Maternal schooling and children’s relative inequalities in developmental outcomes: evidence from the 1947 school leaving age reform in Britain

Abstract

This paper investigates whether mothers’ participation in post‐compulsory education impacts on children’s relative inequalities across four developmental outcomes. The empirical analysis uses information from children born in 1958 in Britain. Mothers of the 1958 British cohort were affected by the 1947 school leaving age reform, which increased the age of compulsory schooling from 14 to 15 years. We selected the first‐born cohort members whose mothers were born in 1933 and 1934 and whose mothers completed compulsory schooling only. We found that the additional year of maternal schooling was significantly associated with relative improvements in mathematics attainment for their children, but no significant differences for reading or behavioural outcomes. The impact on mathematics was mainly for boys. These results suggest wider dispersion in mathematics attainment between sons whose mothers benefited from the additional year of schooling in 1947 and those whose mothers did not.

Notes

1. To our knowledge, one of the few studies to look into developmental inequalities was Feinstein (2003). His study showed widening disparities in children’s relative position according to their mother’s social class as children aged. However, his study did not measure the statistical significance of these changes over time as his measure of development combined several different indicators.

2. Reading and mathematics tests at 11 and 16 were constructed by the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales (NFER) specifically for use in the NCDS.

3. Tests administered to NCDS cohort members were not planned to capture absolute growth in mathematics or reading attainment. For this reason, the raw score achieved in these tests cannot be compared over time. We standardised these test scores, such that our outcome variable is a measure of the relative position of the cohort member within the distribution of test scores at a given age, i.e. 7, 11 and 16 years.

4. Equation (1) does not include controls for mothers’ social background as the sample of mothers was homogenous with respect to these variables (as shown in Table 1). We conducted additional sensitivity checks to verify this issue and found that none of the social background factors were statistically significant.

5. We did not find significant effects of maternal schooling on the level or on the slope of reading scores, externalising or internalising behaviours by gender. These results were not included here but are available from the authors upon request.

6. We also re‐estimated all models in Table 3 with Mundlak’s correction for the correlation between random effect and maternal education and none of the estimated parameters for maternal schooling changed their statistical significance.