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 association between family SES and children’s primary school performance has remained stable. Across 16 British population cohorts born between 1921 and 2011 (N = 91,935), we confirmed previous findings of a correlation between family SES and children’s school performance of 0.28 [95% Confidence Interval 0.22–0.34], after adjusting for cohort-specific confounders. Contrary to the popular 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 influence 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.

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AbstractAlcohol use during emerging adulthood is associated with adverse life outcomes but its risk factors are not well known. Here, we predicted alcohol use in 3,153 adults aged 22 years from (a) genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS) based on genome-wide association studies for the target phenotypes number of drinks per week and Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) scores, (b) 30 environmental factors, and (c) their interactions (i.e. GxE effects). The GPS accounted for up to 1.9% of the variance in alcohol use (i.e. AUDIT-C score), while the 30 measures of environmental factors together accounted for 21.1%. The 30 GPS-environment interactions did not explain any additional variance and none of the interaction terms exceeded the significance threshold corrected for multiple testing. Our findings suggest that GPS and environmental factors have primarily direct, additive effects rather than interacting systematically.Statement of RelevanceWe consider our research to be of interest and significance to the wider public in addition to the academic community. A wide range of social, economic and health outcomes are attributed to alcohol use in emerging adulthood; however, its risk factors are not well known. Twin studies suggest that genetics account for about 40% of the difference in alcohol use between people. Identifying the environments that moderate the influence of individuals’ genetic predispositions on their alcohol use is key for developing and implementing effective interventions. In the current study, we show that individual-level genetic data and a wide range of environmental factors predict alcohol use in emerging adulthood. However, we did not find any evidence for the moderation of the individual’s genetic propensity for alcohol use by any of the environmental factors, suggesting that genes and the environment have additive effects rather than interacting systematically.

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