Britain is about as socially mobile as anywhere

I saw a report last week, which I put aside to read later, assuming that it would be reported prominently in the next day’s newspapers. It made the important argument that Britain is, contrary to what most people think, a socially mobile country.

What a tribute to the power of herd thinking, then, that Peter Saunders’s study for the Civitas think tank, Social Mobility Delusions, went unreported in the British press when it was published last Thursday.

Nearly everyone thinks that Britain is near the bottom of the world league table for social mobility, and the chances of people who are born into poor families doing well in life are getting worse.

Neither is necessarily true.

Saunders takes issue with research published by the Sutton Trust, which says that Britain compares badly with other countries when social mobility is  assessed by the similarity between parents’ and children’s incomes:

Even the Sutton Trust admits it is impossible to say with any confidence whether Britain ranks above or below countries like Sweden, the USA, Australia or France.

On mobility measured by comparing the educational attainment of parents and their children, Saunders says:

Statistics on educational mobility do not back up the Sutton Trust’s insistence that Britain is at the bottom of the international league table (even though it says they do).  The OECD ranks Britain 9th out of 30 on one measure (the extent to which  children’s educational attainment is independent of their parents’ socio-economic status), 2nd out of 17 on another (how far years of schooling of parents and children differ), in the middle of the rankings on a third (the probability of a child attending university if their parents are not graduates), and 5th out of 14 on a fourth (the risk of early school leaving, comparing parents and children). A child’s educational performance is no more predictable from its socio-economic background in England than in the OECD as a whole.

As for the suggestion that social mobility is “getting worse” (that is, there is less of it), this comes from one study comparing a cohort born in 1958 with one born in 1970, the finding of which has not been reproduced in other studies. (If it does show declining social mobility, incidentally, we should note that this happened before New Labour in 1997, when the second cohort were aged 27 – that is, long after their future income and status could be much influenced by government policy.)

I don’t wholly agree with Saunders’s conclusion, which is that Britain does not have a social mobility problem but an underclass problem:

The government’s ‘social mobility strategy’ aims  to increase social mobility by breaking down ‘barriers’ at the top  (e.g. by forcing universities to accept some children on lower grades). Such policies have  little relevance to the problems faced by children in the underclass, for their problem is not absence of opportunity, it is neglect. These policies are unlikely to have any significant effect on social mobility rates, which have hardly varied despite fifty years of radical educational upheavals.  But they do threaten to do lasting damage to our higher education system, by preventing top universities from recruiting the best students on purely meritocratic principles.

However, I think that there should be more interest in what the facts actually are.

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• Officer Dibble

  John doesn’t say what it is about Saunder’s conclusion he doesn’t agree with, but I doubt he’d enlighten my understanding. If money doesn’t buy a better education what on earth are so many people doing spending tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds on? Perhaps he thinks the majority of privately or top catchment area educated younsgters going on to Oxbridge are simply brighter? I’m fascinated by the mental contortions he gets into in supporting the coalition mis-government, explaining how their intelligent, reasoned, fair and progressive policies are so good for us all. In conclusion, he is not necessarily entirely a puppet of the .01%, and I don’t wholly agree with saintlaw’s conclusion that he is always 100% wide of the truth. Clear? Thought so.

• 12758

  The strength of the link between individual and parental incomes is worse in Britain than any other OECD country.
  The extent to which the sons earnings levels reflect those of the father are as follows:
  Denmark 0.15, Austria 0.17, Norway 0.17, Finland 0.18, Canada 0.19, Sweden 0.27, Germany 0.32, Spain 0.32, France 0.41, USA 0.47, Italy 0.48, UK 0.5. From Corak (2006) – that is the real face of social immobility and no amount of spin from politically motivated think tanks (or journalists) can hide that.

• ROFLCOPTERY

  It’s a shame he only did the 12 countries. It’d be interesting to see which other countries we’re on a par with.

• Paul Warren

  Interestingly the Saunders study cited does not mention Corak’s edited work, which I had understood to be the ‘gold standard’ on this issue.
  Also interesting that the Saunders report relies heavily on weasel wording and framing. For instance the LSE researchers (Professors Steve Machin and Jo Blanden) whose work for the Sutton Trust strongly contradicts this Civitas study are referred to as ‘employees’ of the Trust; we are told that ‘politicians believe’ there is a lack of social mobility but ‘academics’ have shown that this is not the case, etc.
  Right wing propaganda disguised as objective research. Nothing new here then.

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Ray-Hunter/663316771 Ray Hunter

  The picture says it all, what a f in nutter we have in charge, there are more bright sparks in a dead light bulb than in the brain of that one. Private Eye make hay……….

• derekcolman

  You have highlighted a bigger problem relating to the British press, and the MSM in general. Many things go unreported, including some really big issues that affect the public. Newspapers no longer ask questions, but just pass on official stories that have been fed to them via news agencies, press officers, and lobby groups. There are a lot of things going on that would enrage the public if they knew about them, but our newspapers no longer bother to dig them out. The one exception in recent times was the MPs expenses scandal, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. I am pretty sure that if something on the scale of Watergate happened today, it would go unreported. It seems the Libor fixing scandal was going on since at least 2008 and lots of people knew about it, but why did the press not pick up on it and expose it a long time ago? The first they seemed to know about it was when the FSA fined Barclays. It seems that reporters now sit and wait for the news to come to them instead of going out to find it. Some news stories even seem to be copy and pasted as they appear in different papers with exactly the same wording.