeably weaken if primary education settings become better equipped to meet and remediate children’s differential learning needs.

Authors

• Sophie von Stumm, University of York
  Presenting Author

• Sophie N. Cave, University of York
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul Wakeling, University of York
  Non-Presenting Author