Introduction
the education of parents is also known to impact on all these features of family life
there is reason to suppose that education plays an important and particular role in the
inter-generational transmission of academic attainment.
There is substantial evidence that children’s education level and cognitive
development are positively related to the education of their parents (Wolfe &
Haveman, 2002). Whether the father or the mother left school before age fifteen has a
negative effect on the probability that the young person will stay on at school beyond
the minimum age required (Bynner & Joshi, 2002; Feinstein et al., 1999; Gregg &
Machin, 2000). Other evidence shows that mother’s educational qualifications are
positively related to children’s maths and reading test scores (Gayle et al., 2002;
Hanson et al., 1997; Hill et al., 2001; Joshi & Verropoulou, 2000; Smith et al., 1997).
The features of family background described so far are routinely considered in
economic, sociological or demographic approaches to the attainment gap. Yet in
branches of the psychological literature another set of factors has also been the focus
of important study. There, a focus on features of parenting has emphasised the effects
of parenting styles and the nature of interactions between parents and children as
important determinants of children’s attainment. That literature has also examined the
attainment gap in psychological and behavioural development, another aspect of
inequality with implications for the lifecourse and also an aspect of the wider benefit
of parental learning.
So, the topic of inter-generational transmission is broad and diverse and has been
approached in different disciplines, with different methodologies, addressing subtly
different research questions. Even within disciplines, authors adopt different empirical
strategies. Researchers have used a great many different models to explore the
influence of family background on children’s development. These different models
control and test for different factors, in different combinations, in different datasets.
Sometimes parental education is modelled as a key causal variable, sometimes as a
mediating factor, sometimes as a control.
Much relevant literature has focused not on the inter-generational transmission of
learning but on one or other important link in the chain of transmission. For example,
Guo and Harris (2000) model the effect of income on attainment, entering parental
education as a control (see 6.3). In many of their specifications, the effect of parental
education often actually proves bigger than the effect of income but since parent
education is not their focus the actual effect, its role and its size, is rather underplayed.
Therefore, in order to understand, model and quantify the role of education in inter-
generational transmission it is helpful to use a framework that can place these
different strands of research in a common context and so enable some assessment of
the relative importance of the different features.
In this introductory section we describe our hypotheses about how and why parental
education impacts on children’s attainments. To clarify these hypotheses and to
structure the summary of the very diverse literature reviewed we draw on a