Living in one-parent families: attainment at school

Data drawn from the National Child Development Study enabled an examination to be made of the school attainment of children who had spent any of their childhood in a one-parent family. Overall, children in one-parent families had lower scores on tests of attainment, but after adjusting for background factors this was no longer the case for the reading test, and the differences on the mathematics test were reduced to non-significance. An examination of particular aspects of these background factors showed that the low income of many of the one-parent families was a substantial part of their social disadvantage associated with low attainment, but this was not the case for their housing conditions. Comparisons within the group of one-parent families revealed little variation. This meant that there was no evidence that either the age at which the child's family broke up nor the reason for the break up (i.e. divorce or widowhood) was important in terms of school performance, although there was a very slight indication that children who had acquired a substitute parent figure had lower test results than those whose parents had remained alone.