Abstract Early school-leaving is considered a societal problem, but it is unclear which family factors explain this. In this article, we focus on three family resources that may explain early school-leaving: parent’s cognitive skills at age 12, parent’s educational attainment, and household income. By combining the Intergenerational Transmission of Skills dataset and administrative data from the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education, we follow the educational career of almost 22,000 children. Structural equation models allow us to determine the relative importance of children’s skills and family resources. Focusing on the direct effects, we find that children’s cognitive skills at age 12 and initial track placement in secondary education contribute most to the risk of early school-leaving (66 per cent of the explained variance), followed by parent’s household income (25 per cent) and parent’s educational attainment (9 per cent). However, family resources may also indirectly explain early school-leaving by children’s cognitive skills at age 12 and their initial track placement. Here, parent’s cognitive skills at age 12 play the most important role. If we take that into account, we find that the total effect of parental resources increases, with parents’ cognitive skills at age 12 having the strongest contribution (18 per cent), immediately followed by household income (14 per cent) and parental educational attainment (11 per cent). These results demonstrate how important family resources are for protecting against early school-leaving, both directly and indirectly.
Vugt et al. (Fri,) studied this question.