(June 2026) Some countries, like Germany, sort students into separate schools early, by perceived ability at around ages 10 to 12. Other countries do this much later, if at all. A new study suggests that this choice can cast a long shadow on memory and reasoning after age 50.   

Educational tracking and the ageing brain 

Researchers interested in the relationship between education and cognitive abilities later in life (reasoning about things, memory, attention) have mostly tended to look at the impact of compulsory schooling laws. Research has generally found educating young people for longer to be good for the brain later in life – although this research has been disputed in a previous study from researchers using SHARE data. 

This time an international research team of Filippo Da Re (University of Padova) and colleagues turned the focus to a related but underexplored policy: educational tracking. 

What is educational tracking? 

Educational tracking is the practice of sorting students into different educational streams (or “tracks”), typically in early adolescence, based on their perceived abilities or likelihood of going to university. This policy is common across European countries, with the usual scenario of separating students into vocational vs. academic high schools. Students in the academic track receive more general coursework and postpone specialisation; those in vocational tracks are steered straight towards occupation-specific, work-based skills. 

Tracking is generally designed to help students optimise their learning and marketplace entry based on their individual abilities and interests. But it can have unintended consequences. This is especially true for children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families, who are overwhelmingly more likely to end up in a vocational track. One reason suggested for this is that vocational training offers a faster route to work for children from struggling families. In the long term, however, this reinforces the inequalities we already see in educational outcomes. 

As one can imagine, the age when a track is chosen is particularly important, because the younger a child is, the less stable and predictive their apparent ability tends to be. Some systems sort early: Germany is a well-known example, where children are typically placed into three different types of school around age 10 to 12. Others (like the UK or Scandinavian countries) delay sorting until 15 or 16, or avoid between-school tracks altogether. This later tracking has been shown to reduce the impact of family background on test scores and labour-market outcomes. The open question Da Re and colleagues set out to answer was whether it also reaches all the way into the ageing brain. 

Using Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe data to study the lasting reach of educational tracking 

The research team used data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and combined it with a newly built dataset on the timing of school-tracking reforms across the continent, drawn from the Gateway to Global Aging Data policy explorer.  

Across the second half of the twentieth century, many European countries reformed their school systems to push the tracking age later, with some moving it from 10 or 11 to 14 or even 16. Because these reforms arrived at different moments in different places, the researchers could compare people who grew up under early tracking with otherwise similar people, born in the same country a few years later, who grew up under delayed tracking. 

Age at first tracking by country and birth year cohort 

Source: Authors, adapted from the Gateway to Global Aging project. 

How cognition and childhood circumstances are measured at SHARE 

Cognition was measured with a standard 10-word recall test: respondents memorise ten common words and recall as many as they can, both immediately and again a few minutes later. The two scores are added together to give a "summary recall" score out of 20.  

Childhood circumstances were captured by an index of socioeconomic status at age 10, built from four commonly-used markers recorded in SHARE's retrospective life-history interviews: the occupation of the main breadwinner, the number of rooms per person, the number of books in the home, and household amenities such as running water and an inside toilet. 

After restricting the sample to people born between 1936 and 1959 — old enough to show early signs of cognitive decline, but not so old that selective mortality distorts the picture — the analysis covered 28,439 people across 14 European countries. The average age at the time of the first word recall test was about 61. 

Memory in later life tracks childhood wealth 

Memory in later life shows a clear relationship to childhood SES: people from well-off families at age 10 scored about 1.2 points higher on the memory test than those who grew up poor.  

However, each additional year that a country delayed tracking shrank the SES gap in late-life memory by close to 8 per cent. Put visually, the line linking childhood advantage to old-age memory is noticeably flatter for people sorted at 14 than for those sorted at 11. However, the study design makes it hard to see whether the gap shrank due to gains among lower-SES individuals, losses among higher-SES individuals, or a combination of both. 

Why might delaying educational tracking help the less privileged? 

The first mechanism is probably education itself. Children from advantaged homes completed almost three more years of schooling than their less well-off peers but later tracking narrowed that gap. The effect was concentrated at the bottom of the ladder: delayed tracking reduced the chance that disadvantaged students dropped out of secondary school altogether and raised the chance they finished at least a vocational qualification. It did not change rates of academic high school or university completion, so the action was more about keeping struggling students in the system rather than pushing more of them towards degrees. 

The second mechanism is the kind of work that education opens up. Children from richer backgrounds were more likely to land white-collar, higher-prestige and less physically demanding first jobs – this is a very well-established phenomenon. Since cognitively demanding, less gruelling work is hypothesised to keep the mind sharper for longer, this more equal start in the labour market plausibly feeds back into more equal cognitive ageing. 

Keeping results robust 

To make sure they were capturing tracking reforms rather than some general march of progress, the authors ran a battery of checks. Placebo tests that assigned fake reform dates to earlier cohorts produced no effect, and there was no sign that the gap was already closing before the real reforms landed. The team also accounted for other policies that shifted around the same time (for example, compulsory schooling years, the minimum school-leaving age and the statutory retirement age) and the tracking effect held firm. Interestingly, a later legally-enforced retirement age was independently linked to a smaller cognitive gap too. 

Why does this matter? 

Reforms that delay tracking have long been argued for on grounds of social mobility. Here they appear to double as a public-health measure, nudging an entire generation towards more equal cognitive ageing, which couldn’t be more relevant at a time when the number of people with dementia is soaring. 

Interested in conducting research into the long-term drivers of cognitive health with SHARE data? CLICK HERE. 

Article: Da Re, F., Bertoni, M., Kieny, C. & Avendano, M. (2026). Dividing lives: The impacts of delayed school tracking on inequalities in cognitive aging in Europe. Social Science & Medicine, 399, 119236. 

Picture by Yan Krukau via Pexels