ArticleNPJ science of learning2022
Persistent association between family socioeconomic status and primary school performance in Britain over 95 years.
Article in NPJ science of learning, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
- Lifestyle behaviours do not moderate the association between childhood maltreatment and comorbid depression and cardiometabolic disease in older adults: a meta-analysis.BMC medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Low intrinsic capacity is associated with risk of developing mild cognitive impairment in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA).GeroScience · 2026Article
- The role of mothers' speech for children's education beyond the early years.Child development · 2026Article
- Associations of childhood economic and psychosocial conditions with later-life cognitive function: a longitudinal analysis of the China health and retirement longitudinal study (2011-2020).BMC public health · 2026Article
- Genetic associations with education have increased and are patterned by socioeconomic context: Evidence from 3 studies born 1946-1970.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Student Socioeconomic Status and Teacher-Student Perceptual Discrepancies of School Effort and Enjoyment.The British journal of sociology · 2026Article
- Predictors of non-completion of upper secondary education in Finland based on register data.Scandinavian journal of public health · 2025Article
- Clustering of circumstances during the first 1000 days after conception and their association with school performance: a population-based cohort study from the Netherlands.BMJ public health · 2025Article
- Association between breastfeeding duration and educational attainment in rural Southwest Uganda: a population-based cohort study.Global health action · 2024Article
- Adolescents' Perceptions of Household Chaos Predict Their Adult Mental Health: A Twin-Difference Longitudinal Cohort Study.Psychological science · 2024Article
- Health and health behaviours in adolescence as predictors of education and socioeconomic status in adulthood - a longitudinal study.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Interplay of socioeconomic status, cognition, and school performance in the ABCD sample.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- Reaching across the political divide to address health inequalities.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Learning loss and psychosocial issues among Thai students amidst the COVID-19 pandemic: the perspectives of teachers in the online classroom.BMC psychology · 2023Article
- On the promise of personalized learning for educational equity.NPJ science of learning · 2023Review
- Association between breastfeeding duration and educational achievement in England: results from the Millennium Cohort Study.Archives of disease in childhood · 2023Article
- The mediating effect of geospatial thinking on the relationship between family capital and academic achievement in geography.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
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. Reducing the effect of family background on children's education is a pivotal aim of educators, policymakers, and researchers, but the success of their efforts is poorly evidenced to date. Here, we show for the first time that over 95 years in Britain the association between family SES and children's primary school performance has remained stable. Across 16 British population cohorts born between 1921 and 2011 (N = 91,935), we confirmed previous findings of a correlation between family SES and children's school performance of 0.28 [95% Confidence Interval 0.22-0.34], after adjusting for cohort-specific confounders. Contrary to the popular assumption that family background inequality has increased over time, we observed only minimal differences in the association between family SES and school performance across British cohorts. 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 influence of family SES on children's education will only noticeably weaken if primary education settings become better equipped to meet and remediate the children's differential learning needs.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.