Session: Educational Inequalities Across Childhood and Adolescence
Genes, Parental Education, and Inequality in Human Capital: Evidence from Two British Cohorts (Gabriella Conti, UCL)
This paper examines how genetic endowments and parental education interact to shape children’s human capital, using newly available genetic data from the 1958 NCDS and 2000 MCS. We exploit exogenous variation in parental education from two UK compulsory schooling reforms (1947, 1972) and combine it with polygenic scores (PGS) for educational attainment (EA) for children and parents. In the MCS, trio genotypes allow construction of direct genetic effect indices that remove genetic nurture bias. Results from both cohorts show gene–environment complementarities: reform-induced increases in parental education have larger impacts on children’s cognitive development for those with higher genetic potential. Parental investment is a key mechanism. These findings are robust across cohorts and have important implications for policies aiming to equalise opportunity.
Family Income Volatility and Children’s Education by Income Level and Genotype (Gaia Ghirardi, WZB Berlin Social Science Center)
Prior research shows that income volatility has adverse consequences on children’s educational outcomes, with the penalty most pronounced among children from middle-income families. Yet, why children from middle-income families are most affected by income volatility remains poorly understood. We test whether income volatility disrupts compensatory parental strategies among middle-income parents, thereby concentrating the educational penalty among their children with a low genetic propensity for education. Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, we combine longitudinal measures of family income dynamics with genotyped parent-offspring trios, allowing us to partial out genetic nurture by directly controlling for parents’ genetic propensities for education. Our results confirm that children from middle-income households experience a stronger income volatility penalty on educational achievement. Among children from middle-income families, the stronger income volatility penalty is observed among those with a low genetic propensity for education. These findings suggest that when family income is volatile, middle-income parents lose their ability to compensate for children’s lower educational genetic propensities.
Little Change, Persistent Gaps: Evidence from three English cohorts of socioeconomic inequalities in academic pathway participation (Dominic Kelly, UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies)
Pursuing A level qualifications (the ‘academic pathway’) is typically a prerequisite for university entry and specific A level subject choices further influence access to selective institutions. Yet, little is known about trends in how many young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds participate in these ‘academic tracks’ over time. This paper presents new evidence drawn from three English cohorts linked to the National Pupil Database: Next Steps, the Millennium Cohort Study and the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities study. We examine two inequalities in academic pathway participation: social origin (family background) and social context (geographic deprivation). Findings reveal little change in the share of low socioeconomic status young people taking A levels or facilitating subjects. However, social origin was consistently a stronger predictor of choices than social context.
Building Foundations: Investigating childhood skill development, gaps and solutions (Luke Bocock, National Foundation for Educational Research)
As part of The Skills Imperative 2035 programme – a five-year strategic research programme funded by the Nuffield Foundation – NFER examined the relationship between children’s cognitive and behavioural development and their school and home backgrounds. NFER examined effects on young people’s development across a broad range of outcomes, including their performance in national examinations, their performance in cognitive assessments, and their behavioural difficulties, with the relative importance of different home- and school-background factors compared within and between four different age-related ‘Development Stages’. This research was motivated by the hypothesis that children’s cognitive and behavioural outcomes are antecedents for the ‘Essential Employment Skills’ (EES) they possess in early adulthood, which previous research from the same research programme showed will be increasingly vital for young people to thrive in the future labour market.
The Hidden World of Disadvantage in English School Qualifications: Why Sociologically Informed Measures Matter (Sarah Stopforth, University of York)
There is a long history of sociological inquiries into social class inequalities in educational outcomes. However, there has been a lack of suitable nationally representative data for researching General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSE) outcomes. The National Pupil Database (NPD) is an administrative educational data source which only contains information on a pupil’s eligibility for Free School Meals (FSM) and the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI). FSM and IDACI are administrative measures of disadvantage routinely used in official statistics. This study is innovative because we use data from the Millennium Cohort Study and linked NPD to evaluate FSM and IDACI alongside established sociological measures of social class and parental education. We argue that sociologically informed measures are fundamental to understanding inequalities in educational outcomes.
