Education as a leveller? Early-life schooling and its relationship with socioeconomic background, social mobility and life-histories in a historic cohort from the Isles of Scilly, UK

The silver spoon hypothesis predicts that those who experience advantageousconditions during development have better adult outcomes and gain fitnessbenefits across their life course. In humans, parental socioeconomic status(SES), reflecting access to resources and environmental stability in early life, haswidely been found to influence child outcomes such as completed educationalattainment. In turn, education plays a key role in shaping life-histories and accessto socioeconomic opportunities across the life course and is hence the focus ofpolicy aimed at unlocking social mobility and improving public health. Usinghistorical data from a period following expansion in the provision of childhoodschooling on the Isles of Scilly, UK, we quantified how parental SES influencedchild educational attainment and how educational attainment in turn shapedsocioeconomic and life-history outcomes in adulthood. We found limited evidencefor an effect of parental SES on educational trajectory, but years of completededucation was linked to higher adult SES, greater completed fertility and longerlifespans. Hence, an institutional environment that provides equal access toschooling can mitigate the relative advantages and barriers typically associatedwith parental SES in educational attainment, thereby widening access to thesehealth and socioeconomic outcomes of education across the life course. Wediscuss the context within which these changes were effective and how thisrelates to policy today.