The educational challenges facing people from disadvantaged backgrounds is something I’ve touched on a number of times in the past year or so.  Whether it’s immigrants, the technologically displaced or those living in poor and polluted backgrounds, challenges to progress are often proving insurmountable.

A new paper from Oxford University highlights the challenges that persist in the UK.  It reveals that children of broadly similar cognitive ability have very different educational chances as a result of differing socio-cultural, economic and educational resources available to their family.

Educational prospects

The researchers assessed data about children born in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s, and they found a significant wastage of talent.  Despite children having high levels of cognitive ability, if they had poorer social origins, this talent was often going to waste and their educational attainment remained poorer than children of similar ability from wealthier backgrounds.

Indeed, the research found that just half of the difference in educational attainment of children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds was due to their cognitive ability, with the other half largely consisting of factors associated with their backgrounds.

“If we compare the educational attainment of children born in the 1990s to those in the late 1950s and early 1970s, we see that parent’s economic resources have become a less important factor, but their socio-cultural and educational resources have grown in significance,” the researchers say. “That means that your parents’ place in society and their own level of education still play a big part in how well you may do.”

The researchers hope that their findings provide valuable insight to policy makers so that they can help children overcome hurdles not of their own making.  The researchers accept the scale of this challenge however.

“These findings show that there are limits to how far inequalities of opportunity can be reduced through educational policy alone. Changes in educational policy aren’t having the impact we want,”  they say.

Instead, things such as workplace training and alternative routes into higher-level occupations can be important channels to support greater social mobility.  Alas, the evidence suggests that young people today increasingly face less favorable mobility prospects than their parents, but awareness if a crucial first step towards devising the interventions to try and help young people overcome the hurdles they face.