Learning and training are central topics in life course research as variations in educational participation, pathways and attainments form an important axis of social inequality. In contrast, housing scholarship often considers education to only be crucial to a specific set of residential processes, such as long-distance migration or neighbourhood dynamics around university campuses. While qualification variables are almost always used when modelling residential behaviour, these are typically treated as controls or are instead interpreted as proxy measures of resources or lifestyle preferences. Surprisingly little attention has thus been devoted to understanding how changes in education and housing systems interact to alter lives, places and patterns of inequality.

The post-war transformation of education is one arena where public policy has had particularly potent impacts on the structure of life courses. Since the Second World War, Global North education systems have expanded as compulsory schooling has been prolonged and become less selective, vocational training pathways have been formalised and participation in higher education (HE) has grown and widened to formerly excluded populations (for instance women, the less affluent and ethnic minorities). This transformation of extended education into a mass activity has altered residential careers by changing the type and timing of life events while also altering aggregate patterns of housing preference, resources and restrictions. Crucially housing has, in turn, become an influential determinant of educational success as where families live often has an impact on the quality of the schooling their children receive (Piekut, 2021).

This chapter uses life course perspectives to examine these two-way connections between education and housing dynamics. It argues that understanding how education interacts with housing processes requires recognising that:

• • Education is not just relevant to housing in early adulthood but rather matters over the entire life span.

• • Education is not just about measurable qualifications but is also a biographical process of gaining competencies, skills and knowledge about subjects, activities and places while developing new perspectives, worldviews, peer groups and tastes.

• • Educational qualifications are, to an extent, positional goods as their economic value is inversely related to their prevalence, while the disadvantages of not possessing a given qualification increase the more ubiquitous it becomes (Green, 2017).

This chapter examines the connections between housing careers and the dynamics of households and families. As Chapter 2 explained, Rossi (1955) was the first to recognise that family dynamics play a pivotal role in structuring housing careers. Decades of subsequent research have supported Rossi's thesis that events in the family life course frequently generate new residential demands which then prompt housing adjustments (Clark, 2021).

However, this prevailing focus on how family processes drive housing careers provides only a partial view of how these two life course domains interact. For a start, causality can flow in the other direction as housing opportunities and constraints impinge on family dynamics, for example the choice to have children (Mulder, 2006). More fundamentally, housing moves and housing-related support practices also actively reshape kin relations (Holdsworth, 2013). Housing and family therefore constitute such deeply intertwined careers that neither can be fully understood in isolation.

Changing families

Changes in housing behaviour are deeply bound up with the ongoing transformation of households and families that has occurred with the post-war demographic restructuring of Global North societies. Broadly speaking, population change since the Second World War has influenced family dynamics in two ways. First, new family behaviours and patterns of domestic living arrangement have emerged as countries have moved through the Second Demographic Transition (Lesthaeghe, 2010). To illustrate this process, Table 3.1 compares data on family-related behaviours and household structures in England and Wales from two census years: 1951 and 2011. The table highlights several trends, including:

• • delayed marriage and the emergence of unmarried cohabitation, most notably among younger couples for whom cohabitation is now both an alternative to marriage as well as the normal precursor to it;

• • increased partnership instability since the 1960s driven partly by higher divorce rates and partly by the replacement of marriages with less stable cohabitations;

• • declining fertility due to postponed childbearing and lower levels of completed fertility;

• • the decoupling of childbearing from marriage;

• • reductions in average household size associated with ageing, lower fertility and increased solo living (ONS, 2014).

These trends have been accompanied by the growth of reconstituted or ‘blended’ families and an increase in the proportion of children dividing their time between the households of separated parents. Greater acceptance of same-sex partnerships and their legal recognition from 2005 have injected further variety into family structures.