A new book looking at the intergenerational transmission of advantage has been launched at a high profile event involving Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Labour leader Ed Milliband.
From Parents to Children, published by the Russell Sage Foundation, was launched at a special two-day conference on social mobility in London organised by the Sutton Trust.
Much of the research presented at the event was based on the book, in which some of the world’s leading academics find that children from poorer families in Australia and Canada have a much greater chance of doing well at school, getting into university and earning more in later in life than children in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The book has been produced by some of the world’s leading academics who set out to investigate whether economic inequality in one generation lead to inequality of opportunity in the next using data from ten countries with differing levels of inequality.
The Trust funded research carried out at ISER, which forms a chapter in the book looking at the effects of parents’ educational achievements on their children’s outcomes. The chapter Inequality in Achievements in Adolescence was written by John Ermisch (formerly at ISER now Professor of Family and Demography at Oxford University) and Emilia Del Bono.