literature review on effects of poverty on education

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• Published: 17 April 2024

How popularising higher education affects economic growth and poverty alleviation: empirical evidence from 38 countries

• Jian Li   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3228-8163 1   na1 ,
• Eryong Xue   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7079-5027 2   na1 ,
• Yukai Wei   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5202-7307 2 &
• Yunshu He   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4814-9835 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  520 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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The popularisation of higher education supports UNESCO’s aim of developing inclusive and equitable quality education to achieve the fourth Sustainable Development Goal. However, the effect of popularising higher education on economic growth and poverty alleviation remains unexplored. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of higher education and adult education within populations (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (gross domestic product; GDP) and the poverty line using panel data from 38 countries. OLS and quantile regression were performed using data for the period 1995–2021 extracted from the OECD and World Bank databases. The results showed that the population segments with higher education had a significantly positive impact on GDP growth. Moreover, an increased proportion of the population with higher education, of working age, was found to be a contributing factor to GDP growth. Popularising higher education also played a positive role during the initial stage of social and economic development. This study also highlighted that popularising higher education play a key role to influence a country’s educational development and scientific and technological innovation drives the deepening of a country’s economy. It suggested that both national and local governments worldwide should pay much attention to the popularisation degree of higher education to greatly improve the innovative ability of talents and scientific and technological innovation in higher education for both the economic growth and poverty alleviation.

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Introduction.

The popularisation of higher education critically contributes to UNESCO’s efforts to realise the fourth Sustainable Development Goal of inclusive and equitable quality education (Ainscow, 2020 ; Bamberger and Kim, 2022 ).Popularisation of higher education expands the scale of higher education and its high growth rate introduces considerable challenges to the management structure of higher education, triggering a series of theoretical and practical concerns relating to the nature and function of higher education (Balestra and Ruiz, 2015 ; Brand, 2021 ). Given that education and social and economic development are mutually reinforcing, the expansion of higher education leads to an ascending spiral of development for individuals and/or economies. By contrast, a lack of education or early withdrawal from education leads to a downward spiral for them (Camilla, 2023 ). This relationship between education and development undergirds the model of poverty alleviation based on the return on education (Decancq, 2017 ). The previous studies emphasise the importance of the return on education as a multidimensional anti-poverty mechanism and thus a key factor in poverty alleviation (Fang et al., 2022 ; Chelli et al., 2022 ; Garritzmann, 2016 ). For example, return on education is the key factor enabling a transition from poverty alleviation through education to poverty alleviation through education (Gillian et al., 2021 ; Gong and Hong, 2021 ). Poverty alleviation is realised through an interlinking of these two processes and the promotion of the latter (Granata, 2022 ; Habibi and Zabardast, 2020 ). The educational resources can meet the needs of the poor mainly through the return on education at the levels of survival and life quality. In addition, the previous studies highlighted that, with a continuous expansion in the scale of higher education, its economic effect gradually appears to become marginal (Hoeller et al., 2014 ). The density of colleges and universities worldwide has increased considerably in recent years, but it is still inadequate to meet increasing demands resulting from the ongoing popularisation of higher education (Jericho, 2016 ). The increase in the number of colleges and universities has a positive effect in promoting economic development but with marginal benefits. (Julian, 2018 ).

Through reviewed the current relevant studies, it is found that there have limited studies that have simultaneously explored the effects of popularising higher education on economic growth and poverty alleviation. The previous research revealed that most studies have focused on the relations between popularisation of higher education and economic growth. However, a few empirical investigations have examined the effect of population segments with higher education and adult education (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (GDP) and poverty reduction. Considering the scope and limitations of previous studies, it aimed to address the above research gap by investigating the effect of a population segment with high levels of higher education and adult education (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (GDP) and the poverty line at a wide scale using panel data from 38 countries. The main research questions addressed in this study are as follows.

Q1: What is the effect of a population segment with higher education on GDP growth?

Q2: What is the effect of adult education on GDP growth?

Q3: What impact does a population segment with higher education have on reducing the proportion of those experiencing poverty?

Q4: What is the relation between an increased level of adult education and the proportion of the population experiencing poverty?

All these questions are relevant to an exploration of the effect of the population segment with higher education and adult education (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (GDP) and the poverty line. This study is divided into several sections: the first section concentrates on examining the effect of popularising higher education on economic growth and the poverty line, the relationship between popularisation of higher education and poverty alleviation, and the relationship between popularisation of higher education and poverty alleviation. In the second section of method, to address this research gap, this study performed OLS and quantile regressions using data extracted from the OECD and World Bank databases for the period 1995–2021. An OLS regression model and a panel quantile model were used to analyse the effect of a population segment with higher education and adult education (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (GDP) and the poverty line within 38 OECD countries. The impact of the proportion of people aged 24–64 years and 25–34 years who had completed higher education in relation to their peers on GDP and the proportion of people living in poverty in 38 OECD countries have been measured and analysed. The results and discussion have been provided at the last.

Literature review

The effect of popularising higher education on economic growth.

The population segment with higher education is regarded as an important contributor to economic growth, generating scientific knowledge and providing labour, which in turn increases human capital and productivity (Jungblut, 2017 ; Kalamova, 2020 ; Liu, 2017 ). As the scale of higher education expands, the emergence of knowledge power as a large-scale global phenomenon reflects the important role of an expanded educated labour force in the advancement of science and technology and the economy. For example, the relationship between higher education and economic development in European Union countries between 1997 and 2016 was analysed. Their findings revealed a statistically significant correlation between expanding higher education and economic growth in the selected countries. The one-way cause-and-effect relationship between education and economic development in these countries suggests that an increase in the proportion of the population enroled in higher education boosts economic performance. In addition, using a survey sample of 35 households, a retrospective study in Brazil, examined the role of educational expansion in reducing income inequality and poverty. Its findings suggest that it would take decades to reduce inequality and poverty in this country and that this outcome could only be achieved through a major expansion of the higher education sector. The growth needed to achieve this outcome would be considerable (Lamichhane et al., 2021 ). This reduction in inequality and poverty could only be achieved if optimistic assumptions about growth, matching job skills and the return on education do not fall short. In brief, education is not a panacea for reducing poverty and inequality. How three major stages of education contributed to the growth in labour productivity in 125 countries during the period 1999–2014 was also explored. They found that human capital is consistent with the educational returns of an average number of years of formal education at the levels of primary, secondary, and higher education. Their analysis showed that higher education had the greatest impact on labour productivity in the economies under study (Ledger et al., 2019 ). In addition, popularising higher education plays an important role in promoting economic growth, as the scale of higher education can guarantee the scale of human resources development by improving the quality of human resources and cultivating and distributing innovative scientific and technological talents. The scale of higher education guarantees the spread of science and technology and the popularisation of scientific and technological achievements (Mathias, 2023 ; Megyesiova and Lieskovska, 2018 ). The expanded scale of higher education worldwide has a spatial spillover effect on economic growth, which is strengthened through international cooperation in the fields of science and technology.

Popularising higher education also plays a direct role in cultivating and transporting scientific and technological talents to promote international scientific and technological cooperation (Mitic, 2018 ; Özdoğan Özbal, 2021 ; OECD, 2022 ; Pinheiro and Pillay, 2016 ). The scale of postgraduate education inhibited the total number of scientific and technological innovation achievements, indicating that there may be a trade-off between ‘quantity expansion’ and ‘quality upgrading’ of scientific and technological innovation achievements. Nevertheless, the positive effect on the number of high-tech innovation outcomes is significant, indicating that the supporting effect of graduate education on scientific and technological innovation is mainly concentrated in the high-tech fields (Pinheiro and Pillay, 2016 ; Rowe, 2019 ; Sahnoun and Abdennadher, 2022 ). The ‘talent increment’ of regional expansion and the ‘resource stock’ of graduate education have a combined promoting effect on high-tech innovation. There are differences in the effect of graduate education supporting high-tech innovation among provinces with different characteristics relating to the development of graduate education. The incremental expansion of high-quality talent is essential for enhancing the efficiency of material capital and stabilising the advantage of resource stocks. Using education statistics from OECD countries, Russia, and several other countries that participate in OECD education research, comparative and correlational analysis methods were applied to analyse how the scale of growth in young people’s participation in higher education is reflected in changes in their employment and economic activity. The results of their analysis showed that the growth in economic activity involving young graduates with a master’s degree exceeded that of college graduates after the 2009 financial crisis, and graduates fared better in the 2020 crisis, which was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The effect of popularisation of higher education on poverty alleviation

Popularisation of higher education is regarded as an essential factor contributing to poverty alleviation (Samo, 2022 ; Adams, 2013 ; Zapp, 2022 ). The higher education’s role in promoting economic growth can only be fully realised through the cultivation of talents suitable for the actual development situation of the country. Countries with food shortages, for example in Africa, also need to procure and train the right agricultural talent. Key drivers of sustainable agricultural production include access to improved technologies, sustainable growth of human, biological and natural resource capital, improvements in institutional performance and a favourable economic policy environment. Higher education graduates with the necessary ‘soft skills and business skills constitute an important pillar. Chakeredza ( 2008 ), who explored the effect of popularising higher education on poverty alleviation, suggested that the number of hungry people in Africa will continue to increase. Higher education in agriculture must be transformed, and efforts must focus on retaining faculty and on reviewing and redesigning institutional management systems, curriculum content and education delivery.

There are many reasons for poverty, with a lack of education being an important one. Insufficient quality education leads to educational poverty. Using PISA data, Agasisti et al. ( 2021 ) investigated the extent of educational poverty in European countries, considering its incidence, breadth, depth and severity. For this study, they adopted an additive multidimensional poverty measure proposed by Alkirew and Foster. Their findings indicated that between 2006 and 2015, the depth and severity of poverty decreased in most of the countries under study. Moreover, the incidence of educational poverty in many European countries was related mainly to student characteristics and school factors. The expansion of higher education has a positive effect on economic development and poverty reduction by improving work skills within the labour force. Increased enrolment in higher education encourages individuals born in families with low education levels to avail of higher education opportunities. Evidently, the expanded scale of higher education in the process of promoting economic growth has enhanced the equity effect of intergenerational social mobility. The expansion of higher education improves total factor productivity, thus promoting economic transformation and advancement globally (Samo, 2022 ; Adams, 2013 ; Zapp, 2022 ). Furthermore, the previous studies have shown that the structure of higher education talent training has a significant impact on economic development. Therefore, government departments need to make constant efforts to improve relevant systems and promote the optimisation and upgrading of the structure of higher education talent training to meet the needs of future economic development.

Theoretical underpinnings

The relationship between education and economic growth is a classic issue in the study of educational economics. For example, in Solow’s view, the growth of per capita output comes from per capita capital stock and technological progress, but capital investment has the problem of diminishing marginal returns, and the long-term sustainable development of the economy depends on technological progress (Solow, 1957 ). The emphasis on technological progress is a very important point in Solow’s growth theory. It was Schultz who systematically analyzed the contribution of education to economic growth. Influenced by the progress of economic growth theory and national accounting methods, Schulz proposed human capital theory in the process of explaining Solow residuals (Schultz, 1961 ). believes that once human capital is included in economic growth, it will solve the paradoxes and puzzles faced in economic growth research. Starting with the difference in income of different types of workers in the labour market, he found that education and health factors are the main reasons for the income difference, and further clarified that the reason for the income difference is the difference in labor productivity (Schultz, 1961 ). Schultz ( 1961 ) believes that human resources include the quantity and quality of labor, and he mainly focuses on the skills and knowledge of people who can improve labor productivity. As for how to measure human capital investment, Schulz believes that the cost of human capital can be measured in the same way as physical capital. Lucas ( 1988 ) focuses on the mechanism of human capital accumulation and why human capital does not show diminishing marginal returns like physical capital. Lucas divides the effect of human capital into internal effect and external effect. Romer ( 1990 ) internalised technological progress, revealed the relationship between human capital and technological progress, and proposed that the stock of human capital determines the economic growth rate, and it is human capital rather than population that determines economic growth. Romer starts with three hypotheses: first, technological progress is central to long-term economic growth; Second, technological progress is formed by people’s response to market incentives, and market incentives determine technological progress. Third, technology is a special kind of product, and once the cost of the initial input is produced, the technology can be reproduced indefinitely at no cost or very low cost.

In other words, higher education is more about improving students’ ability and productivity, thereby increasing students’ income, and promoting economic growth. Higher education mainly affects economic growth through two aspects: one is the same as Schulz’s improvement of individual ability, and the internal effect of human capital, which directly affects the production process (Schultz, 1961 ). Second, Lucas emphasised the external effect of human capital, and the comprehensive effect of human capital on the whole society, which has the characteristics of increasing marginal benefit (Lucas, 1988 ). It emphasises that the human capital invested in technological innovation and the existing knowledge and technology stock of the whole society jointly determine technological innovation.

Research hypotheses and analytical model

In this study, an OLS regression model and a panel quantile model were used to analyse the effect of a population segment with higher education and adult education (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (GDP) and the poverty line within 38 OECD countries. The study’s hypotheses were as follows:

Hypothesis 1: The effect of a population segment with higher education has a positive impact on GDP growth.

Hypothesis 2: Some level of adult education has a positive impact on GDP growth.

Hypothesis 3: A population segment with higher education has a positive impact by reducing the proportion of the population experiencing poverty.

Hypothesis 4: An increase in the level of adult education has a positive impact by reducing the proportion of the population experiencing poverty.

The widely used Mankiw-Romer-Weil model was applied in this study. The overall level of development of higher education and the popularisation of higher education were considered core elements that independently promote economic development and alleviate poverty. The following model was constructed by incorporating the variable of quality higher education into the Solow model:

where Y it refers to the output of i country in t year. The independent variables Qit and P it respectively represent the scale of development and the degree of popularisation of higher education in i country in t year. The following specific model was constructed:

The independent variables were the proportion of people aged 25–64 years with higher education (A) and the proportion of people aged 25–34 years with higher education within the same age group (B). The first variable reflects the population segment that has completed higher education and can work in the corresponding age group. The second reflects the degree of popularisation of higher education. The proportion of those who have completed higher education in relation to their peers is in the normal state, which can reflect the enrolment rate for the previous process of higher education, thus indicating the degree of popularisation of higher education.

The dependent variables were GDP and the poverty line (D). GDP is a measure the overall level of a country’s economic and social development. The poverty line refers to the proportion of people living on less than US$1.25 a day as a percentage of the country’s total population or the proportion of people living in poverty. Thus, it reflects the level of equity in social development. The figure of US$2.15 is used in the World Bank’s index and is based on the purchasing power parity in 2017 (see Table 1 ).

Data sources and selection of variables

This study measured the impact of the proportion of people aged 24–64 years and 25–34 years who had completed higher education in relation to their peers on GDP and the proportion of people living in poverty in 28 OECD countries. Specifically, this study assessed the impact of the overall level of development of higher education and the degree of its popularisation (the breadth of development of higher education) on GDP (the height of development of economic and social development) and the poverty line (the breadth of development of economic and social development). Data were sourced from the OECD database and the World Bank website covering the period 1995–2021. This study selected 38 OECD countries for this study: the United States, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Japan, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, South Korea, Slovakia, Chile, Slovenia, Estonia, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania Colombia and Costa Rica. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the 38 OECD countries. Of these countries, 20 were founding members of the OECD when it was established in 1961, while the remaining 18 subsequently became members. After 1994, OECD membership expanded rapidly. Five new members were added within three years. OECD then entered a period of accelerated development, and its operations and advancement reached an optimal stage. Therefore, this study selected data from the OECD database and the World Bank website covering the period 1995–2021 to explore the relationship between higher education and economic and social development in OECD member countries.

It expresses the geographical relations of the Atlantic region and simplifies the latitude and longitude lines and country symbols, highlighting the geographical distribution by highlighting OECD countries in color and other countries in apricot color.

The impact of the population segment with higher education on GDP growth

This study explored the impact of the population segment with higher education on GDP, taking the proportion of people aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education (B) and the proportion of people aged 25–64 years who had completed higher education (A) as the independent variables for the OLS regression. The square value of model R was 0.097, indicating that the two independent variables could explain 9.73% of the change in GDP. The model passed an F test ( F  = 46.137, p  = 0.000 < 0.05), indicating that at least one of the two independent variables impacted the GDP regression coefficient (C). The following formula was used:

The final analysis revealed that the regression coefficient value of A was 1.553 and the significance level was 0.01 ( t  = 7.141, p  = 0.000 < 0.01). Therefore, A had a significantly positive influence on C. Accordingly, the proportion of the population aged 25–64 years who had completed higher education, that is, the overall level of development of higher education was found to have a positive impact on GDP. The influence coefficient value was 1.533, indicating that an increase in the proportion of the population with completed higher education led to an increase in GDP.

The regression coefficient value of B was −0.813 at a 0.01 level of significance ( t  = −4.300, p  = 0.000 < 0.01), indicating that B had a significantly negative influence on C. The proportion of the population aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education, that is, the degree of popularisation of higher education had a negative effect on GDP, and the influence coefficient value was −0.813.

The negative impact on economic and social development caused by an increase in the popularity of higher education and the proportion of young people’s higher education experience may be attributed to the excess capacity of higher education. The development of higher education should be adapted to the national context. An excess of higher education and a lack of investment lead to a rise in the social cost of education and a decline in social outputs, which hinder social and economic development. At the same time, young people aged between 25 and 34 years occupy the position of’ export’ in the education process. With the increasing popularity of higher education, the supply of talents in the labour market generated through the recruitment of former higher education exceeds the demand for graduates with higher education within recruiting organisations. Consequently, issues such as wasted educational resources and knowledge, unemployment, excessive education, excess talents, an imbalance in the structure of higher education, excessive expansion and decreasing compatibility undermine economic operations and hinder GDP growth.

In this study, the variance decomposition and Pearson coefficient based on covariance calculation were analyzed. The variable of the number of 25–34-year-old who have completed higher education as a percentage of their peers explains 50.74% of the change in GDP. The variable of the proportion of 25–64-year-old who have completed higher education explains 49.26% of the change in GDP. The variable of 25- to 34-year-olds who completed higher education as a percentage of their peers explained 45.88% of the change in poverty line. The variable of the proportion of people aged 25–64 who have completed higher education explains 54.12% of the change in GDP (See Table 2 ).

The proportion of people aged 25–34 who have completed higher education in their peers and the proportion of people aged 25–64 who have completed higher education in their peers, GDP and poverty line showed significant correlation coefficients. The correlation between the proportion of people who have completed higher education at the age of 25–34 and the proportion of people who have completed higher education at the age of 25–64 is 0.931, and shows a significance of 0.01, which indicates that there is a significant positive correlation between the proportion of people who have completed higher education at the age of 25–34 and the proportion of people who have completed higher education at the age of 25–64. The correlation between the proportion of the number of people who have completed higher education at the age of 25–34 and the GDP is 0.209, and the significance is 0.01, which indicates that there is a significant positive correlation between the number of people who have completed higher education at the age of 25–34 and the GDP. The correlation between the number of people who have completed higher education and the poverty line at the age of 25–34 is −0.365, with a significance of 0.01, indicating a significant negative correlation between the number of people who have completed higher education and the poverty line at the age of 25–34 (See Table 2 ).

White test and BP test were used in this study. The test null hypothesis is that the model has no heteroscedasticity. The table above shows that both tests reject the null hypothesis ( p  < 0.05), indicating that the model does have heteroscedasticity. When there is a heteroscedasticity problem, Robust and robust standard false regression is used (See Table 3 ).

The impact of a population segment with higher education on the poverty line

This study also explored the impact of a population segment with higher education on the poverty line. Specifically, this study performed an OLS regression in which the proportion of people aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education (B) and the proportion of those aged 25–64 years who had completed higher education (A) were the independent variables. As Table 2 shows, the R squared value was 0.134. This means that variables A and B could explain 13.37% of the change in the poverty line (D). The model passed the F test ( F  = 48.771, p  = 0.000 < 0.05), which means that at least one variable (A or B) had an impact on the poverty line. The formula for the change in the poverty line was expressed as follows:

The final analysis revealed that the regression coefficient value of the proportion of people aged 25–64 years who had completed higher education (A) was 0.005 but with no significance ( t  = 0.428, p  = 0.669 > 0.05), indicating that the population segment with higher education did not have an impact on the poverty line.

The regression coefficient value of the proportion of people aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education (B) was −0.048 at a significance level of 0.01 ( t  = −4.305, p  = 0.000 < 0.01), which means that in relation to their peers, the proportion of people aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education had a significantly negative impact on the proportion of poor people. A higher proportion of people aged 25–34-years who had completed higher education corresponded to a higher penetration rate of higher education and a lower proportion of those living in poverty. This phenomenon can be attributed to OECD’s support for the development of higher education in various countries. When the development of higher education reaches a certain level, the reduction of the proportion of the population segment experiencing poverty will no longer be affected by a simple expansion of the scale of extended higher education and the superposition of the total number of highly educated human resources. It will be influenced more by the reasonable distribution of educational resources and educational equity within higher education and its popularisation, that is, the increase in the proportion of the school-aged population aged 25–34 years based on the increase of the previous enrolment rate (see Table 4 ).

The effect of adult education on GDP growth

For quantile regression analysis, a total of nine models (with decimal points ranging from 0.10 to 0.90 and at intervals of 0.10) were estimated in this analysis, which aimed to explore the impact of the independent variables A and B on the dependent variable, GDP (C). When the quantile value was between 0.1 and 0.3, the proportion of the population aged 25–64 years who had completed higher education (A) had no significant positive impact on GDP growth, indicating that the development of higher education did not significantly affect economic and social development in poorer OECD countries. When the quantile value was between 0.4 and 0.6, the level of development of higher education had a significantly negative impact on economic and social development. Thus, for a country that had developed over a period, the advancement of higher education required multiple inputs, such as capital, material, and human resources.

During the early stage of the development of higher education, such inputs may, however, have a negative and weakening impact on social and economic development. The added cost of education and the lag between the output of educational achievements and the input of talents puts increased pressure on economic and social development during a certain period. When the quantile value was 0.7 or higher, the improvement of the overall level of higher education had a significantly positive impact on GDP growth, indicating the realisation of the talent training outcomes of higher education. Teaching and research outcomes were thus transformed into socially productive resources and power, with talents with higher education contributing to economic and social development.

When the quantile value was 0.1, the proportion of people aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education in relation to their peers (variable B), indicating the popularisation of higher education, had no significant impact on GDP growth. Thus, in extremely backward countries, the popularisation of higher education had little effect on economic and social development. When the quantile value ranged between 0.2 and 0.6, the popularisation of higher education had a significantly positive effect on GDP growth, indicating its contribution to economic growth.

When the quantile value was 0.7, the influence of variable B on variable C was no longer significant, indicating that social development would soon face the problem of overcapacity in higher education. When it exceeded 0.7, the ratio of eligible people aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education in relation to their peers had a significantly negative impact on GDP growth, revealing that with the development of the economy, society and education, higher education had become overexpanded. Thus, the cost of investing in education exceeded the social benefits, leading to overcapacity whereby the supply of higher education talents exceeded the demand. This situation led to wasted educational resources and excessive competition of talents, hindering economic growth (See Table 5 ).

The increased level of adult education and the proportion of the population experiencing poverty

Using the same model, this study explored the influence of the independent variables, A and B, on the poverty line (dependent variable D). The proportion of the population aged 25–64 years who had completed higher education (independent variable A) had no significant influence on the proportion of the population living in poverty, indicating that popularisation of education and economic and social development have been achieved to a certain extent in OECD countries, and improvements targeting the population experiencing poverty could no longer be achieved simply by increasing the volume and quantity of higher education. When the quantile value was 0.1, the proportion of people aged 25–34 years who had completed higher education in relation to their peers (independent variable B) had no significant effect on the proportion of the population experiencing poverty (dependent variable D). Therefore, the strategy of increasing higher education enrolment and the ratio of the eligible population through the fair allocation of educational resources, and thus the popularisation of education, would not be effective for a small population segment experiencing poverty. In other words, the population segment experiencing poverty in highly developed countries is less receptive to the popularisation of higher education. When the quantile value was 0.2, the independent variable, B, had a significantly positive impact on the dependent variable D, that is, an increase in the popularity of higher education led to an increase in the population segment experiencing poverty. This phenomenon can be interpreted as reflecting the inherent disadvantages of the welfare state in the field of education. A rise in the number of eligible young people aged 25–34 years who have completed higher education reflects the development trend of higher education towards fairness and popularisation following the redistribution of higher education resources.

The fair distribution of higher education resources leads to a lack of competition in the areas of teaching and career development. To a certain extent, reducing students’ willingness and enthusiasm to work may lead to poverty caused by the failure to achieve teaching results. When the quantile value was between 0.3 and 0.4, the independent variable, B, had no significant influence on the dependent variable D. In relatively poor countries, the popularisation of higher education contributes little to reducing the degree of poverty, so it may be necessary to explore ways of alleviating poverty from the perspective of improving the overall level and expanding the scale of basic higher education. When the quantile value was 0.5 or above, the independent variable B had a significantly negative impact on the dependent variable D, indicating that for countries with a relatively high proportion of their population experiencing poverty, the following strategy would be more effective.

Considering the quantile data, this study deemed that the degree of sensitivity of countries at different stages of economic development to the level of development and popularisation of higher education could be more intuitively evaluated using a radar map (see Fig. 2 ). Countries with sub-points 0.1–0.9 were defined along a spectrum as extremely backward, backward, moderately backward, slightly backward, moderate, preliminarily developed, moderately developed, developed, and highly developed. From the perspective of economic development, increasing the proportion of young people who complete higher education and popularising higher education had an obvious positive effect in backward and medium-developed countries, whereas the effect in highly developed countries was not obvious. Overall, the sensitivity of OECD countries to the high level of education penetration was found to be higher than the level of development of higher education. From the perspective of equitable economic development, the overall level of development of higher education had no significant impact on the poverty link in OECD countries, whereas OECD countries with differing economic development backgrounds and at varying stages of development evidenced relatively significant and stable sensitivity to the proportion of young and middle-aged people who completed higher education and the popularisation of higher education.

The dashed line represents the proportion of people aged 25–34 years who have completed higher education. The solid line represents the proportion of people aged 25–64 years who have completed higher education, the impact of the overall level of higher education.

Our findings indicated that population segments with higher education had a significantly positive impact on GDP growth in 38 OECD countries. An increase in the proportion of the population segment of working age who completed higher education was found to contribute to GDP growth. Moreover, an improvement in the popularity of higher education played a positive role during the initial stage of economic and social development.

At the same time, oversupply and overcapacity may result from a continuous improvement of higher education. A very large number of young people who have completed higher education can lead to excessive competition and wasted academic qualifications (Mathias, 2023 ; Megyesiova and Lieskovska, 2018 ). In turn, higher education knowledge unemployment, overinvestment, a structural imbalance, disorderly expansion and wasted resources can occur, which have detrimental impacts on economic operations.

Some studies have shown that strengthening the quality of higher education helps to improve cognitive abilities within the labour force, thereby enhancing the growth of the knowledge economy (Ainscow, 2020 ; Bamberger and Kim, 2022 ). Other studies have reported regional heterogeneity relating to the marginal effect of improving the quality of higher education on economic growth. Some scholars have analysed the influence of the quality of higher education on economic development from the perspective of human capital investment theory. Their findings indicate that the quality of higher education determines the composition and growth trend of social human capital. Because of differences in the degrees of development of different economies, the quality of higher education has a phased influence on economic growth (Balestra and Ruiz, 2015 ; Brand, 2021 ). Case studies of African developing countries by international scholars have revealed that quality factors are key to realising the economic development function of higher education. From the perspectives of both efficient financial investments by states in education poverty alleviation and the effects of economic, time and emotional investments of poor families and individuals in education poverty alleviation, it is necessary to take the return on education into consideration. Moreover, it is important to respond to reasonable concerns regarding the return on education for poor people and to strengthen their cognitive capacities to rationalise as well as their expectations regarding returns on education (Li et al., 2023 ). In this way, the intention to participate and behaviour of anti-poverty education will be generated, and the strategic upgrading of poverty alleviation combined with the promotion of aspirations and cognitive capacities will be emphasised.

Implications

Our use of panel data from 38 countries to deepen understanding of the effect of popularising higher education on economic growth and poverty reduction also has practical implications. The economic, social, and higher education undertakings in OECD countries evidence a certain level of development. The population segment with higher education has no significant impact on reducing the proportion of the population segment experiencing poverty. Simply increasing the proportion of people who complete higher education and expanding the scale of higher education will not effectively reduce poverty (Li and Xue, 2021 ). Providing more educational opportunities to poor people through the slanting of educational resources can help to reduce the proportion of poor people (Ainscow, 2020 ; Bamberger and Kim, 2022 ). For example, popularising higher education plays a key role to influence a country’s development level and scientific and technological innovation drives the deepening of a country’s economy (Bamberger and Kim, 2022 ). Technological progress is the core of economic growth, scientific and technological innovation brings technological change and development in all aspects, human capital promotes economic growth, and higher education trains talents and improves the capital attribute of human (Camilla, 2023 ). For endogenous economic growth theory, the economy does not rely on external forces to achieve sustained growth, and endogenous technological progress determines sustained economic growth. Popularising higher education worldwide brings the accumulation of human capital, improves the quality of workers, and scientific and technological innovation makes technological progress and high-quality economic development, practically. Human capital accumulation is also the process of continuous input of labour force, which covers the accumulation of human capital by labour force factors in formal education, training, and other learning processes. From the perspective of human capital, popularising higher education is the most direct and efficient way to promote the accumulation of human capital and improve the quality of labour force (Balestra and Ruiz, 2015 ; Brand, 2021 ). The popularisation degree of higher education is one of the important indicators to measure the development level of a country’s economic, and it is also the common trend of the development of higher education in all countries after World War II. In this transitional era, how to continue the achievements of higher education in the popular era and solve the existing problems as soon as possible is the heavy responsibility of our times. Therefore, at the initial stage of popularisation of higher education, it is necessary to re-examine the process of higher education popularisation globally and explore the internal logics between the popularisation of higher education and Sustainable Development Goal of inclusive and equitable quality education (Ainscow, 2020 ; Bamberger and Kim, 2022 ).

For policy suggestions, this study suggests that both national and local governments worldwide should pay much attention to the popularisation degree of higher education to greatly improve the innovative ability of talents and scientific and technological innovation in higher education. For example, they could promote scientific and technological innovation in an organised manner to serve national and regional economic and social development. Faced with the current situation in which global higher education has entered a stage of popularisation and new challenges and problems in serving regional economic and social development, national governments should continue to optimise the distribution and structure of higher education resources to support different regions, focusing on the major strategy of enhancing national competitiveness, serving economic and social development, and promoting common prosperity.

Contributions

This study novelty contributes on examining how popularising higher education affects economic growth and poverty alleviation, conceptually, methodologically, and practically. For instance, this study focuses on epitomising the conceptual and analytical model to explore the effects of higher education and adult education within populations (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (gross domestic product; GDP) and the poverty line. In addition, this study novelty combines both Mankiw-Romer-Weil model Solow model to investigate the effects of higher education and adult education within populations on economic growth and the poverty through OLS regression model and quantile model. For the practical aspect, this study practically uncovers the implicit significance of the popularisation of higher education for advocating UNESCO’s aim of developing inclusive and equitable quality education to achieve the fourth Sustainable Development Goal.

Limitations

This study had some limitations. Data could have been collected from a larger sample of OECD countries to explore the effect of population segments with higher education and adult education (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (GDP) and the poverty line. In addition, a qualitative component could be included in future studies to uncover the cultural and historical contexts of the effect of popularising higher education on economic growth and poverty reduction at the local level. Future studies should also investigate the causal relationship between the popularisation of higher education and economic growth. Additional empirical data and advanced research methods can be used to enable a shift from correlation to causality.

In conclusion, this study examined the effect of the population segment with higher education and adult education (popularisation of higher education) on economic growth (GDP) and the poverty line using panel data from 38 countries. The population segment with higher education was found to have a significant positive impact on promoting GDP growth. An increase in the proportion of the working-age population segment that had completed higher education was evidently conducive to GDP growth. Popularisation of higher education was also found to play a positive role in the initial stage of economic and social development.

Data availability

The data of OECD country GDP is retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=1W , The data of OECD country poverty line is retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?locations=1W&start=1984&view=chart , The data of OECD country Population with tertiary education 25–34-year-old is retrieved from https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-education.htm#indicator-chart , The data of OECD country Percentage of 25–64-year old’s who have completed higher education (%) is retrieved from https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/adult-education-level.htm#indicator-chart , The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in Harvard Dataverse https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TP43QS .

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Acknowledgements

This study is funded by 2021 National Social Science Foundation of Higher Education Ideological and Political Course research (Key project) Ideological and Political Education System Construction System Mechanism Research in New Era (No.: 21VSZ004).

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Li, J., Xue, E., Wei, Y. et al. How popularising higher education affects economic growth and poverty alleviation: empirical evidence from 38 countries. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 520 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03013-5

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Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education

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The harmful effects of Covid 19 on children living in poverty have refocused attention on the complex nature of child poverty and the vexed question of its relationship to education. The paper examines a tension at the heart of much discussion of child poverty and education. On the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children’s flourishing and a means by which children can “escape” poverty; yet on the other hand, education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. Narratives concerning education as an escape from poverty tend not to deal in any depth with the injustices associated with poverty, stressing instead the transformative potential of education. By contrast, largely sociological analyses of the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities tend to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children’s lives. In working to move beyond this analytic impasse, the paper shows how the cluster of concepts, which Robeyns (2018) locates as central to the capability approach, give insights which help to address these two different lacunae. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of children living in poverty. Drawing on literature on the heightened inequalities associated with poor children’s experience of lack of schooling during the COVID pandemic, the paper sketches some of the ways in which sociological analysis and normative evaluation can be linked in taking forward an “ethically engaged political philosophy” (Wolff, 2018) to discuss child poverty and education in real schools.

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Introduction

While exacerbating many of the harmful effects of poverty on children’s lives, the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the complexities of relationships of poverty and education and the ethical issues they raise. Two events exemplify this.

In January 2021, with UK schools closed due to the pandemic, children were not able to receive free meals at school, an essential support to thousands of families living in poverty. The government contracted a private company to distribute food to families receiving benefits. The food parcels were, however, of low nutritional quality and not at all plentiful. Mothers posted pictures on the internet recording the extremely meagre weekly food parcels they received in lieu of free school meals. For children living in poverty in England, the fears and disruptions of school closures associated with COVID were amplified by hunger, and carelessness of those in positions of authority distributing food. They were given a minimal handout, but indignity and exclusion were underlined.

In January 2022 Xolani Mtshali, a South African student, waiting to receive his final school leaving results, noted how impossible it had been for him to access the material distributed on TV and radio by the government when schools were shut: “ Even though I know there were TV and radio programmes for extra lessons, we do not have a TV at my house and on the radio they concentrated a lot on physics (which I did not study) and because I stay in a rural area people who would be able to help me with certain subjects stay very far from me, so it was difficult” ( Equal Education 2022 ). As the pandemic claimed millions of lives across the world it raised questions about what forms of social protection societies could offer those who were subjected to intense overt and covert discrimination. As many have noted, it also amplified the inequalities in societies (UNDP 2022 ; UNESCO 2022 ).

These two instances of the effects of Covid highlight many facets of the relationship of poverty and education indicating how the lack of resources in the households and communities of poor children, is compounded by cumulative effects of inadequate policy and practice, and experiences of social division. These incidents during the COVID pandemic prompt the need for philosophical reflection on the nature of the problem and how to address it.

Many studies of the effects of COVID, together with much of the academic work on children, education, and poverty, (e.g., Holt and Murray 2022 ; Hevia et al. 2022 ; Brehm et al. 2021 ), draw attention to the layers of these manifestly unjust conditions but they do not address the normative questions they raise for education. Our discussion examines this tension at the heart of much work on child poverty and education. We note how, on the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children’s flourishing and as a means by which children can “escape” poverty. Education is thus a locus of values but the facts that shape those values are often not fully considered. Yet on the other hand, many accounts document how education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. In these largely sociological analyses drawing on statistical and empirical facts documenting the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities, a number of which were assembled during COVID to record the effects of the pandemic on children’s lives (e.g., UNESCO 2021 ), there is a tendency for the discussion to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children’s lives. A range of facts is analysed, but the values to be addressed are often assumed more than directly articulated. In this paper we discuss problems with both these narratives. In attempting to overcome the limitations of both positions we adopt an approach of “ethically engaged political philosophy” (Wolff 2018 ) and seek to articulate the values and the factors that may advance the debate and inform practice. Our analysis, including a brief critical consideration of the values advanced by ideal approaches to justice, suggests that an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, informed by a normative ethical framework, can broaden out our understanding of the relationship between child poverty and education in a way that transcends the focus on the causal mechanisms by which poverty serves as a barrier to educational achievement and educational opportunities offer an “escape” from poverty.

The first part of the paper counterposes the two narratives about children’s education and poverty which arise from different perspectives and disciplinary foci, such as sociology of education and education and international development. The second part of the paper, in working to move beyond this analytic impasse associated with the two perspectives talking past each other draws on a cluster of concepts, which Robeyns ( 2018 ) locates as central to the capability approach. We use these to develop insights which help to address these two different lacunae and build some interdisciplinary framing that can help to link empirical analysis and normative evaluation in an attempt to better understand the complex interplay of child poverty and education.

Two Narratives of Poverty and Education

The two narratives we have identified in the literature on poverty, education, and childhood, which came to be deployed in the policy discussions at the time of COVID, are firstly a narrative of children shut out of quality education by poverty, and secondly a narrative of children shut up in poor schools because of poverty. We lay out some key features of each narrative and highlight work which exemplifies this. Different disciplinary concerns shape these two narratives. While both narratives are infused with values of justice and equality, albeit considered and articulated in different domains, the different ways in which these values are positioned has implications, constraining a wider analytic engagement.

In the first narrative, poor children are locked out of the opportunities for knowledge, skills, understanding, attaining learning outcomes and qualifications, autonomy, wellbeing, and relationships of flourishing associated with formal education. In these accounts, the problem of poverty is presented as external to the school, and is associated, for example, with poor housing, run down or violent neighbourhoods, families who do not value education, or do not earn enough to pay for good education, harsh government policies or inadequate delivery of education reform, because of a poverty of ambition by officials (e.g. Barrett et al. 2019 ; Pritchett 2019 ; Azevedo 2020 ;). During the COVID pandemic this narrative was often deployed showing how poor girls had less access to mobile technologies than boys and missed much more schooling (UNESCO 2022 ).

In this narrative, schools can mitigate the effects of poverty, if they can improve their ‘quality’. Policy work drawing on this narrative emphasises that the learning outcomes of poor children are behind where they should be, giving rise to significant inequalities of educational attainment. This emphasis on the learning gap has had much attention as an outcome of schools being shut during the COVID period in the UK and internationally (Education in England 2020 ; World Bank 2021 ; House of Commons Library 2021 ). In these versions of this argument there is no normative question to be addressed regarding the nature of quality education, rather, the focus is mainly on a distributional issue, regarding how to improve school organisation, learning outcomes and close the attainment gap (e.g., Weidmann et al. 2021 ; Akmal and Pritchett 2021 ). Education is equated with learning outcomes in a narrow range of subjects, with little attention to a wider range of relationships, processes, experiences, and knowledge forms. Raffo et al ( 2009 ) nuance this narrative and identify the complexity of the relationships between poverty and learning outcomes, distinguishing between accounts which document forms of poverty at the micro, meso, and macro levels. They note that perspectives on education can be divided between those which are oriented to a more functionalist view of education serving society, and those which focus on how education might develop critical perspectives (Raffo et al 2009 , 11–13). A mainstream version of the narrative that poverty is a problem of children out of school or learning little of value in school, we suggest, is more aligned with a functionalist view of education.

This articulates a clear perspective on the ways in which poverty or dysfunctional elements are to be kept outside the focus of education planning, which itself does not engage with the purpose of education beyond ‘learning’. This learning is generally narrowed down to a very limited number of outcomes in literacy and numeracy (Smith and Benavot 2021 ; D’Agnese 2017 ), which further contributes to the existing inequalities.

Thus, in the narrative that poverty is the problem, and education is a remedy or a way out, there is little space, firstly for understanding the perspectives and nuanced experiences of poor children, and what they and their parents say about school, and secondly for understanding the interconnection between macro, meso, and micro level political, economic, and socio-cultural relationships to produce and maintain poverty.

In contrast to the above narrative, attention to empirical research into the experience of children in poverty within educational contexts, can contribute to developing more nuanced and appropriate responses at school, community, national, and the international levels to make education a means for addressing poverty, and redistributing power. For example, Moletsane and Mitchell ( 2018 ) report on the use of participatory visual methodologies developed in partnership with poor girls in South Africa and Canada. These have demonstrated potential to contribute to ‘intensifying effort in relation to addressing the lived realities of girls who are marginalized and who suffer from persistent insecurity, injustice and abuse of power at the local level in otherwise democratic states’ (Moletsane and Mitchell 2018 : 437). This analysis does not bracket poverty ‘outside’ educational experiences but looks at how a range of actors – teachers, learners, social activists—can reflexively work together to take account of its many effects and processes for change. The significance of teachers, and their positioning in this work, is noted in the work Moletsane and Mitchell have done over many years (Mitchell et al. 2020 ; Moletsane 2022 ). Recent studies of the response to COVID 19 school closures and other disasters revealed how schools in areas of socio-economic deprivation worked to offer material and practical support to children and their families in ways that went far beyond the simple requirement to ensure that poor children are able to access the formal elements of schooling (Moss et al 2020 ). The mobilization of school staff in deprived areas in the UK to organize food banks and supplies of basic IT equipment for families experiencing hardship during the pandemic highlighted the ways in which there were important links between education, mental health and poverty in which teachers, parents and learners’ experiences were implicated (Kim and Asbury 2020 ; Holt and Murray 2021 ; Martin et al 2022 ). Pre-pandemic research into the shame experienced by poor children (Chase and Bantebya-Kyomuhendo 2015 ) both illuminates the emotional cost of poverty and draws attention, once again, to the need to articulate a normative framework to address the complex moral demands posed by the existence of child poverty in an educational context.

If, as in the first narrative, poverty is bracketed analytically outside the school, and education is seen as a form of remedy for poverty, the analytic focus becomes how schools can compensate, rather than understanding the process of the construction of the injustices of poverty and working to enact values of justice at all levels of the educational experience.

The second narrative is associated with a wide range of work in the sociology of education (e.g., Apple 2018 ; Allais et al. 2019 ; Ball 2016 ). Here the analysis made is that schools reproduce poverty because of the policy frameworks and injustices of distribution inside and outside schools, the ways they interconnect, and sporadic, sometimes not well thought out ways of addressing this. The problem of poverty is inside and outside the school with significant effect on children, teachers, and families. Here there are normative questions about what constitutes a good education, and what forms of justice and obligations are required to secure it, but many of the studies do not engage with this fundamental dimension. For example, two of the key works that have had major influence on this area of scholarship—Bowles and Gintis’ study of how schools reproduce the class relationships and labour market dynamics associated with capitalism, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital, schooling and social reproduction – do not engage with questions of what some of the positive features of education might be (Bowles and Gintis 1976 , 2002 ; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990 ).

Research into the “pedagogy of poverty” (Haberman 2010 ), for example, has shown how access to schooling and to material resources supporting poor children’s education is not sufficient to address the educational disadvantages they face. Such research has highlighted the ways in which children living in poverty are subject to low expectations and particular styles of pedagogical interaction on the part of educators. Hempel-Jorgensen ( 2019 ) sums up this research:

The ‘pedagogy of poverty’ experienced by learners in poverty is characterised by a focus on discipline, low intellectual engagement and a focus on attainment in tests. A study conducted in England shows how this can differ significantly in schools in which most children are not living in poverty…. This evidence suggests that English schools with low-income intakes are far more vulnerable to the pressures of high-stakes testing than schools with higher-income intakes, as children living in poverty are known to have significantly lower prior attainment. (Hempel-Jorgensen 2019 np)

Furthermore, a number of studies highlight how teachers’ misperception of poverty as caused by parents’ actions leads to negative and stereotypical behaviours which negatively affect their relationships with children (Schweiger and Graf 2015 ; Thompson et al. 2016 ; Unterhalter et al. 2012 ). As Treanor notes, children living in poverty express frustration at being shouted at in school, often for factors related to not having the correct equipment, which significantly affects children’s well-being, and results in progressing disengagement from learning (Treanor 2020 : 83).

Several studies enhance our understanding by looking not just at the effects of poverty on children’s academic achievement, life chances, and ability to engage with pedagogical content, but at the affective significance of living in poverty (e.g., Aber et al 2007 ). Vizard and Hills ( 2015 ), in a comprehensive review of the social policy actions of the Conservative government in the UK from 2015 to the eve of the pandemic in 2020, note the interplay of many processes resulting in conditions for child poverty and poor educational experiences and outcomes. These include erosion of the protective capacity of the welfare state, as resource, workforce and capacity pressures across public services result in a failure to meet needs, compromising quality, and eroding the resilience of public service to shocks. Thus, the widening of inequalities across multiple axes of disadvantage set conditions for increasing poverty, which were to be accentuated during the COVID. This study highlights how it is multiple relationships in and around school that shape poverty. However, it is also distinctive for identifying a number of normative positions on top of securing adequate funding for public services, which include strengthened social rights and accountability mechanisms, such as enhancing the eroded process of democratic accountability for schooling and developing multi-dimensional strategies for change. Vizard and Hill stress giving priority to the needs of the most disadvantaged and to comprehensive public action to reduce social inequalities, together with a new values-based approach to social policy: dignity and respect, recognition and valuation (Vizard 2021 ). This presents a wide range of areas for normative engagement in education, made more urgent by the COVID years.

Any articulation of a normative framework for addressing child poverty as an issue of justice is clearly enhanced by a more informed and in-depth understanding of the multiple disadvantages faced by children in poverty. However, the different ways in which values are articulated and understood has implications for shaping the ethical frameworks selected.

We have highlighted how two widely circulating narratives of children, education and poverty each tend to make the normative ethical framework to understand this process somewhat fuzzy. In the next section we highlight some elements from political theory associated with the dispersed meanings of normative concern we have charted.

Political Theory and Political Imaginaries

To summarise the above discussion, our exploration has indicated that the tension between addressing the background structural factors that create and sustain poverty and addressing the immediate educational needs of children living in poverty is a constant backdrop to the choices and judgements made by educators.

All these discussions, as Brando and Schweiger ( 2019 : 5) note, are philosophically relevant in light of the moral questions arising from conditions of disadvantage and inequality. Normatively, ideal theories of justice, such as the prominent 1971 Theory of Justice by John Rawls , provide principled positions that can guide both the analysis of what constitutes disadvantage and ways to conceptualise it, as well as principles that can guide a fair distribution of resources. Although offering also important insights for education, a thorough discussion of these is not feasible in this paper.

What can be noted, however, is that while ideal theories of justice can go some way towards offering a normative framework within which to make sense of and guide such choices and judgements, they are limited in a number of ways. Firstly, they often universalise culturally specific models of childhood, including assumptions about children’s agency and vulnerability. Within most work in liberal political theory, children are seen as young people whose capacity for moral agency in terms of self-determination, arguably an essential feature of adulthood, is not yet fully formed. They are therefore considered vulnerable and dependent, to various degrees, on the decisions and actions of adults, both within their families and other institutions, including the school. This, in turn, determines a duty of intervention to secure their material and emotional wellbeing and to defend and promote their fundamental interests, both as children and as the future adults they will become. Recent research on child poverty and education, however, questions normative positions about the moral status of children as vulnerable and dependent. Researchers have argued that such normative positions are situated in a Western and often highly abstract conception, related to the cultural and socio-economic realities of the Global North (Hanes 2019 ; Yasmin and Dadvand, 2019). Hanes ( 2019 ), for example, argues that in most of the Global South, children in poverty are considered autonomous and resilient agents. He also highlights how children whose life conditions and experiences do not conform to idealized conceptions of childhood suffer from marginalization and exclusion leading, in some cases, to forms of oppression, such as those seen, for example, in relation to First Nations child removal policies in Canada or the practices of transnational adoptions, whereby children from minority ethnic groups were removed from their families and respectively placed in institutions or adopted by white families (Hanes 2019 : 23, 30). Thus, although different models of childhood inform all theories dealing with children, perhaps the problematic feature of highly idealized views, abstracting from empirical and contextual factors, resides in how they lead to policies that, instead of protecting children, end up further disadvantaging them.

Indeed, the very question of why we should focus on child poverty—i.e., whether the moral significance of child poverty, in and of itself, is qualitatively distinct from the moral significance of poverty—already hints at these underlying ideas about the meaning and status of childhood. Thus, child poverty as a social phenomenon can be seen to involve intersecting normative and empirical dimensions, and educational questions lie at the nexus of these different dimensions.

Secondly, theories of justice often bracket out questions about the background political structures within which socio-economic inequality and poverty are inscribed, suggesting that issues of justice are best addressed within the given political sphere through measures of redistribution and institutional reform (see Sen 2006 ). While we do not deny the validity of this political point, we suggest that political structures and systems are also sustained partly through a political imaginary (Taylor 2004 ) which legitimates and normalises certain assumptions about our social and political life. For instance, Rawlsian theories of social justice, which have significantly informed the work of both political philosophers and educational theorists concerned with educational justice and equality, assume the existence of a degree of socio-economic inequality. Relatedly, the assumption, that poverty is an inevitable part of social, economic, and political arrangements, rather than the result of political choices, is a feature of much work within the first narrative sketched above. Education systems are one of the places in which this imaginary may well be reinforced, whether through teachers’ and administrators’ attitudinal and unconscious biases, the curriculum, pedagogy, or parental choices. This is not to deny, of course, that many individuals working within these systems recognize the needs and aspirations of children living in poverty.

We have drawn attention to some weaknesses of ideal theories of justice not to reject them, but to highlight the need for such critical reflection, and to illustrate how these theories interact in complex ways when they are brought to bear on questions of how to address child poverty within an educational context (Peters and Besley 2014 ). Educational spaces, our analysis has suggested, are spaces in which the complexity between these different models is often most clearly illustrated and where an ethical framework is required that holds together questions of structure, agency, facts, and values. Furthermore, as the World Inequality Report ( 2022 ) states in reflecting on some of the issues that emerged during the COVID years, ‘Inequality is always a political choice and learning from policies implemented in other countries or at other points of time is critical to design fairer development pathways.'

An Ethically Informed Perspective on Child Poverty and Education

As the discussion so far highlights, questions about the interplay of education and child poverty, brought into sharp relief by the Covid years, are best addressed with an ethically informed perspective, where the normative assumptions underlying empirical research and complex intersections of factors, including structural, cultural, and pedagogical, can be interrogated and overcome. This section shows how the cluster of concepts identified by Robeyns ( 2018 ) as central to the capability approach offers both a normative rationale for evaluating the educational disadvantage associated with poverty and insights to guide educational practice. These insights are particularly important now, in light of the widening educational inequalities resulting from the effects of the pandemic and the limited and often unsuccessful measures adopted by many countries to counteract them.

As a normative framework concerned with people’s freedom to achieve well-being, Footnote 1 the capability approach focuses on what people can do and be with the resources they have, and what kind of life they can truly lead (Robeyns 2017 : 24). At the core of the approach is a conception of well-being in terms of people’s real opportunities (capabilities) to choose among different states and activities (functionings), those that they value (Sen 4 , 1992 ). Being a pacifist, working as a gardener or participating in the life of the community are all examples of functionings that people may value, and capability corresponds to the set of real opportunities from which they can choose (Robeyns 2017 ).

Normatively, the approach is used to evaluate individual well-being, relative advantage or disadvantage, the just design of institutional arrangements, as well as social policies. The distinctive contribution of the approach to these evaluations resides in considering inequalities and disadvantage in the space of capability, that is, in terms of limitations (or deprivations) of real opportunities for well-being. Questions of justice and equality, thus, are best addressed in relation to the set of opportunities available to people to lead good lives.

In addition, Sen draws attention to the importance of considering people’s different ability to make use of the resources and opportunities they have, or their conversion factors, in the evaluative exercise of justice (Sen 1992 , 1999 ). These different factors refer to individuals’ internal features such as physical and psychological traits, as well as to factors emerging from society, for example social policies, cultural attitudes and norms, and the physical and built environment. A book, for instance, is a useful resource for reading, but not for a visually impaired person who will need a Braille version to achieve that functioning. What is important about conversion factors is that they provide information on where interventions need to be made in order to assess people’s relative disadvantage, and to expand their capabilities (Robeyns 2017 ). At the same time, considering these factors implies a multidisciplinary analysis, which draws on insights from different areas such as socio-economic analysis, development studies, and education, to name but a few (Robeyns 2017 : 36).

The above conceptual framework brings to the fore the moral dimension of poverty, and the multiplicity of factors that contribute to it, while providing an understanding that goes beyond commonly endorsed notions of poverty in terms of lack of income and external resources (Sen 1999 ). As Sen notes, different sources of deprivation may compound the disadvantage associated with poverty, thus making ‘real poverty … much more intense than we can deduce from income data’ (Sen 2009 : 256). And furthermore, the understanding and remedying of the persistence of poverty can ‘both be helped by explicit consideration of the relation between deprivation in different spaces, especially between incomes and the capability to lead secure and worthwhile lives’ (Sen 1992 : 9). Poverty is thus defined as a deprivation of capability Footnote 2 (Sen 2009 : 254) and identified at the level of deprivation of basic functionings, such as being well nourished, sheltered, healthy and, importantly, educated. The moral urgency of addressing poverty resides therefore in the level of deprivation and deep inequality entailed, as well as in its detrimental effects on overall well-being (Burchardt and Hicks 2018 ).

As stated earlier, we believe that the conceptual apparatus of the approach thus outlined offers an ethically engaged rationale that brings together normative evaluation and sociological and educational analysis in addressing the disadvantage emerging from the interplay of child poverty and education, highlighted during the COVID pandemic, while going beyond idealised approaches to justice too. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of poor children. These features, as we shall see, make the approach specifically apt to counteract the aftermath of the pandemic in ways that go beyond existing measures.

We begin by noting that an understanding of educational inequalities in terms of capability limitations has the normative advantage of highlighting and considering elements of inequality that are not readily evident if we focus only on material or educational resources, such as funding (Terzi 2021 ). If we consider, for example, the inequalities pertaining to the experiences of schooling faced by poor children, it seems evident that no amount of additional resources, in itself, can account for the limited pedagogical interactions related to the ‘pedagogy of poverty’ which, as we have seen, can characterise poor children’s schooling. This element is best accounted for by considering the socio-cultural factors that may affect a child’s use of their educational resources and adults’ response to this. Similarly, the attitudinal and unconscious biases of teachers towards poor children cannot be appropriately addressed without considering them among the socio-cultural factors that affect children’s learning. The capability approach does not discount the importance of resources in tackling these inequalities. Rather, it draws attention to how the usefulness of resources is conditioned by a complex interaction of factors and how such complexity needs to be explicitly accounted for both theoretically and practically, in relation to appropriate interventions. Thus, the approach endorses the use of resources for additional training for teachers or public campaigns to tackle discriminating attitudes, Footnote 3 for example. It is in this way that the process of socio-political and empirical analysis of conversion factors, which constrain or enlarge the capability space, becomes part of the normative discussion. These factors are not bracketed or treated as background, as the first educational narrative or indeed some ideal theories of justice seem to do but are part of the structuring of the normative framework. At the same time, the inclusion of these factors within a normative terrain facilitates incorporating the richness of sociological approaches to child poverty within an ethical framework allowing for acute analysis of crises like the COVID pandemic.

This is not only a theoretical evaluative approach, but one that can be translated into practice too. Many scholars working with the capability approach are able to use this core idea to incorporate multidimensionality into normative notions, and to develop more nuanced evaluative approaches to assessing social relationships in fields of education, health, and housing, to name a few (Chiappero-Martinetti, Osmani and Qizilbash  2020 ). As much of the extensive scholarship on the capability approach and education illuminates (e.g., Terzi 2005 ; Walker and Unterhalter 2007 ; Hart 2012 ; Walker 2019 ), the first narrative we outline, which suggests a solution of enhancing education quality inside schools, does not sufficiently attend to the complex intersecting ways in which inequality is formed both within and outside schools which the capability approach does by looking at a range of conversion factors.

The concept of conversion factors, which are environmental, political, economic, and social, highlights that the dynamics of the constraints on and expansion of capabilities entails normative choices and practical interventions. For example, a child needs literacy to enable her to access the curriculum taught at school and pass the school leaving examination. Being able to read is both a functioning and a capability. Considering environmental and political conversion factors brings to the fore how, even if a child can read, if no school has been built in her neighbourhood, or the school that is available to her is a long distance away and is staffed with teachers who lack enough experience to prepare her to enter the examination, do not talk her language, and assume children from her background are ‘backward’, the child will not be able to learn. Economic conversion factors draw attention to factors such as having to do long hours of work in the home, assisting with childcare, chores, and basic survival. Social conversion factors highlight attitudes which question, for example, a child’s school attendance because she has ‘too much book’ and does not marry young, thus incurring stigma and the risk of sexual assault. These factors need analysis both in how relationships inside and outside the school, and their interconnection , are understood. The two narratives we have sketched work in opposite directions and thus do not foster consideration of the processes associated with conversion factors working together. Drawing on the capability approach, in developing a framework to analyse literature on the gendered effects of school closures and return to school after COVID, a UNESCO overview report noted a wide range of conversion factors at play (UNESCO 2022 ).

Paying attention to conversion factors is particularly helpful in highlighting the increased inequalities of capabilities experienced as a result of Covid. As Anand et al. ( 2020a ) highlight, while the capability of learning has been significantly affected for all children around the world, existing inequalities in access to technology, parental education, and available support have exacerbated the disadvantage of children living in poverty. Specific capabilities, such as opportunities for speech and language development have been affected, particularly in the early years and more significantly for children with special educational needs and those from the most deprived neighbourhoods (Castro-Kemp and Mahmud 2021 ). As noted above, these inequalities are the result of complex interconnected environmental, social, political, and cultural factors, which are foregrounded and assessed by the capability approach. Relatedly, the opportunities to make up for the so called ‘learning loss’ caused by Covid differ too. And while some governments have attempted to address the learning loss by providing additional funding for specific programmes, for instance additional one to one and small group lessons or extended school time, such as the National Tutoring Programme deployed in England, the underlying structural social, economic, and educational inequalities have remained unchanged or have worsened, thus leading to the potential limited success of such initiatives. Consider, for example, the case of Janice, a year 7 student with insecure literacy skills attending a school in a poor neighbourhood. Janice had problems accessing remote learning and her learning has suffered as a result; moreover, she does not qualify for free access to school meals and often arrives at school hungry. Although teachers’ intervention is crucial in providing Janice with appropriate learning support, it is questionable whether such support will work, if the circumstantial factors of Janice’s situation are not addressed, and, importantly, the teaching and learning are based on limited notions of ‘catching up’. Through its attention to conversion factors, we suggest, an approach based on capability draws much needed attention to the role of schools in addressing disadvantage in interrelation with policies addressing circumstantial factors.

Finally, we posit, the conceptual apparatus of the capability approach, and its distinction between functionings and capability, offers insights that may prove helpful for addressing the education of children living in poverty. The importance accorded by the approach to well being and to the opportunities to lead good lives suggests, first and foremost, a shift from a functionalist view of education and its emphasis on a narrow set of learning outcomes, to a view of education aimed at the expansion of children’s capabilities. This more expansive view of education could, perhaps, include an expansion of the social imaginary associated with the dominant normative frameworks that we have outlined above. Thus, education is recognised as having a fertile role in enhancing children’s present and future well-being and providing real opportunities to develop functionings that will enable them to participate in the life of their communities and their broader society, and in work and leisure activities (Nussbaum 2011 ). At the same time, education itself can be one of the ways in which possibilities for social change can be imagined. A number of accounts using the capability approach to analyse educational relationships highlight this (e.g., De Jaeghere 2021 ; Walker et al. 2022 ; Unterhalter et al. 2022 ). While not discounting the importance of achieving functionings pertaining to, e.g., literacy and numeracy, the approach suggests instead a much broader conception of education, one more akin to promoting the full functionings pertaining to local, national, and global citizenship and the capacity to reflect on one’s values and goals and those of the surrounding society.

Moreover, the broader scope of education in relation to the expansion of capabilities is antithetic to any form of reductionist pedagogy, such as the pedagogy of poverty outlined earlier, but supports instead forms of pedagogical interaction and co-construction of the learning and teaching process (Brando 2020 ; Adamson 2021 ).

Lastly, the focus on capabilities, at least at the level of policy, helps unmask the inequalities of children living in poverty by considering the real opportunities they have, beyond the actual level of functionings or learning outcomes they may achieve.

It can be seen that the capability approach provides insights that allow us to address the lacunae identified in the two narratives of childhood, poverty and education we have sketched, and which continue to inform policy after the Covid years. In the first narrative the space of education is conceived as separate from the contexts of poverty, while in the second narrative the space of education is submerged by the structures associated with the perpetuation of poverty. The capability approach identifies the space of capabilities as different to these conceptions. Education has the potential to be a space of capabilities and opportunities that is not separated from social conditions, as the approach acknowledges the salience of conversion factors. But the capability space is also not simply a reflection of what may be the narrow set of opportunities offered by a society that is structured to reproduce inequalities. The capability space may be understood as a site of agency and opportunity contoured by the many historical and contemporary conditions that shape child poverty.

An ethical framework informed by the conceptual apparatus of the capability approach shows how values and ideals informed by the invaluable insights provided by educational, sociological and empirical studies can contribute to an understanding of the complexity of child poverty and the role that education plays in children’s life.

The Covid 19 pandemic has starkly refocused attention to the pressing and growing situation of children living in poverty worldwide. Capabilities threatened during the pandemic include opportunities for health, wellbeing, equity and inclusion. Work on the Covid pandemic and the capability approach has prompted a rich investigation of the ways in which institutions and innovations should be approached (Venkatapuram 2020 ; Anand et al. 2020 ; Ferrannini et al 2021 ; UNDP 2022 ). Our discussion has explored two dominant narratives about child poverty in its interplay with education and it has highlighted how each overlooks the complex ways in which normative values and contextual factors are related. The interdisciplinary conversations that enable theorists and practitioners to develop adequate responses to the pressing reality of child poverty, which has been starkly emphasised by the recent Covid 19 pandemic, we have argued, demand that we adopt an ethically informed, normative position on the desirability and the feasibility of intervening in our educational institutions, in ways that promote people’s real possibilities for leading a flourishing life. The modest, but also the possible radical potential of this perspective is captured in Jonathan Wolff’s suggestion that, at least in principle, ‘it is possible to improve individuals’ opportunities, and hence their capability set, by doing any of three interventions: improving a person’s internal traits such as strengths, skills etc., or improving their external resources including income, entitlement to services etc., and finally improving the social and cultural environment in which a person lives, including social policies, cultural attitudes and norms as well as their built environment’ (Wolff, 2007, Wolff, 2020). The normative framework we have articulated is perhaps a first step towards such an improvement on the existing situation.

Amartya Sen originally formulated the approach as an alternative to predominant accounts of well-being based on utility (Sen 1985 , 1992 ), while Martha Nussbaum further articulated it through a list of ten central capabilities deemed necessary to live a truly human life ( 2000 , 2010).

Sen’s position has however been critiqued for obscuring material deprivation as fundamental to poverty. See Lister ( 2004 ), for an articulated discussion.

We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing on this point.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Gottfried Schweiger and Frank Jeffery, and all the participants to the Workshop on Ethics, children, education and the COVID-19 pandemic held on 28 and 29 September 2022 (University of Salzburg) for their comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the participants to the Seminar Series ‘ Child Poverty and Education: Philosophical Reflections ’ funded by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and held between January and June 2021 (University of Roehampton and IOE UCL’s Faculty of Education). We thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful questions and support.

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Terzi, L., Unterhalter, E. & Suissa, J. Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education. Stud Philos Educ 42 , 49–63 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09865-1

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Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education

Lorella terzi.

1 University of Roehampton, LDN, UK

Elaine Unterhalter

2 IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, LDN, UK

Judith Suissa

The harmful effects of Covid 19 on children living in poverty have refocused attention on the complex nature of child poverty and the vexed question of its relationship to education. The paper examines a tension at the heart of much discussion of child poverty and education. On the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children’s flourishing and a means by which children can “escape” poverty; yet on the other hand, education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. Narratives concerning education as an escape from poverty tend not to deal in any depth with the injustices associated with poverty, stressing instead the transformative potential of education. By contrast, largely sociological analyses of the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities tend to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children’s lives. In working to move beyond this analytic impasse, the paper shows how the cluster of concepts, which Robeyns (2018) locates as central to the capability approach, give insights which help to address these two different lacunae. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of children living in poverty. Drawing on literature on the heightened inequalities associated with poor children’s experience of lack of schooling during the COVID pandemic, the paper sketches some of the ways in which sociological analysis and normative evaluation can be linked in taking forward an “ethically engaged political philosophy” (Wolff, 2018) to discuss child poverty and education in real schools.

Introduction

While exacerbating many of the harmful effects of poverty on children’s lives, the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the complexities of relationships of poverty and education and the ethical issues they raise. Two events exemplify this.

In January 2021, with UK schools closed due to the pandemic, children were not able to receive free meals at school, an essential support to thousands of families living in poverty. The government contracted a private company to distribute food to families receiving benefits. The food parcels were, however, of low nutritional quality and not at all plentiful. Mothers posted pictures on the internet recording the extremely meagre weekly food parcels they received in lieu of free school meals. For children living in poverty in England, the fears and disruptions of school closures associated with COVID were amplified by hunger, and carelessness of those in positions of authority distributing food. They were given a minimal handout, but indignity and exclusion were underlined.

In January 2022 Xolani Mtshali, a South African student, waiting to receive his final school leaving results, noted how impossible it had been for him to access the material distributed on TV and radio by the government when schools were shut: “ Even though I know there were TV and radio programmes for extra lessons, we do not have a TV at my house and on the radio they concentrated a lot on physics (which I did not study) and because I stay in a rural area people who would be able to help me with certain subjects stay very far from me, so it was difficult” ( Equal Education 2022 ). As the pandemic claimed millions of lives across the world it raised questions about what forms of social protection societies could offer those who were subjected to intense overt and covert discrimination. As many have noted, it also amplified the inequalities in societies (UNDP 2022 ; UNESCO 2022 ).

These two instances of the effects of Covid highlight many facets of the relationship of poverty and education indicating how the lack of resources in the households and communities of poor children, is compounded by cumulative effects of inadequate policy and practice, and experiences of social division. These incidents during the COVID pandemic prompt the need for philosophical reflection on the nature of the problem and how to address it.

Many studies of the effects of COVID, together with much of the academic work on children, education, and poverty, (e.g., Holt and Murray 2022 ; Hevia et al. 2022 ; Brehm et al. 2021 ), draw attention to the layers of these manifestly unjust conditions but they do not address the normative questions they raise for education. Our discussion examines this tension at the heart of much work on child poverty and education. We note how, on the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children’s flourishing and as a means by which children can “escape” poverty. Education is thus a locus of values but the facts that shape those values are often not fully considered. Yet on the other hand, many accounts document how education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. In these largely sociological analyses drawing on statistical and empirical facts documenting the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities, a number of which were assembled during COVID to record the effects of the pandemic on children’s lives (e.g., UNESCO 2021 ), there is a tendency for the discussion to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children’s lives. A range of facts is analysed, but the values to be addressed are often assumed more than directly articulated. In this paper we discuss problems with both these narratives. In attempting to overcome the limitations of both positions we adopt an approach of “ethically engaged political philosophy” (Wolff 2018 ) and seek to articulate the values and the factors that may advance the debate and inform practice. Our analysis, including a brief critical consideration of the values advanced by ideal approaches to justice, suggests that an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, informed by a normative ethical framework, can broaden out our understanding of the relationship between child poverty and education in a way that transcends the focus on the causal mechanisms by which poverty serves as a barrier to educational achievement and educational opportunities offer an “escape” from poverty.

The first part of the paper counterposes the two narratives about children’s education and poverty which arise from different perspectives and disciplinary foci, such as sociology of education and education and international development. The second part of the paper, in working to move beyond this analytic impasse associated with the two perspectives talking past each other draws on a cluster of concepts, which Robeyns ( 2018 ) locates as central to the capability approach. We use these to develop insights which help to address these two different lacunae and build some interdisciplinary framing that can help to link empirical analysis and normative evaluation in an attempt to better understand the complex interplay of child poverty and education.

Two Narratives of Poverty and Education

The two narratives we have identified in the literature on poverty, education, and childhood, which came to be deployed in the policy discussions at the time of COVID, are firstly a narrative of children shut out of quality education by poverty, and secondly a narrative of children shut up in poor schools because of poverty. We lay out some key features of each narrative and highlight work which exemplifies this. Different disciplinary concerns shape these two narratives. While both narratives are infused with values of justice and equality, albeit considered and articulated in different domains, the different ways in which these values are positioned has implications, constraining a wider analytic engagement.

In the first narrative, poor children are locked out of the opportunities for knowledge, skills, understanding, attaining learning outcomes and qualifications, autonomy, wellbeing, and relationships of flourishing associated with formal education. In these accounts, the problem of poverty is presented as external to the school, and is associated, for example, with poor housing, run down or violent neighbourhoods, families who do not value education, or do not earn enough to pay for good education, harsh government policies or inadequate delivery of education reform, because of a poverty of ambition by officials (e.g. Barrett et al. 2019 ; Pritchett 2019 ; Azevedo 2020 ;). During the COVID pandemic this narrative was often deployed showing how poor girls had less access to mobile technologies than boys and missed much more schooling (UNESCO 2022 ).

In this narrative, schools can mitigate the effects of poverty, if they can improve their ‘quality’. Policy work drawing on this narrative emphasises that the learning outcomes of poor children are behind where they should be, giving rise to significant inequalities of educational attainment. This emphasis on the learning gap has had much attention as an outcome of schools being shut during the COVID period in the UK and internationally (Education in England 2020 ; World Bank 2021 ; House of Commons Library 2021 ). In these versions of this argument there is no normative question to be addressed regarding the nature of quality education, rather, the focus is mainly on a distributional issue, regarding how to improve school organisation, learning outcomes and close the attainment gap (e.g., Weidmann et al. 2021 ; Akmal and Pritchett 2021 ). Education is equated with learning outcomes in a narrow range of subjects, with little attention to a wider range of relationships, processes, experiences, and knowledge forms. Raffo et al ( 2009 ) nuance this narrative and identify the complexity of the relationships between poverty and learning outcomes, distinguishing between accounts which document forms of poverty at the micro, meso, and macro levels. They note that perspectives on education can be divided between those which are oriented to a more functionalist view of education serving society, and those which focus on how education might develop critical perspectives (Raffo et al 2009 , 11–13). A mainstream version of the narrative that poverty is a problem of children out of school or learning little of value in school, we suggest, is more aligned with a functionalist view of education.

This articulates a clear perspective on the ways in which poverty or dysfunctional elements are to be kept outside the focus of education planning, which itself does not engage with the purpose of education beyond ‘learning’. This learning is generally narrowed down to a very limited number of outcomes in literacy and numeracy (Smith and Benavot 2021 ; D’Agnese 2017 ), which further contributes to the existing inequalities.

Thus, in the narrative that poverty is the problem, and education is a remedy or a way out, there is little space, firstly for understanding the perspectives and nuanced experiences of poor children, and what they and their parents say about school, and secondly for understanding the interconnection between macro, meso, and micro level political, economic, and socio-cultural relationships to produce and maintain poverty.

In contrast to the above narrative, attention to empirical research into the experience of children in poverty within educational contexts, can contribute to developing more nuanced and appropriate responses at school, community, national, and the international levels to make education a means for addressing poverty, and redistributing power. For example, Moletsane and Mitchell ( 2018 ) report on the use of participatory visual methodologies developed in partnership with poor girls in South Africa and Canada. These have demonstrated potential to contribute to ‘intensifying effort in relation to addressing the lived realities of girls who are marginalized and who suffer from persistent insecurity, injustice and abuse of power at the local level in otherwise democratic states’ (Moletsane and Mitchell 2018 : 437). This analysis does not bracket poverty ‘outside’ educational experiences but looks at how a range of actors – teachers, learners, social activists—can reflexively work together to take account of its many effects and processes for change. The significance of teachers, and their positioning in this work, is noted in the work Moletsane and Mitchell have done over many years (Mitchell et al. 2020 ; Moletsane 2022 ). Recent studies of the response to COVID 19 school closures and other disasters revealed how schools in areas of socio-economic deprivation worked to offer material and practical support to children and their families in ways that went far beyond the simple requirement to ensure that poor children are able to access the formal elements of schooling (Moss et al 2020 ). The mobilization of school staff in deprived areas in the UK to organize food banks and supplies of basic IT equipment for families experiencing hardship during the pandemic highlighted the ways in which there were important links between education, mental health and poverty in which teachers, parents and learners’ experiences were implicated (Kim and Asbury 2020 ; Holt and Murray 2021 ; Martin et al 2022 ). Pre-pandemic research into the shame experienced by poor children (Chase and Bantebya-Kyomuhendo 2015 ) both illuminates the emotional cost of poverty and draws attention, once again, to the need to articulate a normative framework to address the complex moral demands posed by the existence of child poverty in an educational context.

If, as in the first narrative, poverty is bracketed analytically outside the school, and education is seen as a form of remedy for poverty, the analytic focus becomes how schools can compensate, rather than understanding the process of the construction of the injustices of poverty and working to enact values of justice at all levels of the educational experience.

The second narrative is associated with a wide range of work in the sociology of education (e.g., Apple 2018 ; Allais et al. 2019 ; Ball 2016 ). Here the analysis made is that schools reproduce poverty because of the policy frameworks and injustices of distribution inside and outside schools, the ways they interconnect, and sporadic, sometimes not well thought out ways of addressing this. The problem of poverty is inside and outside the school with significant effect on children, teachers, and families. Here there are normative questions about what constitutes a good education, and what forms of justice and obligations are required to secure it, but many of the studies do not engage with this fundamental dimension. For example, two of the key works that have had major influence on this area of scholarship—Bowles and Gintis’ study of how schools reproduce the class relationships and labour market dynamics associated with capitalism, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital, schooling and social reproduction – do not engage with questions of what some of the positive features of education might be (Bowles and Gintis 1976 , 2002 ; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990 ).

Research into the “pedagogy of poverty” (Haberman 2010 ), for example, has shown how access to schooling and to material resources supporting poor children’s education is not sufficient to address the educational disadvantages they face. Such research has highlighted the ways in which children living in poverty are subject to low expectations and particular styles of pedagogical interaction on the part of educators. Hempel-Jorgensen ( 2019 ) sums up this research:

The ‘pedagogy of poverty’ experienced by learners in poverty is characterised by a focus on discipline, low intellectual engagement and a focus on attainment in tests. A study conducted in England shows how this can differ significantly in schools in which most children are not living in poverty…. This evidence suggests that English schools with low-income intakes are far more vulnerable to the pressures of high-stakes testing than schools with higher-income intakes, as children living in poverty are known to have significantly lower prior attainment. (Hempel-Jorgensen 2019 np)

Furthermore, a number of studies highlight how teachers’ misperception of poverty as caused by parents’ actions leads to negative and stereotypical behaviours which negatively affect their relationships with children (Schweiger and Graf 2015 ; Thompson et al. 2016 ; Unterhalter et al. 2012 ). As Treanor notes, children living in poverty express frustration at being shouted at in school, often for factors related to not having the correct equipment, which significantly affects children’s well-being, and results in progressing disengagement from learning (Treanor 2020 : 83).

Several studies enhance our understanding by looking not just at the effects of poverty on children’s academic achievement, life chances, and ability to engage with pedagogical content, but at the affective significance of living in poverty (e.g., Aber et al 2007 ). Vizard and Hills ( 2015 ), in a comprehensive review of the social policy actions of the Conservative government in the UK from 2015 to the eve of the pandemic in 2020, note the interplay of many processes resulting in conditions for child poverty and poor educational experiences and outcomes. These include erosion of the protective capacity of the welfare state, as resource, workforce and capacity pressures across public services result in a failure to meet needs, compromising quality, and eroding the resilience of public service to shocks. Thus, the widening of inequalities across multiple axes of disadvantage set conditions for increasing poverty, which were to be accentuated during the COVID. This study highlights how it is multiple relationships in and around school that shape poverty. However, it is also distinctive for identifying a number of normative positions on top of securing adequate funding for public services, which include strengthened social rights and accountability mechanisms, such as enhancing the eroded process of democratic accountability for schooling and developing multi-dimensional strategies for change. Vizard and Hill stress giving priority to the needs of the most disadvantaged and to comprehensive public action to reduce social inequalities, together with a new values-based approach to social policy: dignity and respect, recognition and valuation (Vizard 2021 ). This presents a wide range of areas for normative engagement in education, made more urgent by the COVID years.

Any articulation of a normative framework for addressing child poverty as an issue of justice is clearly enhanced by a more informed and in-depth understanding of the multiple disadvantages faced by children in poverty. However, the different ways in which values are articulated and understood has implications for shaping the ethical frameworks selected.

We have highlighted how two widely circulating narratives of children, education and poverty each tend to make the normative ethical framework to understand this process somewhat fuzzy. In the next section we highlight some elements from political theory associated with the dispersed meanings of normative concern we have charted.

Political Theory and Political Imaginaries

To summarise the above discussion, our exploration has indicated that the tension between addressing the background structural factors that create and sustain poverty and addressing the immediate educational needs of children living in poverty is a constant backdrop to the choices and judgements made by educators.

All these discussions, as Brando and Schweiger ( 2019 : 5) note, are philosophically relevant in light of the moral questions arising from conditions of disadvantage and inequality. Normatively, ideal theories of justice, such as the prominent 1971 Theory of Justice by John Rawls , provide principled positions that can guide both the analysis of what constitutes disadvantage and ways to conceptualise it, as well as principles that can guide a fair distribution of resources. Although offering also important insights for education, a thorough discussion of these is not feasible in this paper.

What can be noted, however, is that while ideal theories of justice can go some way towards offering a normative framework within which to make sense of and guide such choices and judgements, they are limited in a number of ways. Firstly, they often universalise culturally specific models of childhood, including assumptions about children’s agency and vulnerability. Within most work in liberal political theory, children are seen as young people whose capacity for moral agency in terms of self-determination, arguably an essential feature of adulthood, is not yet fully formed. They are therefore considered vulnerable and dependent, to various degrees, on the decisions and actions of adults, both within their families and other institutions, including the school. This, in turn, determines a duty of intervention to secure their material and emotional wellbeing and to defend and promote their fundamental interests, both as children and as the future adults they will become. Recent research on child poverty and education, however, questions normative positions about the moral status of children as vulnerable and dependent. Researchers have argued that such normative positions are situated in a Western and often highly abstract conception, related to the cultural and socio-economic realities of the Global North (Hanes 2019 ; Yasmin and Dadvand, 2019). Hanes ( 2019 ), for example, argues that in most of the Global South, children in poverty are considered autonomous and resilient agents. He also highlights how children whose life conditions and experiences do not conform to idealized conceptions of childhood suffer from marginalization and exclusion leading, in some cases, to forms of oppression, such as those seen, for example, in relation to First Nations child removal policies in Canada or the practices of transnational adoptions, whereby children from minority ethnic groups were removed from their families and respectively placed in institutions or adopted by white families (Hanes 2019 : 23, 30). Thus, although different models of childhood inform all theories dealing with children, perhaps the problematic feature of highly idealized views, abstracting from empirical and contextual factors, resides in how they lead to policies that, instead of protecting children, end up further disadvantaging them.

Indeed, the very question of why we should focus on child poverty—i.e., whether the moral significance of child poverty, in and of itself, is qualitatively distinct from the moral significance of poverty—already hints at these underlying ideas about the meaning and status of childhood. Thus, child poverty as a social phenomenon can be seen to involve intersecting normative and empirical dimensions, and educational questions lie at the nexus of these different dimensions.

Secondly, theories of justice often bracket out questions about the background political structures within which socio-economic inequality and poverty are inscribed, suggesting that issues of justice are best addressed within the given political sphere through measures of redistribution and institutional reform (see Sen 2006 ). While we do not deny the validity of this political point, we suggest that political structures and systems are also sustained partly through a political imaginary (Taylor 2004 ) which legitimates and normalises certain assumptions about our social and political life. For instance, Rawlsian theories of social justice, which have significantly informed the work of both political philosophers and educational theorists concerned with educational justice and equality, assume the existence of a degree of socio-economic inequality. Relatedly, the assumption, that poverty is an inevitable part of social, economic, and political arrangements, rather than the result of political choices, is a feature of much work within the first narrative sketched above. Education systems are one of the places in which this imaginary may well be reinforced, whether through teachers’ and administrators’ attitudinal and unconscious biases, the curriculum, pedagogy, or parental choices. This is not to deny, of course, that many individuals working within these systems recognize the needs and aspirations of children living in poverty.

We have drawn attention to some weaknesses of ideal theories of justice not to reject them, but to highlight the need for such critical reflection, and to illustrate how these theories interact in complex ways when they are brought to bear on questions of how to address child poverty within an educational context (Peters and Besley 2014 ). Educational spaces, our analysis has suggested, are spaces in which the complexity between these different models is often most clearly illustrated and where an ethical framework is required that holds together questions of structure, agency, facts, and values. Furthermore, as the World Inequality Report ( 2022 ) states in reflecting on some of the issues that emerged during the COVID years, ‘Inequality is always a political choice and learning from policies implemented in other countries or at other points of time is critical to design fairer development pathways.'

An Ethically Informed Perspective on Child Poverty and Education

As the discussion so far highlights, questions about the interplay of education and child poverty, brought into sharp relief by the Covid years, are best addressed with an ethically informed perspective, where the normative assumptions underlying empirical research and complex intersections of factors, including structural, cultural, and pedagogical, can be interrogated and overcome. This section shows how the cluster of concepts identified by Robeyns ( 2018 ) as central to the capability approach offers both a normative rationale for evaluating the educational disadvantage associated with poverty and insights to guide educational practice. These insights are particularly important now, in light of the widening educational inequalities resulting from the effects of the pandemic and the limited and often unsuccessful measures adopted by many countries to counteract them.

As a normative framework concerned with people’s freedom to achieve well-being, 1 the capability approach focuses on what people can do and be with the resources they have, and what kind of life they can truly lead (Robeyns 2017 : 24). At the core of the approach is a conception of well-being in terms of people’s real opportunities (capabilities) to choose among different states and activities (functionings), those that they value (Sen 4 , 1992 ). Being a pacifist, working as a gardener or participating in the life of the community are all examples of functionings that people may value, and capability corresponds to the set of real opportunities from which they can choose (Robeyns 2017 ).

Normatively, the approach is used to evaluate individual well-being, relative advantage or disadvantage, the just design of institutional arrangements, as well as social policies. The distinctive contribution of the approach to these evaluations resides in considering inequalities and disadvantage in the space of capability, that is, in terms of limitations (or deprivations) of real opportunities for well-being. Questions of justice and equality, thus, are best addressed in relation to the set of opportunities available to people to lead good lives.

In addition, Sen draws attention to the importance of considering people’s different ability to make use of the resources and opportunities they have, or their conversion factors, in the evaluative exercise of justice (Sen 1992 , 1999 ). These different factors refer to individuals’ internal features such as physical and psychological traits, as well as to factors emerging from society, for example social policies, cultural attitudes and norms, and the physical and built environment. A book, for instance, is a useful resource for reading, but not for a visually impaired person who will need a Braille version to achieve that functioning. What is important about conversion factors is that they provide information on where interventions need to be made in order to assess people’s relative disadvantage, and to expand their capabilities (Robeyns 2017 ). At the same time, considering these factors implies a multidisciplinary analysis, which draws on insights from different areas such as socio-economic analysis, development studies, and education, to name but a few (Robeyns 2017 : 36).

The above conceptual framework brings to the fore the moral dimension of poverty, and the multiplicity of factors that contribute to it, while providing an understanding that goes beyond commonly endorsed notions of poverty in terms of lack of income and external resources (Sen 1999 ). As Sen notes, different sources of deprivation may compound the disadvantage associated with poverty, thus making ‘real poverty … much more intense than we can deduce from income data’ (Sen 2009 : 256). And furthermore, the understanding and remedying of the persistence of poverty can ‘both be helped by explicit consideration of the relation between deprivation in different spaces, especially between incomes and the capability to lead secure and worthwhile lives’ (Sen 1992 : 9). Poverty is thus defined as a deprivation of capability 2 (Sen 2009 : 254) and identified at the level of deprivation of basic functionings, such as being well nourished, sheltered, healthy and, importantly, educated. The moral urgency of addressing poverty resides therefore in the level of deprivation and deep inequality entailed, as well as in its detrimental effects on overall well-being (Burchardt and Hicks 2018 ).

As stated earlier, we believe that the conceptual apparatus of the approach thus outlined offers an ethically engaged rationale that brings together normative evaluation and sociological and educational analysis in addressing the disadvantage emerging from the interplay of child poverty and education, highlighted during the COVID pandemic, while going beyond idealised approaches to justice too. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of poor children. These features, as we shall see, make the approach specifically apt to counteract the aftermath of the pandemic in ways that go beyond existing measures.

We begin by noting that an understanding of educational inequalities in terms of capability limitations has the normative advantage of highlighting and considering elements of inequality that are not readily evident if we focus only on material or educational resources, such as funding (Terzi 2021 ). If we consider, for example, the inequalities pertaining to the experiences of schooling faced by poor children, it seems evident that no amount of additional resources, in itself, can account for the limited pedagogical interactions related to the ‘pedagogy of poverty’ which, as we have seen, can characterise poor children’s schooling. This element is best accounted for by considering the socio-cultural factors that may affect a child’s use of their educational resources and adults’ response to this. Similarly, the attitudinal and unconscious biases of teachers towards poor children cannot be appropriately addressed without considering them among the socio-cultural factors that affect children’s learning. The capability approach does not discount the importance of resources in tackling these inequalities. Rather, it draws attention to how the usefulness of resources is conditioned by a complex interaction of factors and how such complexity needs to be explicitly accounted for both theoretically and practically, in relation to appropriate interventions. Thus, the approach endorses the use of resources for additional training for teachers or public campaigns to tackle discriminating attitudes, 3 for example. It is in this way that the process of socio-political and empirical analysis of conversion factors, which constrain or enlarge the capability space, becomes part of the normative discussion. These factors are not bracketed or treated as background, as the first educational narrative or indeed some ideal theories of justice seem to do but are part of the structuring of the normative framework. At the same time, the inclusion of these factors within a normative terrain facilitates incorporating the richness of sociological approaches to child poverty within an ethical framework allowing for acute analysis of crises like the COVID pandemic.

This is not only a theoretical evaluative approach, but one that can be translated into practice too. Many scholars working with the capability approach are able to use this core idea to incorporate multidimensionality into normative notions, and to develop more nuanced evaluative approaches to assessing social relationships in fields of education, health, and housing, to name a few (Chiappero-Martinetti, Osmani and Qizilbash  2020 ). As much of the extensive scholarship on the capability approach and education illuminates (e.g., Terzi 2005 ; Walker and Unterhalter 2007 ; Hart 2012 ; Walker 2019 ), the first narrative we outline, which suggests a solution of enhancing education quality inside schools, does not sufficiently attend to the complex intersecting ways in which inequality is formed both within and outside schools which the capability approach does by looking at a range of conversion factors.

The concept of conversion factors, which are environmental, political, economic, and social, highlights that the dynamics of the constraints on and expansion of capabilities entails normative choices and practical interventions. For example, a child needs literacy to enable her to access the curriculum taught at school and pass the school leaving examination. Being able to read is both a functioning and a capability. Considering environmental and political conversion factors brings to the fore how, even if a child can read, if no school has been built in her neighbourhood, or the school that is available to her is a long distance away and is staffed with teachers who lack enough experience to prepare her to enter the examination, do not talk her language, and assume children from her background are ‘backward’, the child will not be able to learn. Economic conversion factors draw attention to factors such as having to do long hours of work in the home, assisting with childcare, chores, and basic survival. Social conversion factors highlight attitudes which question, for example, a child’s school attendance because she has ‘too much book’ and does not marry young, thus incurring stigma and the risk of sexual assault. These factors need analysis both in how relationships inside and outside the school, and their interconnection , are understood. The two narratives we have sketched work in opposite directions and thus do not foster consideration of the processes associated with conversion factors working together. Drawing on the capability approach, in developing a framework to analyse literature on the gendered effects of school closures and return to school after COVID, a UNESCO overview report noted a wide range of conversion factors at play (UNESCO 2022 ).

Paying attention to conversion factors is particularly helpful in highlighting the increased inequalities of capabilities experienced as a result of Covid. As Anand et al. ( 2020a ) highlight, while the capability of learning has been significantly affected for all children around the world, existing inequalities in access to technology, parental education, and available support have exacerbated the disadvantage of children living in poverty. Specific capabilities, such as opportunities for speech and language development have been affected, particularly in the early years and more significantly for children with special educational needs and those from the most deprived neighbourhoods (Castro-Kemp and Mahmud 2021 ). As noted above, these inequalities are the result of complex interconnected environmental, social, political, and cultural factors, which are foregrounded and assessed by the capability approach. Relatedly, the opportunities to make up for the so called ‘learning loss’ caused by Covid differ too. And while some governments have attempted to address the learning loss by providing additional funding for specific programmes, for instance additional one to one and small group lessons or extended school time, such as the National Tutoring Programme deployed in England, the underlying structural social, economic, and educational inequalities have remained unchanged or have worsened, thus leading to the potential limited success of such initiatives. Consider, for example, the case of Janice, a year 7 student with insecure literacy skills attending a school in a poor neighbourhood. Janice had problems accessing remote learning and her learning has suffered as a result; moreover, she does not qualify for free access to school meals and often arrives at school hungry. Although teachers’ intervention is crucial in providing Janice with appropriate learning support, it is questionable whether such support will work, if the circumstantial factors of Janice’s situation are not addressed, and, importantly, the teaching and learning are based on limited notions of ‘catching up’. Through its attention to conversion factors, we suggest, an approach based on capability draws much needed attention to the role of schools in addressing disadvantage in interrelation with policies addressing circumstantial factors.

Finally, we posit, the conceptual apparatus of the capability approach, and its distinction between functionings and capability, offers insights that may prove helpful for addressing the education of children living in poverty. The importance accorded by the approach to well being and to the opportunities to lead good lives suggests, first and foremost, a shift from a functionalist view of education and its emphasis on a narrow set of learning outcomes, to a view of education aimed at the expansion of children’s capabilities. This more expansive view of education could, perhaps, include an expansion of the social imaginary associated with the dominant normative frameworks that we have outlined above. Thus, education is recognised as having a fertile role in enhancing children’s present and future well-being and providing real opportunities to develop functionings that will enable them to participate in the life of their communities and their broader society, and in work and leisure activities (Nussbaum 2011 ). At the same time, education itself can be one of the ways in which possibilities for social change can be imagined. A number of accounts using the capability approach to analyse educational relationships highlight this (e.g., De Jaeghere 2021 ; Walker et al. 2022 ; Unterhalter et al. 2022 ). While not discounting the importance of achieving functionings pertaining to, e.g., literacy and numeracy, the approach suggests instead a much broader conception of education, one more akin to promoting the full functionings pertaining to local, national, and global citizenship and the capacity to reflect on one’s values and goals and those of the surrounding society.

Moreover, the broader scope of education in relation to the expansion of capabilities is antithetic to any form of reductionist pedagogy, such as the pedagogy of poverty outlined earlier, but supports instead forms of pedagogical interaction and co-construction of the learning and teaching process (Brando 2020 ; Adamson 2021 ).

Lastly, the focus on capabilities, at least at the level of policy, helps unmask the inequalities of children living in poverty by considering the real opportunities they have, beyond the actual level of functionings or learning outcomes they may achieve.

It can be seen that the capability approach provides insights that allow us to address the lacunae identified in the two narratives of childhood, poverty and education we have sketched, and which continue to inform policy after the Covid years. In the first narrative the space of education is conceived as separate from the contexts of poverty, while in the second narrative the space of education is submerged by the structures associated with the perpetuation of poverty. The capability approach identifies the space of capabilities as different to these conceptions. Education has the potential to be a space of capabilities and opportunities that is not separated from social conditions, as the approach acknowledges the salience of conversion factors. But the capability space is also not simply a reflection of what may be the narrow set of opportunities offered by a society that is structured to reproduce inequalities. The capability space may be understood as a site of agency and opportunity contoured by the many historical and contemporary conditions that shape child poverty.

An ethical framework informed by the conceptual apparatus of the capability approach shows how values and ideals informed by the invaluable insights provided by educational, sociological and empirical studies can contribute to an understanding of the complexity of child poverty and the role that education plays in children’s life.

The Covid 19 pandemic has starkly refocused attention to the pressing and growing situation of children living in poverty worldwide. Capabilities threatened during the pandemic include opportunities for health, wellbeing, equity and inclusion. Work on the Covid pandemic and the capability approach has prompted a rich investigation of the ways in which institutions and innovations should be approached (Venkatapuram 2020 ; Anand et al. 2020 ; Ferrannini et al 2021 ; UNDP 2022 ). Our discussion has explored two dominant narratives about child poverty in its interplay with education and it has highlighted how each overlooks the complex ways in which normative values and contextual factors are related. The interdisciplinary conversations that enable theorists and practitioners to develop adequate responses to the pressing reality of child poverty, which has been starkly emphasised by the recent Covid 19 pandemic, we have argued, demand that we adopt an ethically informed, normative position on the desirability and the feasibility of intervening in our educational institutions, in ways that promote people’s real possibilities for leading a flourishing life. The modest, but also the possible radical potential of this perspective is captured in Jonathan Wolff’s suggestion that, at least in principle, ‘it is possible to improve individuals’ opportunities, and hence their capability set, by doing any of three interventions: improving a person’s internal traits such as strengths, skills etc., or improving their external resources including income, entitlement to services etc., and finally improving the social and cultural environment in which a person lives, including social policies, cultural attitudes and norms as well as their built environment’ (Wolff, 2007, Wolff, 2020). The normative framework we have articulated is perhaps a first step towards such an improvement on the existing situation.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Gottfried Schweiger and Frank Jeffery, and all the participants to the Workshop on Ethics, children, education and the COVID-19 pandemic held on 28 and 29 September 2022 (University of Salzburg) for their comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the participants to the Seminar Series ‘ Child Poverty and Education: Philosophical Reflections ’ funded by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and held between January and June 2021 (University of Roehampton and IOE UCL’s Faculty of Education). We thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful questions and support.

1 Amartya Sen originally formulated the approach as an alternative to predominant accounts of well-being based on utility (Sen 1985 , 1992 ), while Martha Nussbaum further articulated it through a list of ten central capabilities deemed necessary to live a truly human life ( 2000 , 2010).

2 Sen’s position has however been critiqued for obscuring material deprivation as fundamental to poverty. See Lister ( 2004 ), for an articulated discussion.

3 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing on this point.

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Contributor Information

Lorella Terzi, Email: [email protected] .

Elaine Unterhalter, Email: [email protected] .

Judith Suissa, Email: [email protected] .

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Research Article

Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment. What matters more: Exposure to poverty or exposure to affluence?

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

Roles Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Roles Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

• Agata A. Troost, 
• Maarten van Ham, 
• David J. Manley

• Published: March 8, 2023
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281928
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Neighbourhood effects studies typically investigate the negative effects on individual outcomes of living in areas with concentrated poverty. The literature rarely pays attention to the potential beneficial effects of living in areas with concentrated affluence. This poverty paradigm might hinder our understanding of spatial context effects. Our paper uses individual geocoded data from the Netherlands to compare the effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty on educational attainment within the same statistical models. Using bespoke neighbourhoods, we create individual neighbourhood histories which allow us to distinguish exposure effects from early childhood and adolescence. We follow an entire cohort born in 1995 and we measure their educational level in 2018. The results show that, in the Netherlands, neighbourhood affluence has a stronger effect on educational attainment than neighbourhood poverty for all the time periods studied. Additionally, interactions with parental education indicate that children with higher educated parents are not affected by neighbourhood poverty. These results highlight the need for more studies on the effects of concentrated affluence and can inspire anti-segregation policies.

Citation: Troost AA, van Ham M, Manley DJ (2023) Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment. What matters more: Exposure to poverty or exposure to affluence? PLoS ONE 18(3): e0281928. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281928

Editor: Federico Botta, University of Exeter, UNITED KINGDOM

Received: April 4, 2022; Accepted: February 3, 2023; Published: March 8, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Troost et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions of Statistics Netherlands. The Microdata team of Statistics Netherlands can be reached for data access inquiries at the following e-mail address: [email protected] . The paper also includes explanation of the Statistics Netherlands privacy agreements: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/about-us/organisation/privacy .

Funding: The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council ( https://erc.europa.eu/ ) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 615159 (ERC Consolidator Grant DEPRIVEDHOODS, Socio-spatial inequality, deprived neighbourhoods, and neighbourhood effects; awarded to M. v. H.), as well as from European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme ( https://wayback.archive-it.org/12090/20220124075100/https:/ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/ ) under Grant Agreement n. 727097 (RELOCAL; awarded to M. v. H.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The current interest in the economic impacts of neighbourhood effects was ignited by W.J. Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged [ 1 ]. The field has been dominated by a “poverty paradigm” ever since [ 2 ] as studies on a wide range of individual outcomes focussed almost exclusively on the presumed negative effects of living in poverty concentration neighbourhoods. The research focus on poorer neighbourhoods is understandable, as these are the places where a variety of problems accumulate and restrict individual life chances. Moreover, poor neighbourhoods are highly relevant from the perspective of public policy interventions aimed at reducing poverty and related problems. However, focusing solely on the negative effects of spatially concentrated poverty may hinder our understanding of the role of spatial context effects in individual life courses. Studying the effects of living in areas with concentrated affluence could help us to better understand how inequalities arise. After all, the Matthew effect suggests that not only do the “poor get poorer”, but also that the “rich get richer” [ 3 ].

Few studies have specifically investigated the effects of living in affluent neighbourhoods on individual outcomes [ 4 ], despite repeated calls to do so since the 1990s [ 5 , 6 ]. The lack of literature on concentrated affluence is even more striking given the influential position of affluent households: the choices of the wealthy largely shape patterns of socio-economic segregation in cities, as higher income households can use their resources to select the best residential locations in a city [ 7 ]. By using their wealth, richer residents are able to [re]produce spatial inequalities, including the inequalities arising from both positive and negative neighbourhood effects [ 8 ].

To ameliorate negative neighbourhood effects, policy has often focused on the social renewal of poor neighbourhoods through relocating poor and introducing more affluent households–a policy without substantial empirical support [ 9 ]. The need to focus on tackling concentrated poverty while neglecting the spatial concentration of richer households has likely contributed to that limited policy approach [ 10 ]. Ultimately, the overwhelming focus on “fixing” poverty could, in part, be the result of researchers adopting theories based on individual social actors’ attributes rather than on a more dynamic view of society, in which upper social classes manage their resources through mechanisms of exploitation and exclusion (see the overview of social inequality theories in [ 11 ]).

There is a small number of studies that have demonstrated the significant influence of elite or affluent spatial contexts on various life outcomes in Europe [ 4 , 12 – 16 ] and in North America [ 17 – 19 ]. Amongst the important findings from these papers is that well-off and more highly educated neighbours can transfer their social and cultural capital through shared social networks formed within the neighbourhood. This is of particular importance for children’s educational outcomes, considering that richer and more highly educated neighbours not only promote ambitious social attitudes (attending university to access high paying jobs as a norm), as well as invest in local community initiatives out of interest in the wellbeing of their own offspring [ 20 ]. Wealthier residents are likely to set higher standards for extracurricular activities for local children, spending time and resources on activities related to sport or culture. Through participating in such activities, children and teenagers not only expand their objective skills and knowledge, but also learn social codes which can be important for accessing affluent settings [ 21 ]. Evidence from the Netherlands also suggests that homogenous high-income neighbourhoods exhibit more local solidarity behaviours than poorer or mixed-income neighbourhoods [ 22 ].

This study investigates the effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and neighbourhood poverty on educational attainment, using data from the Netherlands. Although by international standards Dutch cities are only moderately economically segregated, there is evidence of growing socioeconomic inequality in recent years [ 23 ], as well as isolated elite spatial contexts, created by rich households seeking to further accumulate their capital [ 24 ]. Moreover, the Dutch educational system is highly stratified and shows a growing dependency on students’ socioeconomic background [ 25 ]. In our study we use longitudinal register data, which enable us to follow the 1995 birth cohort and construct neighbourhood histories from birth to age 18, and measure educational outcomes at age 23. We study the effects of exposure to affluence and poverty at different stages of development: early childhood (ages 0 to 12), adolescence (13 to 17) and the entire childhood (0 to 17). The measures of neighbourhood poverty and affluence are created from bespoke neighbourhoods based on the nearest 200 households. Following earlier studies [ 20 ], we also test if the exposure to the neighbourhood context (both affluence and poverty) is different for children with different parental levels of education. We find that, in all models, neighbourhood affluence has a stronger effect on educational attainment than neighbourhood poverty. Additionally, interactions with parental education indicate that children with higher educated parents are not affected by neighbourhood poverty.

Theoretical background

The spatial influence of affluence.

The neighbourhood context can influence educational outcomes of a child, similarly to the effect of parental and school factors, with which neighbourhood factors often interact [ 12 ]. The literature focusses mostly on social mechanisms [ 26 ] in the neighbourhood, including social interactions, which are based on physical proximity. The benefits of affluence for the quality of the built environment and facilities such as libraries, or schools, are clear–richer parents will have more resources to invest in their community, which they first carefully chose according to their preferences [ 27 ]. However, the social networks formed in the neighbourhood, which can be of high importance for children’s future [ 4 , 15 ], are also affected by the wealth of local inhabitants.

Much of the neighbourhood effects literature uses the theory of resource transmission through local networks, which in turn is based on Bourdieu’s concepts of social and cultural capital [ 28 ]. By knowing certain types of people (social capital), individuals gain access to valuable information about schools or jobs, as well as adopt certain habits and ways of expression which lead to being accepted by those in charge of school or job admission (cultural capital). Yet even when individuals are in possession of these skills and attitudes, these paths may remain untrodden if, for example, they do not perceive attending a university as a realistic option for their future. These socially inspired possibilities are covered by the concept of habitus [ 29 ]. The life choices individuals make must fit in within their habitus, which is formed by those with whom they are interacting [ 30 ]. As individuals imitate others during their socialisation, the way they perceive the world and their place within it is shaped by their socioeconomic background. The habitus of a social class influences children’s attitude to institutions [ 31 ]: the poorer parents, family members and classmates are unable to mobilise the same degree of social and cultural capital while dealing with authorities as richer ones.

Households reproduce neighbourhood characteristics by choosing neighbourhoods with people who are like themselves, and this is partly driven by their choice of housing and the neighbourhoods in which it is available [ 32 ]. Even if they are not consciously aware of social mechanisms, resourceful parents are likely to choose a neighbourhood as affluent as possible and contribute to preserving or enhancing that status [ 4 ]. Such behaviour is rationalised as a desire to provide their children with a safe environment and protect from possible disorder in other neighbourhoods rather than to seek the positive effect of affluent ones [ 33 ]. For children, a safe environment is important because they spend time with their peers outside both in early childhood and in adolescence, playing sports and games. Unsupervised play outside is less prevalent among richer children, but still present [ 34 ]. For a child from a poorer household, becoming part of a social network with children from more affluent households can result in peer effects overriding the educational and vocational preferences of their own parents [ 4 ]. Shared behaviours, such as studying together (potentially supervised or assisted by higher educated parents) or refraining from skipping class, contribute further to educational success. Parents themselves may also be affected by the parenting attitudes in the neighbourhood [ 20 ]. Neighbourhood networks are often connected to other networks, for example when local children are encouraged to join clubs playing higher status sports such as field hockey or tennis [ 34 ]. Ultimately, a transmission of resources takes place in richer neighbourhoods, and children from poorer households can benefit from residing in such places.

Neighbourhood poverty in European context

Poorer neighbourhoods are not only deprived of resources, but also must deal with a wide range of consequences of poverty, including higher crime rates or the social isolation of migrant groups. Many studies of neighbourhood context influencing educational attainment from the US have focused on such spatial disorder, with participants expressing the stress caused by presence of organised crime or drug trade [ 35 , 36 ]. However, these issues are less prevalent in the more egalitarian European societies [ 37 ], with higher government spending on welfare [ 38 ]. There are also differences between Northern American and European urban planning, with European cities being more “urban”–denser, with well-developed public transit networks–while many American cities are characterised by extensive, car-oriented, suburbs [ 38 ]. Even if Western European cities have also experienced suburbanisation during the last decades [ 39 ], their more compact nature should result in lower spatial isolation experienced by their inhabitants. Furthermore, cities in the US have been expanding due to international migration, a phenomenon which remains much slower in Western Europe [ 38 ]. The large influx of new inhabitants from abroad may make social cohesion in American cities more difficult to achieve.

These differences between European and American cities might be a reason for caution in using US studies as inspiration for research on European data. The strong focus on poverty could be one of such trends. Even if American authors have long been calling for a greater focus on affluence [ 5 , 6 ], most of the US research and public attention goes to deprived neighbourhoods [ 2 ]. Based on the practical reality of relatively egalitarian Western European cities, we assume that in the Netherlands, the lack of higher educated, affluent neighbours could be more important than the overall impact of poverty. This assumption is further supported by the few studies from European countries which show that the influence of neighbourhood affluence on various outcomes can be stronger than that of neighbourhood poverty [ 13 , 14 ].

While comparing the effects of affluence and poverty, it is important to highlight that one is not simply the inverse of the other. As already discussed, poverty is often associated with crime and isolation of minority groups [ 35 , 36 ]. Furthermore, the accumulation of different types of capital characteristic for affluence could progress at very different rates than the negative effects of poverty, which can also accumulate (for example, having debts can lead to difficulties in finding an affordable mortgage). There are studies which not only show that the effect of one could be stronger than the other, but also that there can be a significant effect of concentrated affluence on health while concentrated poverty has no effect at all [ 19 ]. Affluence and poverty can also interact differently with individual characteristics. This lack of symmetry is an argument for including them both in empirical models, as well as measuring them as distinct and separate factors to capture all of their influence. There are also theoretical reasons for studying poverty together with affluence, while using the Weberian-inspired conceptualisations of social and cultural capital, on which we elaborate in the next section.

Conceptualising social inequality

This paper addresses the issue of the poverty paradigm in the literature by specifically paying attention to spatially concentrated affluence. Understanding social inequality is central in research on neighbourhood effects, as social inequality is both their cause and consequence. It is, therefore, surprising that there has been relatively little attention paid to the theorising and conceptualising social inequality itself within the field, even in the studies which do include measures of affluence. In the following sections we argue for the need of studying not only the effects of poverty, but also affluence, arising from the theories of inequality used (sometimes only implicitly) in the field.

Most of the quantitative neighbourhood effects research, including the papers discussed in the sections above, fits well into the so-called middle-range sociology, a scientific scope advocated by scientists such as Merton [ 40 ] and Boudon [ 41 ]. Middle-range sociology is situated between the grand theories and pure empiricism, with theories focused on specific aspects of social life, instead of the whole society; it aims to identify the same social mechanisms in different situations [ 42 ]. Middle-range social research papers focus on answering specific research questions based on, most often, quantitative methods such as statistical models or experiments [ 43 ]. Studies of neighbourhood effects often investigate specific mechanisms [ 26 ], related to the effect of some form of segregation and therefore social inequality in urban space. The strict paper structure characteristic for the middle-range social studies usually does not allow for extensive theoretical commentary about inequality. Nevertheless, the concepts used in these papers are based on a variety of competing approaches to class, status and inequality (for an early overview see [ 44 ]), even if these inspirations are not immediately visible.

To understand why researchers tend to overlook the spatial effects of affluence, it is important to highlight some of the traditions in studies of social inequalities and how they relate to the neighbourhood effects field. Wright [ 11 ] outlines three main theoretical approaches within the sociology of class, social mobility and inequality: the individual-attributes approach (used in stratification research), opportunity hoarding (the Weberian approach), and mechanisms of domination and exploitation (the Marxist approach).

The individual-attributes approach focuses on how people obtain resources that allow them to attain a certain occupation, and therefore a position within the social strata. These meritocratic resources (for example, education or motivation), combined with attributes people are born with, shape their chances in life. The opportunity hoarding approach begins with the assumption that access to the most prestigious positions tends to be strongly protected–or hoarded–by those already having access. This Weberian approach studies how individuals in the higher social strata distance themselves by setting up requirements based on economic, cultural and social capital, as well as legal mechanisms of exclusion. One example, from urban geography, is when a good school is only accessible to those living in a certain district, and house prices in that area are sufficiently high that only affluent households can afford to live there. The third approach evolves around mechanisms of domination and exploitation. This Marxist approach takes the analysis further, by asserting that those who restrict access to certain resources and positions can also “control the labour of another group to its own advantage” [ 11 ]. This approach is present in urban studies research on the exploitations of tenants and ordinary homeowners by landlords and developers, and the pressure the latter can exert on government policies.

Social inequality and neighbourhood effects

Quantitative studies on neighbourhood effects usually mix elements of the individual-attributes and opportunity hoarding approaches. The individual-attributes approach manifests itself as focus on social mobility and the idea that the position an individual ultimately attains is shaped by a bundle of attributes, many of them related to physical space. This approach has the advantage that it is relatively easy to translate into statistical models. However, because of the high level of methodological sophistication in time and space-variant predictors, researchers often reduce their most important status-related neighbourhood characteristic(s) to a single proxy variable which captures the spatial context of an individual.

One approach for measuring the affluence of a spatial context is using income [ 45 ]. Using categorical measures, or grouping neighbourhood inhabitants by their income level, often fits the research design better than using average income. Authors tend to follow the tradition of the field by focusing on poverty (choosing to create categories based on the percentage of poor households, etc.), which leads to the relatively lower number of studies on affluence [ 4 ]. From the perspective of the individual-attributes approach, this focus on poverty can be justified because there is no assumed relationship between poverty and affluence. As such, “eliminating poverty by improving the relevant attributes of the poor—their education, cultural level, human capital—would in no way harm the affluent” [ 11 ]. By contrast, “in the case of opportunity hoarding, the rich are rich in part because the poor are poor, and the things the rich do to maintain their wealth contribute to the disadvantages faced by poor people.” It therefore follows that “moves to eliminate poverty by removing the mechanisms of exclusion would potentially undermine the advantages of the affluent”.

One could argue that a discussion on whether societal well-being can be improved without substantially limiting the choices or wealth of upper strata is not immediately relevant to more exploratory neighbourhood effects research. However, many neighbourhood studies still implicitly use opportunity hoarding theories to explain the mechanisms under investigation. Perhaps Maybe the most important examples are the already discussed concepts of cultural and social capital as developed by Bourdieu [ 29 ]. Bourdieu argues that social phenomena such as cultural norms are employed by upper classes to limit the access to their resources. Therefore, researching poverty in isolation disregards, potentially, the most influential part of the picture: the affluent social actors who possess the cultural, social, and economic capital. There are also theories focusing on the spread of disorder associated with capital deficiency, such as the broken windows theory [ 46 ]. It could still be illuminating to frame the commonly studied neighbourhood effects mechanisms in terms of the presence of various forms of capital, rather than a lack of it. Those studies investigating the effect of affluence often omit discussion of the wider implications of focussing on the effect of poverty in research. In addition to developing more methodologically sophisticated operationalisations of the current variables, quantitative neighbourhood effects researchers could deepen their assumptions and conclusions by grounding them in sociological theory. This is one of the goals of the current paper, although there are still interesting steps to be taken, such as questioning not only the poverty paradigm, but also the meritocracy paradigm [ 47 ] as well as expanding the conceptualisations of social class [ 48 ].

Current study

Studies of neighbourhood effects on educational attainment (and in a broader sense all spatial effects studies) should investigate not only the effect of neighbourhood poverty, but also the effects of concentrated affluence. We argued that a better understanding of affluence is crucial for the neighbourhood effects mechanisms driven by various forms of capital. We use household income as a measure of poverty and affluence, which is highly correlated to other, more intangible, characteristics such as social cohesion [ 49 ]. Income also serves as a proxy of resources available to neighbourhood inhabitants. Using income allows us to construct detailed individual neighbourhood histories and investigate the effects of different periods of exposure. We also create bespoke neighbourhoods, which reflect local spatial ties better than neighbourhoods based on administrative borders.

Following the literature review, we expect that the positive effect of exposure to affluent neighbours on education attainment will be stronger than the negative effect of exposure to poorer neighbours. We also expect differences between the effects of exposure to contextual poverty and affluence at different developmental stages, but it is not clear from previous work which period of influence will have the greatest impact. For instance, early years childhood exposure could be more influential for educational attainment than later exposures because of values and beliefs formed during the early years. Young children also experience less disruption from changing the neighbourhood environment [ 50 ]. However, adolescents have greater freedom from their household and spend more time with their peers away from the parental control, and therefore exposures during adolescence could be more important.

In recent years the focus of neighbourhood effects research has shifted somewhat from “do neighbourhood effects exist?” to “for whom” do they matter [ 51 ]. In the case of children, social background could prevent them from interacting with poorer or richer neighbours [ 4 ]. Parents can explicitly limit children’s interactions or simply not create any opportunities to play or socialise with children in other groups. On the other hand, children of higher educated parents may be more likely to believe in the importance of education regardless of their peer contacts in the neighbourhood. Given these propositions, we test for interactions between the exposure to neighbourhood affluence or poverty and parental education.

Data & methods

For our empirical analysis we used individual level, geo-coded longitudinal register data from the Statistics Netherland’s Social Statistical Database (SSD), which covers the entire population of the Netherlands. We selected 140,338 individuals born in 1995 who also had complete neighbourhood histories between 1995 and 2017, when they are around 22 years old, and without missing information on the variables of interest (except for parental education, which has a large percentage of missing values). For our dependent variable, education level, we measured the level of education attained by age 23 and translated this in the number of years someone would normally need to achieve that level. We added an extra year for those who studied at research universities ( wo ) to distinguish them from universities of applied science ( hbo ). The resulting variable ranges from the minimum of 2 years for unfinished primary education, to a maximum of 23 years required to obtain a doctoral degree, with the mean 16.5 years. For individuals who were still following education in the final year of observation, the level of education that they were following at that time is registered.

The data underlying our results cannot be shared publicly as they are a part of the confidential Statistics Netherlands data. Statistics Netherlands is legally responsible for consent related to data use and they have approved our project. CBS is bound by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In addition, CBS adheres to the privacy stipulations in the Statistics Netherlands Act, the European Statistics Code of Practice, and its own Code of conduct [ 52 ].

Contextual affluence and poverty

Contextual poverty is measured as a ratio and based on the Eurostat definition of the at-risk-of-poverty rate, which is the share of households with an equivalised disposable household income below 60% of the national median equivalised disposable income. The threshold for contextual affluence is set at 150% of that median, resulting in a similar percentage of the population above this threshold as the percentage of households under the poverty threshold. Even though in our data the detailed household income extends back to 2003, we have sufficient spatial information to people’s residential histories all the way back to 1995, a further 8 years. To overcome the lack of neighbourhood income data pre-2003 we used the averaged neighbourhood income data from 2003 for all years between 1995 and 2002. Although neighbourhood characteristics change over time, using the 2003 data for earlier years is the only way to include the longer time period, which is crucial for our purposes (see [ 53 ] on the static nature of neighbourhood positions).

The geocoded nature of our data gives us information on the residential location for each individual at a spatial resolution of 100x100m grid squares. Using this information, we have created bespoke measures of neighbourhood affluence and poverty for each year using Equipop [ 54 ]. Equipop calculates the proportion of the k -nearest neighbours that meet user-set criteria, in our case a ratio of the neighbours meeting the poverty or affluence criterion within the 200 nearest households for each year of an individual’s life. These ratios are the building blocks of our neighbourhood history variables, which are described in more detail below. We adjusted the income criterion for the median income in each year: households with an income above 150% of median household income that year were classified as affluent, and those with an income below 60% of median as poor. If, for example, an individual scores 0.15 for their 2005 neighbourhood affluence ratio, this means that in 2005, 15% of the 200 nearest households were regarded as affluent.

By constraining our neighbourhoods to the 200 nearest households, we are able to standardize measures both in densely and sparsely populated areas, important in this study, since we use the data from the whole country. Furthermore, as most of our predictors are based on social interaction, it is appropriate to focus on people rather than space while operationalising the variables.

The scale of spatial research should be chosen according to the theoretical assumptions of the study [ 55 ], and in our case we focus on relatively small-scale, social-interactive neighbourhood effects which would happen in neighbourhoods of about 200 households. This size should reflect a social space where people are likely to interact with each other, which, according to the assumptions of this study, assists in acquiring the skills and resources relevant for an individual’s educational attainment.

Exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty

We measure exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty by combining annual affluence/poverty ratios during different developmental periods: early childhood (ages 0 to 12), adolescence (13 to 17), and the entire childhood (0 to 17): we add up the yearly ratios and divide them by the number of years. The affluence and poverty variables in each period are only weakly correlated (correlation of -.45 for all three periods). We do not include measures of neighbourhood exposure after the age of 17; running models until the age of 23 in an earlier study has shown that young adults have very particular neighbourhood experiences. Many of them leave the parental home around the age 18, moving to cheap student accommodation in often low-income neighbourhoods. That creates a positive effect of having many poor neighbours on attained education, but as the education is rather the cause than the result in such a case, we decided to include only neighbourhood histories up to and including age 17.

Control variables

The control variables in this study include an individual’s sex (female or male) and their ethnicity, which is coded as native Dutch (both parents born in the Netherlands), Western migrant or a non-Western migrant background (Western countries, according to the Statistics Netherlands definition, are all European and Northern American countries along with Japan, Australia and Indonesia). Additionally, an individual’s household context is represented by their household income measured in 2007, when the individual being observed would have been twelve years old, the age by which mothers are likely to have re-joined the labour market, and a variable recording parental education level (lower, middle, higher or missing). The latter variable is constructed by recording the highest education level achieved by either of the (up to) two parents. Parents with missing information on their education are kept in the data as a separate category because of their large number (11% missing) and an overrepresentation of migrants in this category. A control variable at the municipality level is the level of urbanicity, based on the proportion of years between 1999 and 2017 (for which the address density data was available) an individual has lived in an urban environment. To control for the density of social interactions at a lower level, we also included interval distance, measured by Equipop in kilometres necessary to reach the 200 nearest neighbours. The descriptive statistics of all variables can be found in Table 1 .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281928.t001

Analytical approach

We estimated a series of linear regression models with educational level at age 23 as the dependent variable. All models are estimated on the same sample of 140,338 individuals, and contain the same control variables. Given the nested structure of our data, the use of multilevel modelling appears logical. However, there are two reasons why we have not used this type of models. Firstly, individuals are nested in neighbourhoods and these can change each year requiring multiple hierarchies which creates a complex structure inhibiting model convergence. This is further exacerbated by the second reason, whereby there is no strict hierarchy because of the multiple membership of individuals in the bespoke neighbourhoods (the neighbourhoods are overlapping with each other). Furthermore, because of bespoke neighbourhoods which are constructed for each individual every year, and only including people born in 1995 in the sample, a large number of individuals are nested alone in their neighbourhood (71,016; 50.60%), which is a further complication in estimating a hierarchical fixed effects structure.

The spatial variables contribute to around 3% difference in R-squared. The initial model without spatial variables explained around 15% (for detailed coefficients, see the S1 Appendix ), increasing to 16% when the urbanicity control was added, to 18% with all spatial variables included. This is the magnitude of difference that can be expected from similar variables in sociological models. Additionally, including the spatial variables diminishes the effects of other variables in the model, such as family income, which means the spatial variables contribute to the underlying causal structures. VIF values were unproblematic, therefore there are no issues with multicollinearity in the models (see the S1 Appendix for exact VIF values).

Table 2 presents the effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty over time on educational level (measured in years) at age 23. In the case of affluence, the effects of exposure during the entire childhood (ages 0 to 17) and early years (0–12) are both positive and similar in size (b = 2.138, p < 0.001, beta = 0.133 and b = 2.119, p < 0.001, beta = 0.132, respectively). The effect of exposure to affluence during adolescence remains positive, but is smaller (b = 1.733, p <0.001, beta = 0.118). Compared to early childhood (b = -0.827, p < 0.001, beta = -0.036), the negative effect of exposure to poverty is slightly stronger when taking into account the whole childhood (b = -0.989, p < 0.001, beta = -0.043), and the effect during adolescence (b = -0.925, p < 0.001, beta = -0.052) is the strongest, when looking at the standardised beta coefficient. The most important finding for this paper is the comparison between the effects of affluence and poverty. The modelling results show that exposure to affluent neighbours has a stronger overall effect on educational attainment for all three time periods than exposure to poverty, confirming our hypothesis.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281928.t002

Most of the control variables have the expected effects, with women having a slightly higher levels of education level than men, and with higher parental household income and education being positively related to educational attainment. A surprising effect is that, in our models, Western and non-Western ethnic minorities have a slightly higher educational levels compared to native Dutch individuals. However, our models control both for parental household income and parental education level, which explains much of the negative influence of belonging to a minority ethnic background observed in other studies. In total, each of the models explains almost 18% of the variance in educational attainment.

Interactions with parental education

The effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty remain significant in the models which include interactions between these neighbourhood factors and parental education, ranging from lower parental education (reference category), through middle, to higher education, and also including the sizable group of parents whose education level is missing from the data. In the model with interactions with neighbourhood poverty we additionally include the exposure to neighbourhood affluence as a control variable, and vice versa (for detailed results, see the S1 Appendix ). For ease of interpretation, we present the results of the interaction terms visually. Fig 1 shows the slopes of the interactions from both models. In the model with the interactions with neighbourhood poverty, children from households with at least one higher educated parent do not appear to be affected by the proportion of poor households in their bespoke neighbourhood. Children of either middle or lower educated parents are negatively impacted, although the severity of the impact is differential. When the proportion of poor neighbours is low then it is the children of lowest educated who are most at risk; the experienced effects are similar for children from lower and middle educated families at the highest proportion of poor neighbours.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281928.g001

In the model with the interactions with neighbourhood affluence, all interaction slopes are positive, although the slope of the interaction between higher parental education and neighbourhood affluence is slightly flatter. This implies that again, children with at least one higher educated parent are less susceptible to their neighbours’ influence on educational attainment, compared to those with lower educated parents. However, this difference is less pronounced in the case of exposure to affluent neighbourhoods than to poor ones.

Conclusions & discussion

In this paper we have compared the effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and neighbourhood poverty during different stages of childhood on educational attainment. We argued that there are theoretical reasons to believe that exposure to affluence may actually be more important as a predictor of educational attainment than exposure to poverty, because of the crucial influence of interacting with higher educated people on one’s resources, skills and educational aspirations; and, in the Dutch context, because of the lack of extreme concentrated poverty. Confirming this empirically, our results show that neighbourhood affluence has a stronger effect on educational attainment than neighbourhood poverty in the Netherlands. This is consistently the case across different time periods–from early childhood (ages 0–12), adolescence (13–17)–as well as for the entire childhood (0–17). According to our models the neighbourhood effects during different time periods are similar when it comes to magnitude, direction, and significance. Interestingly, the effect of exposure to poverty during the entire childhood period is stronger than that of shorter periods, which contrasts with previous results from the US [ 50 ] and the Netherlands [ 56 ].

We considered the educational level of parents to explore whether children from higher or lower educated parents are influenced differently by the neighbourhood. This is in line with earlier works, arguing that neighbourhood effects may not be the same for everybody within the neighbourhood, and that the heterogeneity of individual backgrounds might be important for their transmission [ 51 ]. The interactions between the effects of neighbourhood affluence or poverty and parental education level show that children with at least one higher educated parent are not impacted by neighbourhood poverty. We therefore consider higher education to be a buffer against negative neighbourhood contexts. However, children with higher educated parents are still influenced by neighbourhood context when that context is set in affluence, although their gains are not as great as those experience by children living in households with lower levels of parental education.

Most importantly, our results highlight how spatially concentrated affluence contributes to the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities, as the effect of neighbourhood affluence on educational attainment is stronger than that of neighbourhood poverty. It seems that, in this sense, neighbourhood effects in the Netherlands are similar to those observed in the UK [ 13 ] and Finland [ 14 ]. Our results, specifically the effect of spatially concentrated affluence being stronger than that of poverty, support our initial idea that it is often the lack of resources –the cultural and economic capital of richer neighbours—in poor and middle-income neighbourhoods that is the problem, not the theorised negative effects of poverty itself. Again, in the Dutch context, crime and teenage delinquency are at relatively low levels compared to the United States, where much of the previous literature is set. Social interactions with resourceful neighbours and peers do seem to play an important role in forming children’s ambitions, as well as in sharing knowledge and forming attitudes that support them. Additionally, children with at least parent with a higher level of education were less susceptible to neighbourhood influences, especially when living in poor neighbourhoods, which suggests that parental resources have a buffering role, compensating for the local lack of capital. Such children were also less affected in affluent neighbourhoods, but they still benefitted from the neighbourhood context. This implies that neighbourhood resources can have an added effect regardless of family background.

One potential possible limitation of this study is that we have measured neighbourhood resources only taking into account household income. While the use of this relatively simple variable allows for a sophisticated operationalisation of neighbourhood histories at across time periods it does not necessarily capture all important dimensions of resources. Future work could try to include other dimensions of capital and inequality to investigate the effects of living near elite, rather than just affluent, social groups. The sequences of moving from more to less affluent neighbourhoods, and vice versa, could also be studied, as we did in an earlier paper focusing on the different temporal aspects of exposure to neighbourhood poverty. Future studies should also include the role of the school context [ 57 ], with a direct measure of it. Lack of the school context is a possible limitation of this study; however, the effect of schools can be a mediating factor in the neighbourhood effect on educational achievement in the Netherlands [ 58 ]. And finally, when longer time series become available, future studies could measure educational attainment at an older age, which may provide more accurate information on obtained diplomas and final qualifications as well as the impacts of returning to education in later adulthood.

In the introduction we observed that neighbourhood effects research is trapped in the poverty paradigm, and as a consequence focusses predominantly on the negative effects of living in poor neighbourhoods. Our study serves as an inspiration for both research and policy focused on the spatial transmission and segregation of affluence. The positive effect of growing up in an affluent neighbourhood is not a serendipitous turn of fate; urban segregation is an outcome of opportunity hoarding processes by those with the means to do so, even if people do not expect the macro level outcomes of their decisions [as in, for example, the Schelling ethnic segregation models: 59 ], and the overwhelming majority of households are subjected to the whims of landlords and developers controlling the housing market. By studying the effects of living in both affluent and poor environments, we have painted a fuller picture in which urban segregation is not just driven by the sociospatial transmission of deprivation, but also by most resources being concentrated in affluent neighbourhoods.

Supporting information

S1 appendix..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281928.s001

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank for Heleen J. Janssen’s contributions during the early stages of the work on this manuscript.

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Poverty and Education: Towards Effective Action A Review of the Literature

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This analysis is about the role of poverty in school reform. Data from a number of sources are used to make five points. First, that poverty in the US is greater and of longer duration than in other rich nations. Second, that poverty, particularly among urban minorities, is associated with academic performance that is well below international means on a number of different international assessments. Scores of poor students are also considerably below the scores achieved by white middle class American students. Third, that poverty restricts the expression of genetic talent at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Among the lowest social classes environmental factors, particularly family and neighborhood influences, not genetics, is strongly associated with academic performance. Among middle class students it is genetic factors, not family and neighborhood factors, that most influences academic performance. Fourth, compared to middle class children, severe medical problems affect impoverished youth. This limits their school achievement as well as their life chances. Data on the negative effect of impoverished neighborhoods on the youth who reside there is also presented. Fifth, and of greatest interest, is that small reductions in family poverty lead to increases in positive school behavior and better academic performance. It is argued that poverty places severe limits on what can be accomplished through school reform efforts, particularly those associated with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The data presented in this study suggest that the most powerful policy for improving our nations' school achievement is a reduction in family and youth poverty.

Teachers College Record

Background/Context: This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned. In their place must come recognition that income inequality causes many social problems, including problems associated with education. Sadly, compared to all other wealthy nations, the USA has the largest income gap between its wealthy and its poor citizens. Correlates associated with the size of the income gap in various nations are well described in Wilkinson & Pickett (2010), whose work is cited throughout this article. They make it clear that the bigger the income gap in a nation or a state, the greater the social problems a nation or a state will encounter. Thus it is argued that the design of better economic and social policies can do more to improve our schools than continued work on educational policy independent of such concerns. Purpose/Objective/Research Question: The research question asked is why so many school reform efforts have produced so little improvement in American schools. The answer offered is that the sources of school failure have been thought to reside inside the schools, resulting in attempts to improve America's teachers, curriculum, testing programs and administration. It is argued in this paper, however, that the sources of America's educational problems are outside school, primarily a result of income inequality. Thus it is suggested that targeted economic and social policies have more potential to improve the nations schools than almost anything currently being proposed by either political party at federal, state or local levels. Research Design: This is an analytic essay on the reasons for the failure of almost all contemporary school reform efforts. It is primarily a report about how inequality affects all of our society, and a review of some research and social policies that might improve our nations' schools. Conclusions/Recommendations: It is concluded that the best way to improve America's schools is through jobs that provide families living wages. Other programs are noted that offer some help for students from poor families. But in the end, it is inequality in income and the poverty that accompanies such inequality, that matters most for education.

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Impact of Poverty on Education: Understanding the Effects and Seeking Solutions

Introduction.

Poverty has long been identified as a significant social issue that affects various aspects of individuals’ lives, including education. Many studies have shown that poverty and educational outcomes are strongly correlated, with children from low-income families experiencing significant academic achievement and educational attainment challenges. In this article, we will explore the impact of poverty on education, the barriers that prevent students from low-income families from accessing quality education, and some possible solutions to address this issue.

The Impact of Poverty on Education

Poverty affects education in multiple ways..

Firstly, financial constraints restrict access to educational resources, including books, technology, and other materials that can enhance learning. Children from low-income families are less likely to have access to quality preschool education, significantly impacting their readiness for kindergarten and subsequent academic success.

Secondly, poverty can lead to inadequate nutrition and healthcare, hindering cognitive development and negatively impacting academic performance. Children from low-income families often face food insecurity, which can lead to malnutrition, leading to health issues, and reduced attention and retention during learning.

Thirdly, poverty often leads to unstable home environments, including frequent moves, stress, and a lack of resources. These factors can lead to emotional and behavioral problems, making it challenging for children to focus on their studies and achieve their potential.

Barriers to Education for Low-Income Students

The impact of poverty on education is often exacerbated by systemic barriers that limit access to quality education for low-income students. For example, schools in low-income areas are often under-resourced, leading to overcrowded classrooms, outdated materials, and fewer opportunities for extracurricular activities. This can result in a lower quality of education and limited exposure to enrichment programs that may be beneficial.

Moreover, inadequate teacher training and support can lead to ineffective teaching and reduced student outcomes. Teachers may not have the necessary resources or expertise to address the unique needs of students from low-income families, such as language barriers, learning disabilities, and trauma.

Solutions to Address Poverty and Education Inequality

To address the impact of poverty on education, we need to implement systemic solutions that focus on reducing the disparities in access to quality education for low-income students. Some possible solutions include:

• Providing equitable funding for schools in low-income areas to improve resources and materials.
• Investing in high-quality preschool education to improve readiness for kindergarten and future academic success.
• Offering teacher training and support to address the unique needs of students from low-income families.
• Providing access to nutrition and healthcare services to support cognitive development and academic success.
• Engaging parents and communities in education to foster a culture of learning and support.

In conclusion, the impact of poverty on education is a significant issue that requires attention and action. By understanding the challenges and barriers that low-income students face, we can develop and implement practical solutions to address the issue.

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