Education and the Family

Passing Success Across the Generations

Leon Feinstein, Kathryn Duckworth, Ricardo Sabates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134155576
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Why it is that success, deprivation or disadvantage are so often passed down intergenerationally? What part does education play?

The educational achievement of parents is often reflected in that of their children and there are many underlying causes for such a relationship. Education and the Family argues that government policy has an important role to play in addressing this inequality even though many of the causes lie within the home. Although each child should be supported to achieve his or her objectives, differences in the willingness or capabilities of families to take advantage of educational opportunities exacerbate social class differences and limit actual equality of opportunity for many. Understanding the causes of this transmission is key to tackling both social class inequality and to expanding the skill base of the economy.

By providing an overview of academic and policy thinking in relation to the role of the family, this book explores the educational success of children. It focuses on the education of the parents but also considers how the family - compared to wider, external influences such as schools - is a driver of differences in educational outcomes. It concludes with a consideration of what policy-makers are attempting to do about this key issue and why, and how this will impact on schools and teachers.

This book will interest researchers and academics in education and social policy, as well as teachers and other education and social policy practitioners.

1 Introduction

With its prioritisation of ‘education, education, and education’, the incoming UK Labour government of 1997 emphasised the potentially crucial role that the education system might play in the service of meeting wide-ranging government objectives. However, these objectives have varied widely from concerns about economic productivity to health, citizenship and social mobility, and it has never been entirely clear in policy, theory or practice whether the education system is the answer to the problem of social immobility and entrenched disadvantage, or part of the problem. Perhaps much depends on what we mean by ‘education’, how we view the role of education in the lives of individuals, what objectives we set the education system and how we set out to implement these objectives.

This book is concerned with the question of social mobility and the deep and abiding connection between the wealth and resources of parents and that of their children. Why it is that success, deprivation or disadvantage are so often passed down intergenerationally? How do the mechanisms that drive inequalities of opportunity work and what are the pathways for intergenerational effects? Understanding the nature and causes of this transmission is important for tackling social class inequality, expanding the skill base of the UK economy and developing a more sustainable future.

Our emphasis in this book is on the particular role that education plays in passing down success and failure across generations. Considering theory and evidence, we put forward a model to understand the pervading influence of parents’ education in the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage. The focus is on the education of the parents but this requires a consideration of all other key features of the family environment. Therefore, we also lay out the evidence to ascertain which factors are most important, how such factors are in part pathways for the effect of education and how the different factors interact.

The focus of the book is very much on the family, but we contextualise the family within wider, external influences, primarily those at the community level, and consider the question of how important the family is relative to schools and neighbourhoods as a driver of national-level differences in educational outcomes. The focus on analysis of the family enables clarification of some of the processes at work there and of how they play out, constrained and provided for by micro-level (individual), meso-level (community) and macro-level (national) factors.

Background

It is well established that there is a strong relationship between the educational achievement of parents and that of their children. There are many underlying influences behind such a relationship. Some, such as genes, are beyond immediate policy intervention. Others, such as income and parenting, are more appropriate as sites of policy intervention, but are nonetheless strongly contested both in terms of the extent to which they play a causal role and the extent to which they should be thought of as fundamental policy mechanisms.

Despite these controversies, this book takes the view that policy interventions are required. The intergenerational transmission of educational success is a key driver of the persistence of social class differences in advanced societies such as the UK, and a barrier to equality of opportunity. Although each child should be supported to achieve their full potential, differences in the capabilities and resources of families to take advantage of educational opportunities exacerbate social class differences and limit actual equality of opportunity for many.

This book is about education and the family in two senses, then. In the first sense, it is about the role of the educational attainments of parents in the development of educational success for their children. In the second sense, it is concerned with how education can be a site for policy now, with the role of schools and other educational institutions in the development of children’s achievement, and with the complex interactions between home and school in the formation of positive outcomes for children.

The context

Defining success

People differ in how they define success and have political and ethical debates about it, although there are also some widely accepted elements in our culture. It may be that, for most people, access to wealth, power and control over resources is a crucial element in their judgement of success. Others may chase more abstract aims such as fame, compassion, artistic endeavour and so on, but we need have no single notion of what is meant by success.

If we define success as an individual’s achievement of their own aims, then it may become clear that, when we talk about passing success across the generations, we are referring not just to access to material resources (important though this always is), but also to access to wider features of human potential and to social networks, or identity and social capital, as they are sometimes termed. However, aims are not exogenous to this system; they are formed within the particular social and economic contexts of individuals, and so one cannot take their achievement to be an objective or value-free indicator of success. Furthermore, one cannot say that someone has experienced success in their life and development solely on the basis of achieving their own objectives, if their life and its context have already led to them diminishing those objectives. Therefore, the democratic perspective, which says that success is whatever people mean by it, is not without problems for an analysis seeking to understand the role of education in impacting on intergenerational patterns of access to resources and advantage.

For these reasons, we primarily associate success in this book with school achievement, such as scores in tests of ability in reading and maths, and educational attainment, such as gaining qualifications and continuing into further and/or higher education. We do not mean to suggest that achieving academically should be the benchmark of personal value or of success generally. In fact, for many children and young people succeeding in school is not a good yardstick of success in those terms, and this conflict over the values and objectives of young people is an important element of the dynamics at play in the intergenerational transmission of resources and of education policy failure. Moreover, there is growing recognition of the importance of broader sets of capabilities that support and interact with more traditional notions of academic success, such as attention-related skills, social and communication skills, and behavioural self-regulation. Nonetheless, educational success does appear to lead to, or be widely associated with, access to most other resources that are important in life and are broadly sought after.

A framework for analysis

The topic of the intergenerational transmission of educational success and advantage is broad and diverse and has been approached in different disciplines, with different methodologies, addressing subtly different research questions. Even within disciplines, authors adopt different empirical strategies. Researchers have used a great many different models to explore the influence of different features of family background on children’s development. These different models control and test for different factors, in different combinations, in cross-sectional as well as longitudinal datasets.

Parents’ education is a major influence on children’s educational success, both directly and through indirect pathways such as income. As such, in quantitative analysis parental education is sometimes modelled as a key causal variable, sometimes as an explanatory or mediating factor and sometimes as a background characteristic (a control). Guo and Harris (2000) model the effect of income on attainment, entering parental education as a control. In many of their specifications, however, the effect of parental education actually proves bigger than the effect of income, but since parental education is not their focus, its actual effect, role and size are rather underplayed. Furthermore, much of the relevant literature here has focused not on understanding the mechanisms through which the intergenerational transmission of educational success occurs, but on exploring only one link in the possible pathways of transmission. Thus, clarifying the role and importance of education and its effects is not easy.

Understanding the possible relationships and the conceptual premises that follow quickly leads to a considerable amount of complexity. In order to understand, model and quantify the role of education in the intergenerational transmission of advantage, it is helpful to use a framework that can place these different strands of research in a common context that can cope with a large degree of interaction between key features of the individual, their family and the wider society. Doing so also enables assessment of the mechanisms involved and their relative importance. Therefore, to structure our presentation of theory and evidence here, we draw on a model of human development influenced by work in the field of developmental psychology, most notably the work of Uri Bronfenbrenner (1979, 1986; Bronfenbrenner and Crouter, 1983). The great advantage of this framework is that it allows for a focus on relationships between the many important factors, rather than a simple list of influences.

This perspective also provides a framework within which to combine economic perspectives with those from other disciplines. One objective has been to present the valuable perspectives described in the developmental literature to those more versed in sociological and economic literature and vice versa. This framework, its origins and how we conceptualise the influence of parents’ education in transmitting success across the generations is described in detail in Chapter 3.

An overview

Our starting point, then, is the strong – but by no means necessary or deterministic – correlation between the educational success of parents and that of children. The book fits within three wider concerns: first, the processes and pathways involved in the intergenerational transmission of opportunity generally; second, the effects and importance of education; and third, the implications for education and wider policy. To this end, the book is set out in three separate parts.

PART I Understanding and conceptualising the importance of parents’ education

In Chapter 2, we begin by setting out some of the issues around defining and measuring education. We go on to summarise evidence on the role of parents’ education in passing down educational success and advantage across the generations. The evidence suggests that this role is substantial. Finally, we review some of the most recent empirical evidence aimed at establishing whether the education of parents has a causal impact on the development and life chances of their children and discuss some of the methodological issues around isolating education effects.

In Chapter 3, we outline the general theoretical framework that we use to explain the role of education and describe our conceptual model for understanding the ways in which parents’ education influences children’s school achievement. We highlight the advantages of this model and discuss its complementarities with other models of intergenerational transfer and social mobility. We also point to potential weaknesses of our approach and set out necessary caveats.

PART II The influence of parents’ education: a review of the evidence

The centrepiece of the book is a review of the role of the educational achievement of parents in the school achievement of their children. Parents’ education is a major influence both directly and via other channels. Our ecologically framed model for understanding the role of parents’ education in their children’s own educational success attempts to capture this complexity. It has at its centre interactions between parents and children; dynamic processes that support, sustain or hinder successful development. These processes are termed ‘proximal’ in the ecological model because they are closest to the day-to-day lived experience of the child and impact directly on developmental outcomes. These processes are constrained and influenced by the key features or particular characteristics of the family. Factors such as mental health, parents’ beliefs and attitudes and the availability of resources influence the more proximal interactions between parents and children. The family unit is itself influenced by wider social, economic and demographic features, such as parental income, family structure and the education of parents. These factors are termed ‘distal’ in the ecological model because they are more descriptive factors of a family’s socio-economic situation, typically exerting their influence through pathways of mediating factors rather than shaping outcomes directly.

In Part II, we take each of these three main categories of influence and evaluate the empirical evidence on the importance of the main factors in each of these categories. Chapter 4 presents evidence on the influences of proximal processes, Chapter 5 on the influences pertaining to the key features of the family and Chapter 6 on distal family factors. In this way we lay out the evidence to ascertain which factors are most important, how such factors are in part a channel for the effect of education and how the different factors interact. Other contexts besides the family are also important. Pre-schools, schools, peer groups and neighbourhoods provide pathways for effects of family background and so contribute to the intergenerational transmission of educational success. The importance of these other contexts and their relations with the family unit are reviewed in Chapter 7.

PART III Policy and the wider responsibilities of education: early preventive action

In the UK, the relationship between home and school has become increasingly a focus of policy, both through the recognition of the importance of home factors in the formation of school achievement and through the recognition of the school as a site for engagement in wider aspects of personal and social development. With the reforms of Every Child Matters (ECM) in England and related legislation in other UK nations, the education system is increasingly seen as a site for wider aspects of social policy that go beyond a narrow focus on educational achievement. Thus educational and social policy have become, and may continue to become, increasingly intertwined. Therefore, this book also considers the implications of this ecological perspective for education and wider social policy.

In Part III, we report findings from a quantitative study of whether it is possible for policy intervention to identify children at risk of adult deprivation from early signals. Chapter 8 presents this new evidence to support debate on this new direction for education and social policy. The starting point for the analysis is the objective of assessing the practicality of early preventive intervention to reduce childhood risk, adult deprivation and the intergenerational persistence of inequality and disadvantage. The policy framework for the analysis is that of progressive universalism, that is, the objective of providing support and intervention on the basis of need within a universal system recognising the entitlement of all to such support. We summarise findings from our own recent research using large-sample UK data about the extent to which information about children and their family environments is predictive of later outcomes. The outcomes of special interest here are those that tend to be associated with personal difficulty and risk for young people and adults, and the social cost for those in their environment and wider society. We also provide an assessment of the extent of persistence and change in childhood risk of adult outcomes as children pass through into adolescence. We go on to assess the levels of change in risk status through childhood, and model the implications of this for the assessment of the value and cost of different intervention scenarios.

It is important to emphasise that, although it is possible to identify childhood risk and to predict likely outcomes for groups at risk on average, it is never possible to predict with certainty the outcome for any individual child. One can make a forecast of likely outcomes and use it, for example, to assess the cost-effectiveness and social value of a set of possible interventions, but this is not the same as suggesting that the future of any child is predetermined. That would not only deny the possibility of intervention, but would also lead to stigmatising effects that would undermine the primary purpose of the intervention. The longitudinal design of these data enables us to assess the level of accuracy in the extent to which we can identify those at risk using early childhood information about family context and child development.

In our view, these findings offer a challenge to which current central and local government should respond with appropriate and measured policy in the interests of social inclusion, personal welfare and the wider economic and social development of the UK. The relationship between childhood risk and high cost or high harm outcomes in adolescence or adulthood is not deterministic, mechanistic or inevitable. There are many steps on the pathway from risk to outcome. There are children at risk who do not experience harmful outcomes and there are children with low apparent or observable risk who do. Therefore, policy responses must allow for flexibility and change. Administrative data should always be augmented by local-level practitioner knowledge and appropriate interventions should also be selected by local practitioners, who should work closely alongside communities and agencies to avoid rigid tracking or excessive and unnecessary stigmatisation of vulnerable young people and their families.

There are challenges from the political left, right and centre to the view that it is the role of the Government to intervene or engage heavily in the domestic sphere. The book concludes in Chapter 9 with a consideration of these debates, and gives a view of what policy-makers are attempting to do and why.

Part I
Understanding and conceptualising the importance of education

2 Understanding the importance of parents’ education

The introductory chapter outlin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Series editors’ foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Understanding and conceptualising the importance of education
• PART II The influence of parents’ education: a review of the evidence
• PART III Policy and the wider responsibilities of education: early preventive action
• Notes
• References