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 Elephants that's surely a wealth factor again. Better educated means more likely to be with a better educated and therefore higher earning partner and therefore more able to survive on one income.

Of course these are broad generalisations and clearly there will always be exceptions to the rule.

alpacino Taking that time off is likely to mean the woman no longer earns £100k though. They don't tend to be the types of job you can dip in and out of.

Money however is a big enabler and gives you the freedom to chose not to work which is likely to be why higher earners find themselves having the option to stay at home..

Er, actually I'm the third generation woman on my mother's side to go to Oxford with a family going back hundreds of years of doctors and bishops etc...

I am a teacher, but it's not because of my politics, and it's not even about 'giving something back', though I am more left wing than a lot of very right-wing teachers I know: it's because I genuinely love my subject (and I also like teenagers) and an academic career (my next best option) has much lousier money and security than teaching.

I could have, like one of my (also Oxbridge) sisters been a rich lawyer, but I didn't love the law. I could have, like my equally educated other sister, worked for development charities and been poorer, but I like chatting about books and my talent lay in teaching and this makes all the difference to me.

I think I am financially middle-of the road, with what I think of as a good quality of life, for which I work very hard. In my new job, I leave the house before my children are awake, but I can see them in the evenings and I was fully involved in their babyhood.

Yes Atticus but with 100 grand coming in you can save up for three years? I could do it? To cover maternity leave.

What sort of jobs give that salary? I imagine ones where high expertise is needed, certain qualifications and possible client relationships?

What I find interesting is how siblings can be very different in terms of their academic achievement. Clearly means that a big part is simply how motivated the individual child is.

I did well academically and am a very high earner married to another high earner. First born.

My middle born DSis doesn't work and is on benefits, not very academic, chose loser boyfriend at age 18 over university.

Youngest DSis is a teacher, not particularly academic but earns an ok salary married to another teacher also earning ok salary.

All have same parents, same working class small town upbringing.

You can save alpacino but walking away from that sort of income is incredibly difficult since the loss of your salary has such a massive change on the family income. Maternity leave is one thing, leaving your job to stay at hem until the DCs go to school is another matter altogether,

£100k salaries are generally going to be for lawyers, accountants, banking, senior management in large corporations, company directors.

My above post was in response to greengrow, trying to point out that financial rewards might appeal a bit less to those who truly love learning in the first place, rather than what learning can get for you in terms of status and cash.

home not hem!

greengrow I've just re-read your post about me and I'm loving your assumptions about my background!

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.

This kind of statement demands either more granularity or a retraction. High-flyers tend to marry high-flyers, and 50K after-tax is not going to lure a certain demographic of women back to work if their husbands work 80+ hours and are making 300K+.

but lovely if a £100k woman is married to a £100k man the loss of her salary is going to have an enormous financial impact.

I wholeheartedly agree with parental support and nurturing. In all it's forms. We removed DS from school during yeR 8 because he was being bullied, had low self esteem and poor mental health. He wasn't capable of achieving academically when he was so miserable. So we home educated him. I don't pretend I could offer the academic input of his teachers, but we were able to improve his self esteem whilst trying our best academically. He returned to a different school for year 9 and went on to pass all his GCSESs. I don't believe he would have done as well if we hadn't paid attention to his mental health.

I also have a personal hypothesis about language development. DH and I worked opposite shifts with our first child, to reduce the need for child care, and while we both talked away to him, he didn't have the benefit of hearing us talk to each other so often and his language development may have been affected.

Roll forward a few years to DC 3, born after a gap. We didn't want the older DC to feel sidelined by making the evening routine about the new baby, and so we focused upon having dinner as a family every night and not bath and bedtime. The result is that DC 3 has been part of noisy family life from day one, and has the vocabulary, and debating skills to prove it.

I would like to put forward good self esteem/mental health and not putting children to bed too early as contributing factors.

Its very easy to see the tangible benefits of education if you are earning a good income because of your education. I work in the City and the vast majority of the big earners are well educated. e.g. senior traders with Post Docs in Physics or Maths etc. as well as the usual suspects like lawyers and the like.

How do you make education feel worthwhile to someone who has no role models or proof showing that education enhances your life.

I believe that how well a child does is down to mindset of the family rather than parental income. People who believe that hard work can affect a child's results will make their children do their homework and practice reading.

The children of immigrants on a low income often do well becuase their parents have get up and go. It takes guts to move to a new country for a better life. Such people often encourage their children to take advantage of opportunities they never had as children.

In deprived areas there is often a higher proportion of adults with learning difficulties. It is hard for such parents to support their children's learning. Perhaps more of a problem is that they have an negative view of education. If parents do not believe that they can make a difference then they will not push their children.

Sure, atticus, but the average 100K-woman is not married to a 100K-man. Firstly, women tend to marry men who are both older and make more money than them. Secondly, the average 100K woman would tend to take maternity leave in her critical career-building years whereas her husband would not.

Which is why I ventured a guess that the average 100K woman is actually married to a 300K man.

chazs I think I have an idea: you put brilliant teachers in schools as the norm - and this is done by paying teachers as much as doctors and making a PGCE as competitive as medicine.

Only then will you attract the best graduates into the profession and only then will people like greengrow think teaching is a worthwhile career.

lovely, I know lots of high earning women who earn more than their spouses.

We're obviously generalising massively in this conversation.

What's wrong with putting children to bed 'too' early?!

My dgm and dgf came over after the second ww from Eastern Europe (offered by the British government that needed workers in post war Britain - he was a solicitor in their home country and she was studying for a degree when the war started - they had a tough time and had to escape where they were so were in a camp. They were given a pound and a passport and got jobs in factories in uk, dgf died when my father was little, dgm remarried and bought her sons up with the expectation of going to university (she and dsgf went on in later life to do other things but after ds' had grown up). They grew up poor in a disadvantaged area but both went to uni - one is an academic (professor) and the other is a dentist. Based on my purely anecdotal experience - yes the parents approach to education is something that would help a child do well academically.

I know word factory - so then it comes down to the quality of the study - how it is prepared, the sample you test, whether the testing is valid - are the questions right - too broad and you miss stuff, what assumptions are made, are they considering everything that impacts their data and then the quality of the analysis done after the data is gathered - the analysts own knowledge, prejudices and even political or commercial leanings - if it is a crap study their conclusions or nonsensical or over-simplistic or biased.

Conclusions can be not conclusions or

Party I was referring to the british culture of early tea / bath / bed. People often cite European cultures as having"better" education systems as their children start school later and yet appear to do as well or better.

My own view is that by allowing their children to spend time in adult company during the evening, instead of packing them off to bed so the adults can eat in peace, these cultures are nurturing their children's language development, and positively affecting their academic attainment level.

Immigrants are often well educated or from the middle class of their own country. It might not be obvious when they arrive as they may have sacrificed most of what they have to get here or have had the rug pulled out from under them. It doesn't surprise me when many immigrant families value education as they often come from just the sort of background in their own country which would value education.

I find it interesting that nowhere in this thread has the difference between education and qualifications been raised.

When talking about the potential causal/correlative factors such as maternal education, and family income/wealth (also two very different things....high income doesn't necessarily mean high wealth IYSWIM), it's clear that these factors may just be proxies for some other kind of more or less amorphous influences (for example, no-one's mentioned class which is also interesting - traditional class analysis took the culture of different classes to be very different in respect to education - the middle classes typically valuing formal education, and particularly qualifications, in a way that wasn't quite the same in either the working or upper classes). And no-one's mentioned the difference that has occurred over the last 60 years with first the rise then the fall of the big postwar expansion of the grammar school and free university system, which created a very different climate for educational prospects for non-wealthy children in, say, 1965 compared to today. It's not surprising that if maternal education was once the biggest factor (acting as a proxy perhaps for the intersection of class, natural aptitude and culture), that in today's neoliberal capitalism pure wealth might have become the biggest factor, not necessarily because you can buy education or academic attainment, but because it can buy you the things that academic attainment used to be one way of helping you buy.

And qualifications are themselves a proxy for what we assume education to be - if you get a job at a management consultancy because you got a physics degree from Oxford you are probably not going to be asked technical solutions to mechanics problems in the interview. The piece of paper acts as a credential, but how much education stands behind it is not always clear, nor how it should guarantee that you should have a lucrative job. For those kinds of jobs the qualification just really serves as a way of credentialling yourself as a member of an elite - if you want a city job they are got by doing a lot of other things as well, mostly things that involve you having done other kinds of positional advantage that normally only wealth or class position can buy. It might look like you got that job because you have a degree from Oxbridge, but actually you got it because you did other things like look the right part, talk to the interviewers in ways they expected to be talked to, know people who could give you useful info about how to go about getting the job, have done informal work experience in the right places, and so on.