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Millions were affected by COVID-19 school closures, with parents and schools caught unprepared. Education is expected to play a role in creating equal opportunities, so transferring schooling responsibilities to families may have increased learning inequalities generated by family backgrounds. We examined the time students spent on home learning and explored the role of the schools' distance teaching provision in explaining differences traditionally attributed to parental education, eligibility for free school meals, ethnic background and single parenthood. Using the Understanding Society COVID-19 dataset, we found children who received free school meals, single-parent families and children with parents with lower formal education qualifications and Pakistani or Bangladeshi backgrounds spent significantly less time on schoolwork. However, schools' provision of offline and online distance teaching and homework checking significantly increased the time spent on learning and reduced some inequalities, demonstrating the policy relevance of digital preparedness to limit learning loss in school closures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study compares the social mobility and status attainment of first- and second-generation Turks in nine Western European countries with those of Western European natives and with those of Turks in Turkey. It shows that the children of low-class migrants are more likely to acquire a higher education than their counterparts in Turkey, making them more educationally mobile. Moreover, they successfully convert this education in the Western European labor market, and are upwardly mobile relative to the first generation. When comparing labor market outcomes of second generations relative to Turks in Turkey, however, the results show that the same level of education leads to a higher occupation in Turkey. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]