Now that Alan Milburn has been made czar for promoting the working class to top jobs in the middle class citadel, the next thing they’ll be offering are social mobility allowances. Already a Cabinet Office report published two months ago has claimed, even before Alan Milburn had time to take credit for it, that social mobiloity is increasing. Sadly, the research proved nothing of the kind.

What the research actually found was that the relationship between parental income and GCSE achievement at age 16 had weakened for children born in 1990 compared with a cohort born in 1970. However, this shift does not necessarily have any implications for social mobility at all. What we need to know is whether there was any change in the relationship between parental income and assets and the income and assets of their children.
What we do know is that there has been a massive decline in the proportion of the population doing skilled manual work. At the same time the relative earnings of many occupations which require higher educational levels have declined, in that the occupations which required 5 ’0′ levels in 1960 now require a degree. The net effect is that children from middle-income households now find it harder to achieve the relative, and even the absolute, living standards of their parents. The uncomfortable truth is that when the 11-plus still held sway, there was more social mobility than there is now.
The position is a lot more complex than the crude New Labour spin extracted from the research report. The emphasis put on education is largely misplaced. Other factors have been much more important – the rapid expansion in middle class professions and occupations in the 3 decades after 1945 which later inevitably slowed, the growth of opportunities for women, the ballooning of inequality and poverty in and after the 1980s which made advancement from the bottom much more difficult, and the number of jobs requiring educational credentials which has risen exponentially.
Sadly, the latest available international evidence shows that the US and Britain have the lowest social mobility, Germany is in a middle position, and the Nordic countries and Canada have higher levels of social mobility. And what all the research shows is that social mobility cannot just happen through education. Better communications between schools and the community are vital in order to ensure that the cultural aspirations of both family and the community are aligned with, or at least not in conflict with, the goals of the school.

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