How well can we predict educational outcomes? Examining the roles of cognitive ability and social position in educational attainment

Abstract

Social inequalities in UK educational outcomes continue to persist despite improvements in recent years. However, studies that examine these inequalities fail to account for differences in prior cognitive ability. We seek to determine the influence of cognitive ability on educational outcomes and the extent of socio-economic disparities in education across a wide range of indicators while accounting for cognitive ability. Social inequalities exist whereby children from disadvantaged backgrounds systematically underperform compared to their advantaged peers regardless of cognitive ability; high ability children from disadvantaged backgrounds are disproportionately less likely to attain good grades compared to children from advantaged backgrounds. In addition, school effects operate to add to this inequality as children in fee-paying secondary schools outperform their state secondary school counterparts regardless of ability. Future UK policies should focus on reducing social inequality in education to ensure that all children are offered the same life chances regardless of background.

Can education be personalised using pupils’ genetic data?

“…There was a large amount of overlap in the polygenic score distribution between pupils in the top 10% of attainers and all others; while pupils with a high polygenic score are more likely to be high attainers, genetics do not determine high attainment. High academic attainment is due to both environmental and genetic factors, including social background 19 , teacher bias 22,23 , the home and school environment 24,25 , and luck. It is also possible that the quality of family and school environments may constrain or support pupils' ability to exploit their genetic propensity to education.…”

“…For polygenic scores to be informative for personalised education and provide actionable information to inform effective policy, the scores must not only explain sufficient variation in educational attainment, but they must also explain sufficient variation over and above other readily available phenotypic data. Phenotypic measures that are predictive of educational attainment such as sex, month of birth and prior attainment 17,18 are readily available to schools while others measures such as parental education and socioeconomic position 19,20 are easily and cheaply collected. However, to date, few studies have investigated how well polygenic scores predict individual level educational attainment conditional on observable phenotypes that are easily available to educators.…”

Why are education, socioeconomic position and intelligence genetically correlated?

“…25 That genetic correlations between educational attainment and cognitive ability persist so strongly throughout childhood further demonstrates the importance of cognitive ability to education in the UK. 8 Further research is required to investigate how these genetic relationships persist into further and higher education. Bivariate heritability analyses indicated that shared genetic variation can explain a substantial fraction of the phenotypic correlations between educational attainment, SEP and cognitive ability.…”

“…A persons own educational attainment and their parents occupational position are two of the strongest determinants of health and social outcomes throughout the lifecourse. [1][2][3][4][5] Education and occupational position are conceptually viewed as subcategories of broader socioeconomic position (SEP), 6,7 are strongly correlated [8][9][10] and highly heritable. 2,5,[11][12][13] Furthermore, education has been demonstrated to have a complex genetic architecture characterised by high polygenicity, 14,15 and this is likely to be the case for other complex social traits.…”

“…The implicit understanding of a genetic correlation is that there are shared biological mechanisms within an individual that influence both their education and their SEP, that is, correlation between causal genetic variants. One strong phenotypic candidate that may underlie this relationship is cognitive ability, 11,26,27 itself highly heritable 12,13,18 and with strong correlations with educational attainment and other measures of SEP. 1,8,[28][29][30][31][32] Genetic correlations between cognitive ability and educational attainment have been estimated at 0.65 (0.02) 12 and 0.63 (0.03). 18 Genetic correlations between cognitive ability and measures of socioeconomic position have been estimated at 0.40 (0.02) 12 using neighbourhood social deprivation and 1.00 (0.47) 13 using a composite measure of parents' occupation and education.…”