Cracking Social Mobility

Innovative Solutions to an Entrenched Problem

Tom Moule

• Publisher: University of Buckingham Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781800315624
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800315631
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

In the UK and most countries today, a person's life chances are unfairly influenced by their socio-economic circumstances at birth.

This has led to societal divides that have become wider and more pronounced as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. There is now heightened awareness that the current state of affairs is unacceptable. Innovative approaches are urgently needed in order to combat social immobility.

Drawing upon the latest research, Cracking Social Mobility explores the factors that contribute to social immobility, and puts forward focused, innovative solutions. The book impresses upon readers that social mobility is a societal goal worth striving towards, and that societies can take strides in the right direction by harnessing the power of digital innovation. From democratizing the private tuition sector and enhancing the effectiveness of teaching and learning, to supporting inclusive recruitment practices, technologies can help to level the playing field. A heartfelt call to action, this book explores how this can be achieved.

'Cracking Social Mobility highlights the very-real urgency of this issue but also (thankfully) suggests some potential road maps for the future, the most important of which is technological innovation and – vitally – applying it to education it in a way that is beneficial to all.' Lord David Puttnam

'This is an important and timely book… Tom Moule's arguments are urgent and compelling.' Geoff Barton

'AI offers real prospects for significant advance on social mobility for disadvantaged students, who have been insufficiently helped by conventional educational approaches. This book addresses a very important subject.' Sir Anthony Seldon

'For the sake of future generations, we cannot afford to ignore technology's potential to improve the delivery of teaching and learning in the classroom.' Rt Hon David Davis MP

CHAPTER 1

THE CASE FOR SOCIAL MOBILITY

Which of the following claims sounds more alarming to you?

A) You live in a country with an intergenerational earnings elasticity of 0.5.

Or

B) You live in a country in which the grand total of all your hard work, the talents you have honed and the grit you have shown along the way, have the same influence on what you earn in your adult life as does the amount your parents earned when you were a child.

I am going to assume that for most people, the answer is ‘B’. While ‘A’ is just an innocuous statistic, ‘B’ most certainly is not. It asserts that individuals have limited control over their own destinies. It implies that the outcome of your life is not entirely in your own hands but is significantly influenced by the circumstances into which you were born. And now for the punchline – ‘A’ and ‘B’ claim the same thing.

Intergenerational earnings elasticity (or IGE for short) is a measure of how much someone’s income is influenced by that of their parents. More importantly, however, it also serves as a proxy for how much control members of a particular society have over their own lives. If you lived in a country with an IGE of 1, you would inevitably earn the same as your parents earned (in real terms). All your friends would earn the same as their parents did. And your children – you guessed it – would end up earning the same amount as you (and as their grandparents, for that matter). Fortunately, no country actually has an IGE of 1, but if such a country did exist, its citizens would effectively have no power to determine their successes in life. At the other extreme is an equally fictitious country with an IGE of zero. Here, your parentage would neither help nor hinder you in the slightest: your successes would be entirely in your own hands.¹

If you live in the UK or the USA, however, the situation is almost slap bang in the middle of these two extremes. Authoritative studies have reported that both countries have IGEs in the region of 0.5² (see figure 1), which suggests that in these countries, your efforts have around the same impact on how much you earn as your parents’ income does.³

Of course, income is far from a perfect measure of how happy and fulfilled people are in their lives, which is what really matters. But in countries with high IGEs, the reason a person’s income is so closely linked to that of their parents is because the whole trajectory of their lives is being directed by their starting point at birth; the closer the IGE gets to 1, the tighter individuals are steered along their forecasted paths. In that imagined country with an IGE of 1, a person’s income relative to his or her fellow citizens is predetermined at birth. If you lived in this society, you would have to live with the fact that the quality of your education, your career choices and your chances of career progression were set in stone from day one.⁴ While this might sound attractive to those at the top of society – those who have everything to lose, but zero chance of doing so – think on this: in a society with an IGE of 1, every success in life is down to the lottery of birth. Merit has no part to play. The rich, the poor and those in between would be united in their impotence to determine the course of their own lives. In other words, extreme inequality of opportunity is tantamount to fate. When individuals have no control over their own lives the power of destiny is absolute.

In the real world, things aren’t quite that bad. France has an IGE of just above 0.4, Germany just above 0.3 and Canada just under 0.2. But even these figures are not something to celebrate. In these countries, intergenerational elasticity is significantly above zero because the direction of people’s lives is, to some extent, dictated by their circumstances at birth.

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, the evidence that the playing field is far from level is all around us. The Social Mobility Commission’s State of The Nation Report (2018-19) revealed that people from better-off backgrounds are 80% more likely to ‘make it into’ a professional job than people from less well-off backgrounds. This disparity contributes to the overall ‘class pay gap’ of 24%.⁵ To make matters worse, people from less privileged backgrounds are far more likely to be among the lowest paid workers in society – 27% of adults from working class backgrounds earn less than the living wage, which compares to 17% of those from more privileged beginnings. And disadvantaged children are more likely to be unemployed in adult life.⁶

Young people who are not from privileged backgrounds face significant barriers to achieving their full potential. Wealthier applicants are around six times more likely to gain a place at the most selective universities compared to applicants from less privileged backgrounds; a child eligible for free school meals has only a 0.05% chance of gaining a place at Oxbridge.⁷ Alas, the problem is not isolated to universities. This divide is mirrored in access to top apprenticeships too, with the Social Mobility Commission showing that people from poorer backgrounds are more likely to be found in ‘lower returning’ and ‘lower level’ apprenticeships.⁸ Even when the causeways to success are diversified, they can still be dominated by more privileged groups.

These examples give a sense of the disproportionate levels of resistance faced by the most disadvantaged in society. But the negative effects of social immobility are not felt by this group alone. The middle classes feel the pains of inequality of opportunity too.

Only 7% of people in Britain are privately educated⁹ – partly due to the fact that average fees are now reported to be as much as £17,000 per year¹⁰ – yet those who were privately educated dominate the most prestigious positions in society. 65% of senior judges were privately educated, as were 59% of the most senior civil servants, 57% of members of the House of Lords, 52% of diplomats and 44% of newspaper columnists.¹¹ Research has also shown that people who were state-educated are likely to earn around £200,000 less between the ages of twenty-six and forty-two than those who were privately educated.¹² The gap between this privileged group and the rest of society can also be seen at an earlier age. Researchers from Durham University found that being educated privately increases pupils’ grades by just under two-thirds on average per subject (i.e. BBB would increase to AAB) even when prior attainment is taken into account.¹³ Elsewhere, the Sutton Trust has demonstrated that privately educated students are twice as likely to gain a place at a Russell Group university and seven times as likely to get into Oxford or Cambridge.¹⁴ Ultimately, this means that people from comfortable backgrounds are not immune to diminished life chances, particularly if there is entrenched privilege further up ahead.

These patterns have not arisen by chance; they reflect a fundamental asymmetry in the life chances of people from different backgrounds. But despite the overwhelming evidence that there is a problem with social immobility and inequality of opportunity, there still isn’t unanimous agreement that these problems are worth solving. Some view efforts to improve social mobility as an affront to the pursuit of social justice. This group often paints social mobility and equality of opportunity as ingredients of a dog-eat-dog agenda, rather than as a means to achieve fair and equitable outcomes for the many (individuals from all socioeconomic backgrounds) and not the few (those with the resources to unfairly maintain their positions at the top of society).

Others perceive inequality of opportunity as an acceptable by-product of a free society. Of course all parents want the best for their children, and of course those with means will use their resources to support their families. Isn’t that the primary duty of parents and guardians, to help secure the best life for their children? So on this basis, is social immobility not a necessary evil?

The problem with both of these concerns is that they rely on misunderstandings of what social mobility is and of how it can be achieved. The arguments are pitched as ‘social mobility vs equality’ and ‘inequality of opportunity vs freedom’, even though these clashes are non-existent and avoidable, respectively. Throughout this book, it will become clear that addressing social mobility does not necessitate intrusions upon individual freedoms. Momentarily, by interrogating the concept of inequality of opportunity in greater depth, we’ll see that equality of opportunity is a) a goal worth striving towards, and b) not at odds with absolute equality.

When trying to answer questions like ‘Is inequality of opportunity acceptable?’ or ‘Should we strive to live in a more socially mobile society?’, it is important to be impartial. Focusing too much on how we are individually affected by social mobility and equality of opportunity could cloud our judgements. To help us achieve this ambitious level of impartiality, let’s invoke a thought experiment. John Rawls, a prominent 20th-century philosopher, considered that when trying to determine whether a particular state of affairs is fair or not, people should remove their own circumstances and traits from consideration by imagining themselves standing behind a veil of ignorance and judging a moral issue objectively. From behind the veil, you would have no clue as to your ethnicity, gender, physical health, mental health, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background or indeed any personal factor that might affect the outcomes of your life. From this standpoint, you could hypothetically gaze upon a society – real or imagined – and pass judgement on whether it was fair or not. Your judgement would not be tainted by self-interest; absolute impartiality means there are no interested parties behind the veil.

Equipped with the blissful ignorance provided by the veil, we can now start to examine how fair social immobility and inequality of opportunity are. Behind veil number one is a society with high social immobility. If you were to enter this world at the top of society, you would be fast-tracked to success. You would go to the best schools (and preschools/nurseries), you would get additional support from the best private tutors, you would get the best support with applying to universities or apprenticeships and you may even be lucky enough to have a job lined up with a friend of the family when you finish. A pretty attractive deal. But the catch is that if you don’t enter this world at the top, but start towards the bottom, then a very different fate is in store for you. You may find your life chances diminished by a poorer quality of education, low expectations, lack of advice and guidance on life choices and a job market that is rigged in favour of those with the right connections.

Behind veil number two, however, is a society in which opportunity is distributed equally. No matter what circumstances you were born into, you would have the same opportunities to develop your abilities and convert them into concrete successes. In this society, all people get the same high quality of education, they all have access to equal levels of support in progressing from education into a fulfilling job and they are able to make further progress based on merit alone. In this world, your chances of fulfilling your potential are not affected by your starting point in the slightest; what you make of your life is very much up to you.

So the question is this: if you had no idea what circumstances you were going to be born into, would you choose to enter the world behind veil number one or the world behind veil number two? If you’re considering going for number one, be sure to assess whether the risk of being trapped towards the bottom of society would be worth the rewards of being able to coast at the top.

I am strongly of the opinion that the society behind veil number one is thoroughly undesirable. It is unjustifiable that some people, by virtue of their heritage, should have a far greater chance of fulfilling their potential in life, and that others should face a disproportionate number of barriers to fulfilling theirs. We only live one life, so every individual, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background and a whole host of other factors, should be able to live life to its fullest. As such, equality of opportunity should be the default. Social mobility should be the default. Social immobility is an aberration caused by the fact that people’s socioeconomic beginnings have an undue influence on their life chances. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, and that they are all equally endowed with the inalienable right to pursue happiness in their own lives. But if we are willing to tolerate high levels of social immobility, then we are accepting that people (that’s all people, not just males) are not created equal, and that many people’s circumstances alienate them from, and make ever more nebulous, the right to pursue happiness.

John Rawls himself derived a justification for equality of opportunity from the principles underpinning the veil of ignorance. Hs position was that, ‘Those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use those gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of their social class of origin.’¹⁵ While I firmly agree with this, I would clarify that ‘talent’ and ‘ability’ should not be interpreted as ‘gifts’ possessed by the chosen few. Everyone has genuine talents that can enable them to thrive; but only in a society with equality of opportunity will all people be able to develop and convert their talents to the same exten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 – The Case for Social Mobility
• Chapter 2 – The Case for Technology
• Chapter 3 – Disrupting the Shadow Education System
• Chapter 4 – Equality of Excellence (Making Schools Engines of Social Mobility)
• Chapter 5 – Achieving a Dynamic and Inclusive Workforce
• Chapter 6 – Further Roles for Technology
• Chapter 7 – Lifelong Learning and the Digital Economy
• Chapter 8 – Overcoming the Digital Divide
• Chapter 9 – Where Technology Is Not the Answer
• Conclusion
• References
• Acknowledgements