The results of the research projects conducted by the Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) have revealed marked differences in the quality of the education offered by different schools in the SACMEQ education systems — manifest in varying levels of pupil performance — as well as problems of equity (Dolata, S.; Ikeda, M. and Murimba, 2004). These inequalities raise questions and their causes need to be thoroughly analyzed.
Of the different hypotheses put forward to explain the unequal performance of pupils, one of the most important has to do with the effect of the family background, the highly disparate nature of the populations studied being the prime cause of variations in pupil performance. These variations therefore need to be analyzed in terms of the family and environmental factors that produce them.
The object of this paper is 1) to discuss the idea of a socioeconomic status (SES) index for pupils from SACMEQ education systems, 2) to identify the factors from which the SACMEQ SES is derived, 3) to examine the breakdown of pupils by home background across countries and over time, and 4) to examine any link between pupils’ family background and school performance.