Increasing Social Inequalities in Educational Attainment Over Adolescence Follow Increasing Inequalities in Working Memory

Abstract

By the end of primary school, the poorest UK pupils are around a year behind their peers in terms of educational attainment. This gap doubles by the age of 16. Using longitudinal data from the demographically representative Study of Cognition, Adolescents, and Mobile Phones (SCAMP), we previously showed that working memory (WM) gaps also widen during adolescence. In the current study, SCAMP data were linked with data from the UK Department for Education's National Pupil Database (n = 2726). Analyses showed that differences in WM skill development mediated some of the widening socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment during adolescence. Interestingly, some (parental occupation and income poverty), but not all aspects of socioeconomic status (parental education), predicted individual differences in academic progress via WM. While correlational, these results provide an important starting point for understanding different ways in which socioeconomic status might impact attainment during adolescence.