How to get ahead in Britain

What was Gordon Brown's argument?
That as a child, he had benefited from what he called "the first great wave of social mobility" in the late 1950s and 1960s; but that these advances, as recent figures revealed, had stalled in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving a "lost generation" of "Thatcher's children" in their wake. For anyone wedded to the goals of "the classless society" and "equality of opportunity" this was obviously bad news, but Brown vowed not to "explain away the figures" but to treat them as "a spur to action, a call to conscience".

Do the figures support his case?
They certainly seem to. The conclusion of the two most influential academic studies on the subject – published by the Sutton Trust in 2005 and 2007 – is that Britain has become a more rigid society, and that poor children born in the 1950s had a better chance of escaping into the richer classes than children born in the 1970s. On international comparisons, the studies also found that the UK, along with the US, had much less social mobility than Scandinavian nations and quite a lot less mobility than Germany.

But is this so surprising?
Not really. The 2007 Sutton Trust study begins with a declaration that "minimising the relationship between family background and later economic and social status is an important goal of public policy"; yet in reality, government policy has far less influence on social mobility than the changing shape of the economy. The death of heavy industry and explosion of white-collar jobs from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, enabled many working-class Britons to rise up the economic ladder without displacing those already in "middle class" jobs. But that shift has run its course, and as "back-office" tasks are transferred to Asia, and more and more middle-class women enter the workforce, the opportunities for the working class to advance have shrivelled – and the figures seem to refl ect this. What is perhaps surprising, although not highlighted in the Sutton Trust studies, is that even though British society has grown more rigid, the figures still suggest a relatively high degree of upward and downward movement between classes.

So what are these figures on which the studies rely?
They're based on national survey data charting the careers of two sets of British boys – those born in 1958 and those born in 1970. To get a measure of inter-generational mobility, the researchers divided the boys into four income classes according to the level of their parents' income (the sons of the poorest 25 per cent of parents in the bottom class, and so on) and then looked at what these boys were earning once they'd hit their mid-thirties. In a truly fair society, the researchers surmised, a son aged 30+ should have an exactly 25 per cent chance of still being in the same income class that his parents were in when he was born – and a 75 per cent chance of moving into one of the other three classes. The researchers make much of the fact that if you were born into the poorest quarter of the population in 1958, you only had a 70 per cent chance of escaping your class heritage; and if in 1970, an even more unequal chance (63 per cent) of escape. What they don't point out, is that even so, the class structure defined in the figures is in some ways surprisingly fluid.

How so?
According to the figures, even those born into the poorest class in 1970 had a 35 per cent chance of leapfrogging into the richest two classes by the age of 34. Conversely those 1970 babies whose parents were in the second richest class had a 25 per cent chance of falling into the class beneath them, and a 22 per cent chance of falling into the very bottom class. Given the host of factors that impede true equality of opportunity – notably the huge advantages one gets just by being born to well-off parents (in terms of language and educational skills, expectations, household diet, etc; what sociologists refer to as "social capital") – such figures are in many ways evidence of remarkable social fluidity. Where this is not the case, it is largely confined to children of parents in the richest class. Forty-five percent of such children born in 1970 were still in the richest quartile in adulthood.

And what accounts for that?
Since it is essentially the professional classes (ie the bulk of the top quartile) who seem to be pulling up the drawbridge, one factor could be the tenacity with which the professions defend their turf. The more onerous the cost of taking professional exams, the harder it is for the less well-off to gain entry. For the most part, however, commentators focus on what they see as a more fundamental hurdle: the education system. The Sutton Trust researchers, noting how the rich monopolise the best education opportunities, point to the huge gulf between Britain's elite schools and its "bog-standard" comps. In 2005, 42 per cent of top politicians and 72 per cent of barristers came from the seven per cent of Britons educated privately. Even in the state sector, selectivity reigns: three per cent of pupils in the best state schools are entitled to free school meals: the national average is 17 per cent. Hence the cry of many on the right to bring back grammar schools.

And would that do the trick?
Grammars were undoubtedly a key route by which working-class boys of Gordon Brown’s generation managed to get ahead, but opponents counter that, by creaming off the most talented children, they result in even less mobility further down. In any case, the biggest "opportunity gap" between the classes opens up before a child even reaches school age. Studies show that the "poor but bright" children, who at age three outperform rich but dim" ones, are overtaken by them by age five. To tackle that, as Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, has argued, one would need "Scandinavian" levels of pre-school provision which enable virtually all mothers to work, and practically all infants to enjoy high-quality day care. But the level of funding and intervention such a solution would entail, makes it a distant political prospect. ·