By all accounts, social mobility has slowed. But as Michael Gove proposes ways of addressing the problem through education, John Humphrys considers, can the trend be reversed?
There are not many things on which politicians of all parties agree but the value of social mobility is one of them. Every poor child should have the opportunity to a better life than his or her parents. Yet over the last few decades, under governments of all colours, social mobility has not only slowed down but actually gone into reverse. Now the Coalition Government wants to put the issue back on the agenda. But can it reverse the trend?
Confounding the class system
Britain’s history is notoriously class-based. It is not that long ago that everyone was supposed to know his (and especially her) place and life was simply about fulfilling the role you were born to, whether it was that of duke or dustman. But ever since the industrial revolution created a mass working class and a dynamic and growing economy, that form of social organisation was bound to bite the dust. And so it has.
What replaced it was the belief that what people made of their lives should depend not on the accident of birth but on ability and effort. Merit rather than blood should determine outcomes. If such a meritocracy was to be established, then it was essential that there should be social mobility: that people should be free to move up (or down) both the social scale and the income scale according to their deserts.
This process took off during the twentieth century. The new economy built upon industrial production, financial services and a growing welfare state provided the jobs that gave people from humble backgrounds the opportunity to work their way out of poverty into an increasingly affluent middle class. State education gave them the means to seize the opportunity.
The old social structure had consisted of a small, wealthy aristocracy at the top, a still quite small professional middle class below them and a massive working class, accounting for 70% of the population. But by the end of the century, there was still, at the top, a small group of aristocrats (not always rich) and the super-rich (not always high-born), a huge middle class in the middle, and a very much smaller working class at the bottom. Or, to put it more accurately, a small non-working class right at the bottom, consisting of people from families whose members had never been in work. This was – and is – the so-called ‘underclass’.
The hope was that the process of increasing social mobility would simply keep going until all but the utterly feckless would be able to enjoy the opportunity provided by a dynamic economy to improve their lot should they wish to do so. But this has turned out not to be the case. All measures of social mobility have shown that in the last twenty years or so social mobility has ground to a halt and that the prospects of children from poor backgrounds being able to lift themselves into a more affluent life are worse than they have been in living memory.
Several reasons are offered as to why this should have happened. One is that globalisation has transferred many of those jobs which provided the means for people to better themselves (especially in manufacturing) from Britain to low-cost countries in the developing world. Put metaphorically, some of the essential lower rungs of the ladder have been taken away, leaving many people facing an impossible leap on to the higher rungs.
Some commentators have suggested that the welfare system is to blame: that we have been so soft on ‘failure’ that we have undermined people’s incentive to make an effort. But the most common explanation is that it is the shortcomings of the education system that is most responsible for the decline in social mobility.
Education and private schools
This argument tends to take two, related forms. First, it’s claimed that state education has simply failed to equip children with the skills necessary to get on in the world. Secondly, it’s argued that because of this, middle class parents who can afford it have taken their children out of the state sector and paid to have them educated in public schools, on a scale never before known. The effect of this is to create a self-perpetuating elite of those who get on because they have been privately educated and who then, in turn, can afford to have their own children similarly educated. That puts the kybosh on social mobility.
Perhaps surprisingly in some people’s eyes, the Conservative education secretary, Michael Gove, said last week in a speech to independent school head teachers, that it was a 'national scandal' that so many people in the top jobs in politics, the law, business, the media and elsewhere (including himself) had been educated privately. His message was clear: this was a state of affairs that could not be allowed to persist. But what can be done about it?
The answer traditionally given by leftwing politicians (who have tended to be more vociferous about the issue than Conservatives) is that the root of the problem is poverty and, in particular, growing inequality. Deal with these two evils first and social mobility will be revived. But Mr Gove challenged this analysis. He argued that, more than in any other country, it was parenting and not poverty that determined the educational fate of children in England. The disadvantage suffered by children from families where parenting was an issue started before they went to school and then got worse.
But proper schooling could rectify the situation, he claimed. According to his evidence, only 24% of disadvantaged English children perform better than expected by the time they leave school, whereas in Shanghai the figure is 76%, in Hong Kong 72% and in Finland 46%. The OECD average is 31%. In other words, the initial disadvantage of poverty can be overcome by the right education system. Children from poor backgrounds can be given a proper footing on the ladder despite their poverty and social mobility can thus be revived.
Part of the Government’s policy for improving the education of the disadvantaged is the ‘pupil premium’, a Liberal Democrat policy championed by the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. This provides every school with an extra £600 for every child in receipt of free school meals and leaves the school free to decide how best to use it. By 2015 this policy will affect 1.8 million children and cost £2.5 billion. The Government also believes that education can be improved by giving all schools more independence to run their own affairs.
Labour is not impressed by the pupil premium, arguing that schools have to use the money simply to 'plug the gap' left by cuts in funding elsewhere. But others claim that whatever the value of the pupil premium may or may not be, it is no answer to the problem of social mobility.
They say that so long as the affluent middle class are able to pay for their children to go to independent schools, social immobility will persist and get even worse. On this argument, the only solutions are to deprive public schools of their charitable status, making fees prohibitively expensive except for the super-rich, or to ban public schools altogether. But that course seems too radical for any of the mainstream parties and might even contravene human rights laws.
So can we revive social mobility, or are we doomed to return to a society in which only the already rich can better themselves?
What’s your view?
- Do you think greater social mobility is an end governments should be trying to bring about or not?
- Why do you think social mobility has ground to a halt?
- How important do believe education is to the promotion of greater mobility?
- Do you agree or not with Michael Gove that poverty is not central to educational outcomes and that a good state education system can overcome the disadvantages of a poor background?
- Do you think the pupil premium is likely to be effective in this way or not?
- How would you change what goes on in schools in order to promote greater social mobility?
- Should the public schools be deprived of their charitable status or abolished altogether?
- And do you think social mobility will be revived or not?
Let us know your views using the comment box below.
