Income and attainment are linked, why?

[Arkadia]

This article is just out:

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it:

Closing disadvantage gap will take 'over a century' - www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44927942

Nothing new really, but I often wonder, why is attainment linked to income and not to parental involvement or school choice? I remember seeing a documentary on the BBC where it was stated, but not explained, that parental involvement does not matter, only income is a good predictor of how well you will fare at school. There was also a ted talk on the matter I seem to remember...
Anyway, my question is, why is income deemed SO key? Why are kids from rich but totally uninvolved parents in theory more likely to do well than kids from poor, but involved parents? One could say that it is the school because the rich parent tend to send their offspring to schools where parents are generally involved and in so doing they benefit from some kind of herd effect. But if that is the case, what matters is still the parent, and the school while the money is simply a side issue.
I am not talking about children from addicts parents or in the foster system and such like, but normal NOT well off families. Why should they be at such a disadvantage?

Crap parenting is crap parenting regardless of income. But it’s a bloody sight easier to be a good parent if you have a bit of money.

thanks fruit - it was actually for Norestformrz and why she felt pupil premium was a red herring

I really agree that who you know makes a huge difference to life.

another mumsnetter recommended the book Outliers which has a couple of chapters on education in it that I found really interesting.

I've realised increasingly what having money does mean for education. There's so many things where someone from the middle class has advantages, even before you put in that they are more likely to have a higher education so can help the children too.

At a basic level:

Tutoring: be it 11+ or at a different age. Dm tutored maths and she reckoned a year of tutoring at GCSE level would bring 1-2 grade rise, although the best she had was from predicted an E up to a B.

Extra-curricular activities/trips. Yes they may not directly help exams, but some things like music/drama etc are helped, and also some subjects are very clear that there will be expenses. There's a thread a saw recently about geography trips (for A-level) I think and whether a residential or lots of day trips were better. But they had a cash cost. Even if there are funds to help, then it may be enough to put someone off doing it.

Work experience: Things like medicine they look out for work experience. I could get work experience at a relevant place easily. I have various friends or relatives who I could ask. Would be no hassle really. But if you're not friendly with people who are already in those trades, it's much harder to get work experience. People will always take their relative/friend's child over the person they don't know.

Exam remarks: If dd1 who did GCSEs last year had been 1 mark off the next grade on every paper, we could (not saying we would) have risked the money for remark. At about £40 a subject, and you get it back if the mark changes, it would be expensive to loose that amount, but we could have risked it. But there are families for whom they can't risk that £40, or don't have the £40 to put in even knowing that it's highly likely their paper has been mismarked. Yes, some schools have a fund in such circumstances, but not all do.

And that's before you get to the more likely to have a parent at home to help with homework, more likely to have computer access, more space to work, more books to look things up etc.

It seems to me that the die is actually getting weighted further towards the people with money.

A good parent, or a pushy parent, Bert?

The trouble is that this is not really a subject where individual’s life experience is particularly helpful (sorry, i don’t men that to sound horrible). It’s about groups, and statistics. There are two children at our local grammar school who are on pp, for example- their mother is a single parent who is an artist. Their presence does not mean that the statement “X grammar school has a vanishingly small number of pp children” any less true. It does mean however, that people can point at them and say “See?”

I would say its because of limited expectations. In my area at primary I was told that as I was so clever I could work in a shop or maybe even become a secretary. Maybe careers advice has moved on a bit. (NOT trying to insult people who work in shops/are secretaries) but this was not what I was remotely interested in doing.

“A good parent, or a pushy parent, Bert?”

Pushy parents are bad parents.

That bbc article is about children from families whose income is less than £16k. The family income.

That’s not about not multiple having holidays abroad or boarding school. That’s about it being really hard work day to day to get by. I don’t know how many in this thread are going to say they have multiple children living off £16k but I highly doubt it’s a piece of cake!

But a lot of attainment does come about because of pushiness. (I agree with you by the way, but the point is that if we are saying educational achievement is something all parents should aspire to then that embraces a certain amount of pushiness with it.)

“don’t know how many in this thread are going to say they have multiple children living off £16k”

Maybe not on this thread- but there will be loads on Mumsnet. They will all be saying that with just a bit of scrimping and saving and giving up smoking and Sky they can afford school fees and holidays and anyone who can’t is feckless......

The trouble is that this is not really a subject where individual’s life experience is particularly helpful

Amen to this. The thread started off quite interesting and thought-provoking and rapidly became less so when it just became a bunch of anecdotes and people essentially being very smug about their own parenting.

@Norestformrz, can you elaborate on pp and fsm? They are always branded about and I vaguely know what they are - primarily from the news - but, I must confess, I don't know the difference and who is eligible for what.

So what should be done? How do we increase equality of opportunity?

Because think of the potential we are missing. So many kids who could do great things are missed. How do we start to fix it?

@Arkadia Free School Meals are given to children whose parents are on Income Support i believe.

Pupil Premium is a sum given to schools for every child they have on FSM plus those who have been on FSM at any point in the previous 6 years (ever 6).

Schools must spend the pupil premium funding on strategies and resources to boost the attainment of these children.

I thought the chapter on this subject in Freakonomics was interesting. A very extensive US study looked at how parents influenced educational outcomes for their kids. This things were correlated, (a couple of them negatively) with children's educational success:

"1) The child has highly educated parents; 2) The child’s parents have high socioeconomic status; 3) The child’s mother is thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth; 4) The child had low birthweight; 5) The child’s parents speak English in the home; 6) The child is adopted; 7) The child’s parents are involved in the PTA (Parent Teacher Association); and 8) The child has many books in his house."

Here are some factors which did not have a correlation with educational outcomes of children:

"1) The child’s family is intact; 2) The child’s parents recently moved into a better neighborhood; 3) The child’s mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten; 4) The child attended Head Start; 5) The child’s parents regularly take him to museums; 6) The child is regularly spanked; 7) The child frequently watches television; and 8) The child’s parents read to him nearly every day."
(These are not direct quotes from the book, but quotes from a summary of the book.)

So what should be done? How do we increase equality of opportunity?

I suppose to a certain extent it depends on whether low income is in itself causative or whether having a low income is associated with another characteristic that results itself in poor educational attainment. I personally think that having a low income in itself does cause much of the disadvantage in lots of different ways and so cutting benefits is likely to exacerbate it.

I think it's worth pointing out that the kind of intensive, enrichment focused parenting that middle class people do these days is:

a) An adaptation to being middle class and
b) An adaptation to rising inequality.

Its people who already treat intelligence as a form of currency and education as a way of obtaining and displaying social status, watching opportunities contract and ramping that behaviour up a notch.

The PP who said there's no point being on a beach unless you also explain the wildlife and describe the tides is a great example. It's not so much parenting as curating a child's entire experience.

This sort of thing is one way that mc parents operate a "glass floor" to protect their own offspring from downward mobility.
It's not something your going to persuade working class parents to take up because, (although it may be adaptive to the middle class experience) its actually bloody weird and neurotic.
Its also not an arms race that working class parents can win because of the many structural reasons already mentioned.

A lot of people seem to think the answer to social mobility is to make working class parents behave more like middle class parents. I think this is mistaken.
Social mobility happens when incomes are relatively equal and the distance between social classes is narrower. When middle class parents are less neuroticly guarding against failure and working class parents have greater access to resources.

Excellent last paragraph in particular there unlimited

It is an interesting discussion and I am pleased I stumbled across it in active conversations, although I don’t have primary aged children.

Thanks imortal

Because of parental expectations and the definition of success in your culture/social circle

I think that's very interesting unlimited. So what's the answer? I think whatever system is devised, eventually the middle classes find some way to game it to their advantage.

You can't stop the middle class gaming things reallybadidea, That's their whole culture!
You can make the game less important and the consequences of "failure" less brutal.
Social mobility comes as a by product of income equality.

I think in lreland in my childhood it was different. None of our parents had been to college but education became all of their goals for the next generation. My df left school at 13 to work on the farm but he read the paper everyday cover to cover. That meant we all read it as it was there. My dm left school at 15 but was a super bright woman who brought us to the library because she was going there to get books for herself. We had to watch the news as only had one channel so we discussed it at every meal. We had a small farm. My dps put 9 of us through college and from an early age in the house it was..what will you study in college..expectations count a huge amount. My dm discussed all our courses as she was hungry for information and totally clued in. We were poor but language rich and stimulation rich. Money isn't everything but attitude.

“You can't stop the middle class gaming things“

It’s not that they are gaming things. It’s that the system is set to “middle class default”

“I think in lreland in my childhood it was different.”

No. In your family it was different

And we must be wary of romanticizing the past. It was another country. And frequently a shit one.