to ask what the most important factors actually are in helping children do well academically

[somewherewest]

According to a poster over on the AIBU thread about grammar schools several essays suggest that "the most deciding factor of any child's academic achievement at school is the educational background of its mother and/or the number of books in the family home".

Is parental education genuinely such a decisive factor? If it is how do we go about trying to promote an educational 'level playing field' for all children?

But that study said being able to help children with their school work was one of the big disadvantages.

That isn't down to wealth but education again.

From my experience of teaching in less wealthy areas I honestly think lack of sleep,personal discipline,too much screen time and no importance put on getting an education are the biggest factors re disadvantaged kids.

We can all pontificate all we like but if kids aren't able to concentrate,don't want to concentrate or see no reason in working hard they won't.I don't think you can lay all that at the door of poverty.

Too much screen time deffo a problem.

Thought I hadn't seen Xenia for a while!

Interesting to hear about the studies showing income is the most important factor but surely its not the cause of the academic achievement but an indicator of other things such as parental education (higher income is likely to reflect higher academic achievement), quality of schooling (higher income is likely to mean private schooling with smaller class sizes), etc.

Not seeing the point in education and not engaging with school even though your forced to sit in the lessons is a huge problem.

My friend is Polish

Her children are way above average at school and her eldest has a music diploma and took 5 GCSE's in y10, all languages for which she gained A* for them all.
Her ds is only 7 and way beyond his peers. Education, especially languages are important to them.

atticus I suspect you're right.

Being wealthy can't cause academic achievement per se. Though perhaps wealthy people are likely to be quite academic and thus pass on their genes and expectations.

However, being wealthy can facilitate educational attainment in the ways you say.

Indeed, perhaps such educational attainment cant be achieved without wealth?

Perhaps it's now become a case of the chicken and the egg?

I don't think wealth/income is the main contributing factor, otherwise children from poorer families wouldn't be well educated by definition.
The friend I mention above is from a low income family, they receive full tax credits, but they spend their money wisely and invest in their dcs education.

Well the stats are very clear.

Very few people coming from low income families do attain educationally at the highest level.

Sure there are notable exceptions, but the truth is the truth. The lowest attainers in education are poor, the highest are not.

But the maj are in the middle.

The highest educated I'm guessing are the Oxbridge educated who aremost likely to be the richest but who are a tiny,tiny percentage of the population of a whole.

Many,many people are well educated and not rich.

Basing this discussion solely on those with an Oxbridge degree is ludicrous.

LePetit - I mentioned sleep back on page one as well as stable home life. We have just separated our dc in an attempt to improve behaviour as they were waking each other up. There has been a dramatic improvement in less than a week.
DP told me he had heard children with ft working mums did not do as well at school. Not sure where he got that from though. The dc still get bedtime stories every night, chat over breakfast and on the walk to school and all our attention at the weekends.

This study is quite interesting

lepetit I'm not just thinking of Oxbridge (which is actually quite economical) but many other universities where the loan will simply not cover accommodation let alone eating.

The middle are finding it increasingly difficult as they get more and more squeezed.

Post graduate studies and professional training are becoming out of their reach.

Aren't these factors all gained from statistics? - so on a basic level they select a group of people from different categories - so in this case IQs - ask them all the same questions about their background, parent's backgrounds etc and correlate the frequency for each category so in this case it would be IQ range such as 90-

Also - educated women command a higher wage generally than uneducated peers - on average obviously there are industries where this is not the case and there are always a few that buck a trend - so a dual income house with higher wage earners will put their dc in the "wealthier" end of the scale.

maddening yes indeed.

But that's all you can do in an analysis really, isn't it?

For example the area where a child lives is definitely a factor, but the reasons why area is important May vary and be open to interpretation.

I guess parental wealth is possibly the easiest to interpret as parents either can afford to send their child to bar school or they can't iyswim.0

DP told me he had heard children with ft working mums did not do as well at school. Not sure where he got that from though.

I'd love to see a source for this, as it's contrary to all the studies I have seen. I just don't think the evidence backs this up!

I've got an Oxbridge first and an M.phil and I'm not rich. Bum.

Or as in our case better educated women marry men they meet through university and end up being SAHMs and waffling science at their DDs wether they are listening or not.

On average you are more likely to be a stay at home mother if you are not well educated and do not earn much actually rather than being a £100k a year wife whose salary would be missed if she stayed home.

Also it is not just who does well academically. Th eposter above with the good qualifications and low pay is a case in point. Someone can be the first person from their family to go to university, do very very well and become say a teacher (I am not knocking teachers but the pay is not great). They want to make a difference because of their left wing politics say and also teachers might well make double their own father's minimum wage of £13k a year. Thy have done very well with their Oxford first comparatively but the lower expectations of their family in a sense limit them to that rather than aspiring to be a woman runing BP on a salary of £800k a year.

Actually greengrow round here it's the better educated mum's who SAH or work child friendly PT hours.

It's less well off mothers who are doing caring jobs, cleaning and shop shifts at all kinds of hours and passing DCs round Friends, relatives or leaving them with fathers, who have done a full days work and who may or may not do much interacting with them.

I think it depends on whose doing the educating if you are looking at it in terms of income.
If you expect them to be spoon fed by professionals in an expensive school and are prepared to buy an education then income is a major contributing factor, hence Tim nice but dim

However, if you want to encourage independent thinkers and learners who are self motivated to learn then money may not be so important.

I think you also need to define "doing well academically"
I would say that a child who struggles but works exceedingly hard and manages 10 GCSE's all C grades has done far better than the very able, none trier who gains 10 GCSE's grade B when they were predicted A*- A.

greengrow, not everyone measures success in terms of monetary value.

Statistics are great but don't always mean they are right and it all depends on how they weight certain criteria and considerations that they give to other factors - so a bad study can really give pointless data

Totally agree, they are only part of the picture.

No thank goodness.

On average you are more likely to be a stay at home mother if you are not well educated and do not earn much actually rather than being a £100k a year wife whose salary would be missed if she stayed home

I know its a straw poll but once on here we had a thread about this, and loads of highly educated women came on to say they chose to stay at home esp while children were small.

After all only small for 0-3 years, 0-5 years, so if you earned such a huge salary, its more likely you could comfortably have that short time off to look after your young. If you couldn't afford too, well....