Parental unemployment and children's education: A note on the very small role of aspirations

Children exposed to parental unemployment have been found to lag behind in school, but research has struggled to pin down the underlying explanation. One hypothesis is that parental unemployment may dampen children’s aspirations to do well and go far in school. Yet, few studies on parental unemployment have relied on actual measures of children’s aspirations or devised a formal analysis of this mechanism. Using longitudinal data from the UK (N =1,277), I investigate the role of educational aspirations in GCSE attainment. I compare adolescents exposed to parental unemployment before or only after the typical age at which GCSE exams are taken. In adjusted models, children exposed to parental unemployment before their GCSEs are around 7 percentage points less likely to attain the qualification by age 17. On average, children have high educational aspirations, although intentions to enrol in college or university are relatively lower after an early spell of parental unemployment. Nevertheless, a hypothetical intervention setting aspirations to the same level for all children is found to eliminate, in a best-case scenario, a negligible fraction of the educational penalty faced by children exposed to parental unemployment. This note thus seeks to stimulate more research on the mechanisms underpinning the intergenerational effects of unemployment. Findings cast doubts on the idea that children’s aspirations, the target of much policy discourse and intervention, are a crucial part of the equation.