Existing research on intergenerational mobility shows that family inputs are strongly related to the lifetime outcomes of children. Yet these analyses have stopped short of identifying what underlying family characteristics actually determine these patterns of intergenerational persistence of outcomes and, importantly, to what extent these characteristics are set in stone or are subject to change. We present novel evidence on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills by compiling a dataset linking maths and language skills of parents to maths and language skills of their children.