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Evidence from the EU-SILC special module
A further insight into the influence of a person's background, or home environment, on the intergenerational transmission of disadvantages comes from the EU-SILC for 2005. Analysis of these data confirms the findings from PISA (outlined above) that in all countries, albeit to varying extents, those people whose parents attained a tertiary level of education are much more likely to attain a tertiary level themselves than are people whose parents had a low level of education. In the EU as a whole, therefore, those people aged 25-64 who, at the time they were young teenagers, had fathers with tertiary qualifications, were over three times more likely to have attained tertiary qualifications themselves than were those whose fathers had only basic schooling (Table 1). Much the same holds true for the differences in the education level of their mothers.
These findings broadly confirm the results of the Adult Education Survey - that the extent of educational mobility is low in Hungary, Portugal and Poland, and is relatively high in Finland, Sweden and Estonia.
There is, however, some uncertainty over the reliability of these findings, because of the difficulty of verifying the accuracy of people's recollections and the problem of identifying the level of education attained (not infrequently) several decades earlier, given that most countries will have seen changes to their education systems in the intervening period. Much the same uncertainty applies to the results of the Adult Education Survey. Accordingly, it is useful to try to check the findings from other evidence.
