Achievement at school and socioeconomic background—an educational perspective

INTRODUCTION Educational achievement, and its relationship with socioeconomic background, is one of the enduring issues in educational research. The influential Coleman Report concluded that schools themselves did little to affect a student’s academic outcomes over and above what the students themselves brought to them to school—‘the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighbourhood and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school’ (p. 325). Over the intervening 50 years, much has been added to the research literature on this topic, including several high-quality meta-analyses. It has become ubiquitous in research studies to use a student’s socioeconomic background, and that of the school they attend, as contextual variables when seeking to investigate potential influences on achievement. The two articles in this issue of Science of Learning touch on aspects of this discussion rarely included in the educational research literature. The article by Smith–Wooley et al. asks whether whether it is the influence of the student socioeconomic background that is the greater influence or whether the parents are passing down intellectually advantageous genes to their offspring. In contrast, the article by van Dongen et al. suggests that that it is likely a combination of genetics and socioeconomic background, and they examine the effect of environment on the epigenetic status of genes that are involved in learning and memory.