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?

Many people on lower incomes cannot earn a high income because they simply are not bright enough to get a better job. I think that’s fact and it’s not yuk. Not everyone can be a teacher or a doctor. We cannot assume everyone has the same intelligence. You have to reward intelligence and capability in Work but you also have to ensure that people are oven the opportunity to do their best. Some will grasp that. Others are not going to, for a variety of reasons. We also would like to ensure the poorest in society are helped to achieve if they can. It’s inevitsble that not everyone is going to so we have the welfare state to assist. It’s also a fact that some people are more determined than others.

We also know we have around 1/4 million families who need a great deal of help. Rather than spending money on catch all programmes, it might be better to target money where it can do the most good.

really I think you are selective reading to some extent.

I'm seeing a lot of posters who are explaining why children from poorer families find it harder to succeed due to lack of time, money, and parental education / experience themselves.

This is a thread about educational attainment (I think). I do think that the MC have higher expectations of kids going to university. This is a lot because this is what they expect as they did it themselves. In our society as a whole, non university routes to success are viewed as 'lesser' as people close their eyes to the success people can have from e.g becoming a plumber, or an estate agent, or whatever, that don't need a degree.

I think Tony Blair did everyone a disservice when he aimed for 50% to go to university. He would have done better imo to work towards a) improving parity of esteem for vocational routes and b) to ensure equal access to the university courses from across the social spectrum.

I agree with a PP who said about MC parents 'gaming' the system. That to me is a primary reason for abolishing standard grammar schools. Entry just doesn't seem to pick the top 20%. It seems to me that it probably picks most of the top 5% and then from the next 35%. But those from that 35% are biased towards parents with the time, energy, money, skills to ensure their child is properly prepared - aka 'gaming'.

@noblegiraffe has posted graphs before showing why Pupil Premium is aimed where it is. The graphs split achievement by parental income, and at one point there is a massive drop off , which is where PP is set.

Bubbles Many people on lower incomes cannot earn a high income because they simply are not bright enough to get a better job. I think that’s fact and it’s not yuk.

That may be true, but there are also likely to be many people on lower incomes who cannot earn a higher income because they have not been educated enough to their potential. They are then caught in a trap, because they can't afford to take time out of work to improve their education levels (assuming they haven't been completely turned off it anyway).

Think of the person who just missed getting into grammar. And then had to leave at 16 to help earn money for the family. If the education system fails children from less well off families then their chance of advancement is reduced.

Compare with my 'academically challenged' DC. I can throw my education, time and money towards helping them do well at school. Passing their GCSEs gives them opportunities for further courses. We can afford to subsidise them while they study or do voluntary work towards a career. They may be less bright than some other kids, but with our family behind them they are getting a better start towards their adulthood.

Many people on lower incomes cannot earn a high income because they simply are not bright enough to get a better job. I think that’s fact and it’s not yuk.

If this is a fact then I'm sure you'll be able to post links to good quality evidence that shows that intelligence and income are strongly linked.

Often recent immigrant families are very interested in grades and see education as the route to attainment and then to success (note attainment and success are not necessarily the same). ... This can be seen as great attainment in a narrow sense. However, I would suggest that some level of money or cultural capital or awareness of cultural capital amongst parents is what transforms just attainment in terms of grades into something much broader and richer - and this is often lacking amongst those who focus purely on grades and study.

Perhaps these immigrants are simply playing a longer game. To quote John Adams, the second president of the United States:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

An narrowly focused child from a poor background may feel out of place and have a miserable time socially at Oxbridge (or a medical/legal course), but they will, on average, earn more than those who do not manage to get a place (even if not as much as those who go to Oxbridge from a more privileged background) and will be in a better position to allow their children "to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

I think the point was made recently that often those who are disadvantaged are not able to access enough education to reach their potential to become higher earners. Some people in that group would have had great intelligence and potential and some would have had less intelligence and potential, but given more opportunities by heir families and society, most could probably have achieved more - that's the whole idea of what disadvantaged means. And I too, think disadvantaged is a more useful term to use than class.

And yes, this thread is specifically about attainment - in academic terms it is a measurable thing by grades at school. And there clearly is a link between lower incomes and attainment in these grade terms. This isn't to say people with low incomes are less intelligent (although it is of course a fact tht not everyone is equally intelligent and there will be more and less intelligent amongst all groups but probably not evenly spread) but again, that their disadvantage contributes towards lower attainment. What many people have successfully identified on this thread are the various sources of disadvantage - family based, school based, culture based - these create lower expectation, lower opportunity and lower income and an inter-generational effect in broad terms, although as has also been mentioned, people do 'break out' but they are not the norm.

When people do 'break out' from low income backgrounds to achieve well as school (attainment in terms of grades) it seems to be because of one or a combination factors, which most low income family children simply don't have access to;

• unusually high intelligence and drive towards something different
• highly motivated family (often seen as often mentioned here amongst certain ethnic minority groups with high levels of educational aspiration)
• external circumstances which work in their favour - such as an excellent local school or influential individual in their life.

Regarding the intelligence thing, which is a source of offense - what data would you seek as evidence of intelligence instead of attainment? Would so-called intelligence tests which cover VR/NVR type skills rather than content do it - those used in IQ tests, things like MIdyis or Cat4 tests?

Expat, I agree that taking a narrow view of success, is very much part of a long game, even if at the time people are not aware they are playing the long game.

If you are poor but aspirational and perhaps relatively new to a country, academic success in terms of grades and uni is a route out of poverty. I can see why people think music and dancing and similar are frivolous or distractions from the key purpose of study and grades. As I said, perhaps it is not until the next generation who perhaps take the grades and academic success more for granted, that it is possible to engage in the luxury of seeing success more widely and valuing and giving time (and income which is usually needed too) to those wider cultural activities - luxuries indeed.

Many people on lower incomes cannot earn a high income because they simply are not bright enough to get a better job.

There is a correlation between IQ and income, as well as between IQ and profession, but the noise is very high. According to the graph on that page, the top 25% of janitors have higher IQs than the bottom 25% of college professors or electrical engineers!

Society doesn't reward intelligence directly. Society (sort of) rewards achievement. Achievement is positively correlated with intelligence, but massively affected by opportunity.

Chocolate,

My understanding is that it is incredibly difficult to find a test of 'intelligence' that is not affected by experience / education, simply because the advantage of 'positive experience' - better nutrition, better care, more simulation, more language - starts so early, and because there is no measure of 'intelligence / potential' that cannot be improved through familiarisation or direct / indirect teaching.

It might be possible, given the wealth of data available from e.g. IQ tests, attainment tests of various sorts, to obtain some kind of 'norm' for a specific socio-economic group and then measure how far an individual member of that group differs from it?

I wonder, btw, what would happen if grammars and other selective schools had to take the 'average' proportion of PP children from their catchment - so for example, they had to have 23.9% PP children if that was the local average, but they could select the most able 23.9%, while they also selected the most able of the 76.1% non-PP children.

I wonder, btw, what would happen if grammars and other selective schools had to take the 'average' proportion of PP children from their catchment - so for example, they had to have 23.9% PP children if that was the local average, but they could select the most able 23.9%, while they also selected the most able of the 76.1% non-PP children.

I'm guessing they would end up mostly taking the children of university educated writers who earned below £16K in one of the last six years while working on their novels. And recent immigrants.

The thing is, would that be enough to make up 23.9% of the intake? I am guessing that that is the makeup of the 2% or so PP children at many grammars...

My question is whether, if low income genuinely lowers 'measured attainment', for all the reasons discussed above, then any selectivity should compensate for that by simply taking the 'most able' from any group, up to their proportion in society as a whole. I agree that the 11+ would have to become 'opt out' everywhere, as otherwise simply the barrier of having to apply would automatically skew the test entrants relative to the population.

This has been posted before but explains it welll

Last one

I didn't realize we could upload images. Here's the table of IQ ranges by occupation I referred to earlier. Source link [[http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
here]]. Actual underlying paper here.

10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles marked for each occupation. So, again, the top 25% of janitors have higher IQs than the bottom 25% or so of college professors or electrical engineers.

The thing is, would that be enough to make up 23.9% of the intake?

Probably not fully, but I think it's likely to skew heavily in those directions.

if low income genuinely lowers 'measured attainment', for all the reasons discussed above, then any selectivity should compensate for that by simply taking the 'most able' from any group, up to their proportion in society as a whole.

Even if it were possible, selecting purely on "background-neutral ability" would have several implications for those schools. At the very least:

1. You would have a wider range of achievement at entry. You might need something akin to Oxford Lady Margaret Hall's Foundation Year to catch low-achieving high-ability children up to the rest of the entry. I have no idea what the impact of "being held back a year" at 11 years old would be. Or else you would need much further setting within the school which may offset some of the benefit of being in a grammar.

2. You might have a wider range of progress after entry. Students of high ability who have low achievement at 10 years old presumably underachieve for good reasons. To the extent it's because they don't have sufficient support outside of school, it's not clear to me that just attending a grammar would fix that. Again, this might lead to further setting within the school, which may offset some of the benefits of being in a grammar.

I'm not suggesting that your ideal is not desirable. I'm saying that any school which tried it would have to adapt quite a bit because the student body would become much more heterogeneous in many ways than under the current system.

What about specialist grammar schools ONLY for pupil premium pupils that pay double pay to teachers and have enforced class sizes of 15 or less?

Only way middle class people could game that is by deliberately impoverishing themselves.

This is a slightly bizarre list of occupations. Plenty are not on it!

Janitor? I think we, mostly, would expect our surgeons to be of higher intelligence than a building janitor? It also begs the question why the janitors at the top have not made alternative use of their intelligence. That is perhaps where choice comes in. Do they like this job and do not want the extra responsiblity and training that other jobs entail? They might be extremely happy with their jobs. Also, IQ is a crude measure of intelligence.

The idea that huge numbers of PP children are massively intelligent but its not spotted or supported is a bit ridiculous. Their outcomes are clearly not saying that, even with massive support and money, they would not get 8/9 grades at GCSE. Many just could never improve that much if their average grade is C or D. The majoroty are clearly not grammar type children. We have opt out of 11 plus where I live - still few PP in the grammar schools. However, if they had tutoring this figure could be improved, but not massively.

The amount of tracking of progress in schools and help towards attaining well is taken very seriously. However, it is the ones who could do better with targeted help is where there should be a concerted effort made with the correct interventions that work. The original research said the children on benefits did worse, the D grades. I took that to be children whose parents were wholly on benefits and not on in work benefits. Clearly the educational attainment of the parents makes a big difference and attitude to learning and ambition. However, very clever children of all backgrounds are helped to achieve, if they want it.

Regarding technical or vocational training - it really cannot be the same as high flying graduates. My DH is a Chartered Engineer. This takes most Engineers 3 years to attain, or much longer, post degree. Why should a school leaver at 16 who is less competent, with far lower basic qualifications, be valued the same if they take a lower engineering route? They do, of course, have a value as do plumbers, electricians and bricklayers, but do not let us pretend they can have parity with the highly educated. In the vast majority of developed societies, this cannot be the case for economic reasons. However, if anyone has an entrepenurial streak, then go for it! That may well be more rewarding!

I dislike grammar schools generally because I think that it is wrong to focus disproportionately on the top x% to the detriment of the rest, when everyone deserves to reach their full potential.

However if for the sake of argument I was designing a grammar system then I think that the best way of preventing the MC gaming the system would be to identify the 'disadvantaged' children by the level of parental education eg kids whose parents didn't have any higher educational qualifications. Even the gamiest MC person is unlikely to avoid going to university so that they can get a theoretical future child into a grammar school!

I do not deny that people with low intelligence will generally have low incomes, however I do not think it follows that you can just say, oh, poor people just aren't as clever as rich people. Or that they in some way choose to be poor. It just isn't that straightforward and we risk missing out on a huge pool of talent by writing people off in that way. I think things such as contextual offers for university courses may have a part to play in widening access, but IME schemes like this are resisted and resented by the MC as they see 'poor people's getting some kind of advantage over them, without acknowledging that by virtue of being MC you already have masses of advantages!

Many people on lower incomes cannot earn a high income because they simply are not bright enough to get a better job.

People who make this kind of remark are failing to realise that a hell of a lot of what they see as other people's intelligence (or lack of it) is not innate but learnt. And that there are many other advantages that might allow a wealthy, privately-educated person access to very good jobs even if they were of fairly low intelligence.

And here comes again the MC bashing... I am still to understand why it is better that everybody does badly or do not reach their potential, than to have SOME who do and what is wrong to try our utmost to make sure our children have a good/better life.

@BubblesBuddy, maybe Will Hunting skewed the numbers :D

I had a friend with certainly above average intelligence who never really looked for work or anything, just happy drifting. This friend came from a good home, with reasonable money, invested parents, etc, whoever the outcome has been far from ideal. The only saving grace is that there I no "next generation".
I have also personally come across several families where entire generations were on benefit. Could the younger generations be saved? Who knows and NO idea how. For sure, to them education didn't seem a priority.

Parents with money who are alcoholic or drug addicts have spare money after paying for their addiction, no dealers knocking on the door.

They live in bigger houses so children have their own rooms and sometimes own bathrooms, parents can employ a nanny or provide music lessons/tutors.

The spare money can also pay for food, if the poor child's mum has spent her last £5 on alcohol they go hungry, the rich parent who is out of it, the children can get a take away delivered.

Books, access to books makes a huge difference.

Individual laptops/tablets rather than a shared computer with limited broadband.

Electricity not being on a prepayment meter so rich children never have to go to bed at 6.30pm because the lights have gone out.

Rich children often socialise with other rich children who also have access to the same things.

The idea that huge numbers of PP children are massively intelligent but its not spotted or supported is a bit ridiculous. Their outcomes are clearly not saying that, even with massive support and money, they would not get 8/9 grades at GCSE.

How would you know this? On what basis do you make the claim that £1300/year additional funding is sufficient to overcome the acknowledged disadvantages of poverty? On what basis do you make the claim that PP children are so much less intelligent than their more economically advantaged counterparts?

I've shown you my data. Now you show me yours.

We have opt out of 11 plus where I live - still few PP in the grammar schools.

Absolutely - because by the age of 11, the advantage of NOT being PP is already very obvious.

What i am proposing is that the grammar schools, if they wish to be selective, MUST admit the right proportion of PP children. If grammar education is as genuinely 'better' as its supporters claim, then they should make better progress. If, actually, the advantage of grammars is all about intake (which is my working hypothesis), then at least the grammars will start to have their fair share of the social, family etc problems that come with many disadvantaged pupils and take their fair share of the burdens that this places on comprehensive schools in all areas and (disproportionately) non-grammars in selective areas.

I also, btw, believe that this should happen for 'leafy' / desirable comprehensives and for faith schools - all schools in an area should have equal proportions of deprived, SEN etc children - so school A might have a small catchment for non-PP, non-SEN boys, but a HUGE catchment for PP girls or SEN boys. It would make the perceived differences between schools - currently based MUCH more on their intake than their progress - much more fairly based on actual educational provision.

Another correlation that I haven't seen mentioned so far is that richer parents are more likely to live further away from their own parents than poor ones (I can't remember the study now - the tipping point seems to be, understandly enough, moving 'away' for university study). That would be another factor feeding into what time-poor parents do for childcare. Richer parents would be a) less likely to have grandparents on hand and so b) more likely to be putting children in "enriched" childcare, or childcare that explicitly prepares children for a school environment so they can hit the ground running. Grandparents in richer families are also less likely to be working themselves and so if they are involved in the childcare can do more of the stuff already mentioned (beaches, museums, reading) than a grandparent who is helping out around their own work.

(I'm not at all saying that being looking after by grandparents/other family members is necessarily disadvantaging for children, but it might be a factor contribuing to being less "school-ready" which then would form part of the very early discrepancies being seen.)