Rich-poor education gap grows for 16-year-olds in almost all of England

My question is what is the underlying issue? Is it their home life? Quality of food? What they do in school holidays? Is it that school is dictated by area and area is dictated by house price so bad schools end up with poorer households? Or is it a mix? Without this information we don’t have the route forward and just need to perform more studies.

Expert opinion shows intelligence is [49%](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301886) heritable.

Therefore, smarter parents produce smarter kids – on average.

IQ, obviously, predicts income (Experts believed 45% of SES variance was explained by intelligence and 55% by non-IQ factors.)

Therefore, rich kids are going to do better at school due to the intelligence gap.

First, it’s the pandemic, so presumably school closures during the pandemic.

Second, you’d expect richer parents to value education more highly, and have larger homes where each child could have their own room and their own laptop for Zoom lessons.

Third, and this is the interesting bit, it is only outside London. So what did London do differently? Possibly one answer is a large immigrant population which might value education more and so made sure their children cracked open a textbook while their schools were closed for Covid, rather than scrolling through TikTok. Except there are other towns that also have large BAME populations, and they were not exceptional.