Pat Wills, national chair of Early Education, said last week that while social deprivation was a factor, it was 'too simplistic' to attribute educational achievement entirely to parental income levels. 'I know mums and dads who live in extremely challenging circumstances, but they are wonderful parents and that's reflected in their children and how they achieve despite their obvious disadvantages,' she said.
The issue of class division in educational attainment arose both at a Department for Education and Skills research conference in London on 12 November called 'Education - Breaking the Cycle of Deprivation', and in an article in The Observer of 10 November in which David Miliband, school standards minister, said, 'We continue to have one of the greatest class divides in education in the industrialised world, with a socio-economic attainment gap evident in children as young as 22 months.'
DfES officials said Mr Miliband's remarks and those of adult learning minister Ivan Lewis in a speech at the conference were based on the findings of a 1999 paper, Pre-School Educational Inequality? British children and the 1970 Cohort, by economist Dr Leon Feinstein. Children aged under two were given four simple tasks, including pointing to facial features, putting on and taking off a pair of shoes, stacking coloured bricks and drawing lines and circles. The results showed that those from middle-class, professional backgrounds were far better at completing the tasks than children with working-class parents.
Dr Feinstein, director of the Wider Benefits of Learning Research Centre at the Institute of Education, said, 'I was not saying that everything is set in stone. There is tremendous mobility and everything to play for.
Middle-class children who start badly can catch up, but it is less likely a a working class child can do that.'
Eva Lloyd, chief executive of the National Early Years Network, said parent-child relationships should not be overlooked. 'This should give food for thought to a Government which is keen to force mothers back to work.'
Pat Wills added, 'Parents on high incomes may spend little time with their children, so it would be worth looking at this particular form of social deprivation.'