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Parental qualification
Students were asked to indicate their parents’ highest level of education against a list of nationally appropriate educational levels to ensure local relevance. Each of these levels was also mapped to International Standard Classification Levels (ISCED 2011) so that consistent comparisons across countries could be made.
Highest levels of parental education
As seen in Table RCST#4, 60% of students reported at least one of their parents’ highest levels of education was above secondary education and 41% of students had at least one parent with a university education.
University-level parental education and student performance
This information was compared with student achievement in the PILNA assessments. To simplify the analysis, parents’ highest level of education was grouped into two categories: below university level and university level.
Table RCST#5 shows student performance in the PILNA domains by their parents’ highest level of education.
From Table RCST#5 we see that in both year levels for the reading and writing domains and year six in numeracy, students who have at least one parent with a university level education had higher average performance in the PILNA assessments than did students who did not have a parent with a university level education.
There was one exception. No differences in numeracy performance were found between year four students who had a parent with a university education and year four students who did not have a parent with a university education.
What does this mean?
In general, students with at least one university educated parent tended to perform better than students without a university educated parent. This suggests that higher levels of parental education may be associated with higher performance and that students belonging to families with less education may be at a disadvantage compared to their peers.
