In Britain and elsewhere, the influence of family socioeconomic status (SES) on education is already evident in primary school, and it persists and increases throughout the school years, with children from impoverished families earning lower grades and obtaining fewer educational qualifications than children from more privileged backgrounds. Reducing the effect of family background on children’s education is a pivotal aim of educators, policymakers, and researchers, but the success of their efforts is poorly evidenced to date. Here, we show for the first time that over 95 years in Britain the influence of family SES on children’s school performance has remained stable. Across 15 British population cohorts born between 1921 and 2011 (N = 83,249), we confirmed previous findings of a correlation between family SES and children’s school performance of .27 [95% Confidence Interval .21-.32], adjusted for cohort-specific confounders. However, contrary to the general assumption that family background inequality has increased over time, we observed only minimal differences in the association between family SES and school performance across British cohorts. We argue that education policies must prioritize equity in learning outcomes over equality in learning opportunities, if they seek to disrupt the perpetuation of social and economic inequality across generations. We speculate that the effect of family SES on children’s education will only noticeably weaken if primary education settings become better equipped to meet and remediate the children’s differential learning needs.

We tested the relative influence of mothers’ and fathers’ education on children’s differences in intelligence (IQ) across five UK population cohort studies (total N = 48,175) with children born in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1994-96, and 2000. Associations between mothers’ and fathers’ education with children’s IQ ranged from r = .38 (CI 95% .36 - .41) to r = .19 (CI 95% .17-.20) across generations. Fathers’ education was more strongly associated with children’s IQ in earlier cohorts but later, mothers’ education became more influential. Negative interactions between mothers’ and fathers’ education, suggesting compensatory effects, influenced children’s IQ only in the earlier cohorts significantly. We conclude parents’ education has continuously influenced children’s IQ with medium to large effect sizes across generations.