The effects of parents' learning on child attainment
This project will be undertaken during 2005 and 2006. Early findings will be available from spring 2006.
For more information on this project, please contact Ricardo Sabates.
This study will provide empirical evidence on the extent to which adult learning can redress intergenerational attainment gaps, focussing particularly on those parents who achieve Level 2 qualifications as adults, or who take first steps to doing so. The project will also provide evidence on the types of learning that have the most substantial second generation benefits.
The central focus of the project is an assessment of the implications for children of learning undertaken by their parents, either individually or as family learning.
Five subsidiary areas are being addressed:
- The relationship between level of qualification attained by parents and the school attainments of children.
- The extent to which the engagement of parents in adult learning alters trajectories of child attainment.
- The mechanisms through which adult learning has such effects.
- The extent to which findings differ by course type, location or duration of learning
- The extent to which findings differ for families with low levels of prior qualification or low prior engagement with learning.
This project takes advantage of the adult learning module in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). This module was developed by the DfES (now known as the DCFS) in order to accurately record the qualifications achieved by the parents in terms of NVQ equivalent qualifications. Questions were also asked about adult learning undertaken during the previous three years and reasons for participation or non-participation.
This information links to other measures of the family context, to data on children’s attainments over time and to measures of their attitudes to learning. The connections between these diverse factors will be modelled using the Bronfenbrenner ecological model described in A model of the intergenerational transmission of success by Feinstein, Duckworth and Sabates (2004), Report 10 in the Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report series.
Time invariant selection bias needs to be dealt with because the outcome variable is changes in the attainment of children. To the extent that the decision of parents to participate in learning is the result of time-varying factors, this may lead to selection bias but, since the data also includes measures of the reasons for participation in learning, this type of bias can be assessed to a certain degree.
