Executive Summary

The relationship between a person’s level of education and the level of income this commands has been well explored in the literature. Less well examined are the links between family structure, the educational attainment of the parents in the family and levels of family wellbeing. This study addresses this gap using a series of family wellbeing indicators derived from data available in the five-yearly census as part of the Family and Whānau Wellbeing Project.

The associations between parents’ educational attainment and wellbeing (as measured by median equivalised income, the incidence of low income, unemployment, hours worked and level of home ownership) are described for different family types using information derived from census data for the period 1981–2006. The use of census data allows the impacts of parents’ educational attainment to be assessed across time and within family types by each of the wellbeing indicators.

The results confirm the findings of other studies, which show that attainment of secondary and post-secondary educational qualifications commands a ‘premium’ in the labour market. This study indicates how this ‘educational premium’ is distributed differently over different family types, and suggests that this premium has increased over the period 1981–2006 for most measures of family wellbeing.