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On the other hand in the United States overall (where the American dream was born of course), only 7.5 per cent of people make it from the bottom to the top of society. Given the common characteristics of the US and Britain, the danger for Britain is it slips down further to this lower level of income mobility – equivalent to a 20 per cent drop on current levels. America’s ‘low opportunity’ areas have long-range mobility as low as 5.5 per cent. That is equivalent to a 40 per cent drop on current levels in Britain. Unless we change matters, the fear is Britain could drop down to these levels of
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The Great Gatsby Curve suggests the political debates over whether to aim for equality of outcome or equality of opportunity are a false dichotomy. The two principles are inextricably related: extreme inequality of incomes at one point in time leads to greater inequality of opportunity over time which in turn leads to widening gaps between the rich and poor. This seems plausible, given that privileged elites over successive generations may be less inclined to support the redistributive policies that would give those lower down society’s ranks a greater chance of displacing them at the top.
As we have seen, there could be as much as a 40 per cent drop on current mobility levels, given the data from other countries.
The wage freeze for the young meanwhile has restricted their ability to get on the housing ladder compared with previous generations. In 1994–5 42 per cent of those under twenty-five were private renters; by 2013–14 this had climbed to 67 per cent.20 They really are on dead-end street. They are spending more of their diminishing income for a roof over their heads. The golden age of the 1950s and 1960s has turned into the bleak age of the early twenty-first century.
The increased use of ‘zero-hours contracts’ – for which employers are not obliged to provide any minimum working hours – harks back to the days of queuing for jobs on the docks a hundred years ago. In 2017, an estimated 1.3 million people were ‘employed’ in the gig economy.22
Britain’s apprenticeship system is broken: too many apprenticeships are sub-standard, offering no progression, and are undervalued by employers.23 A credible alternative vocational stream to challenge the high-status academic path has yet to materialize.
The argument for greater social mobility for Britain has become an economic as well as social one – mirroring the debate in the United States. Studies estimate that modest increases in Britain’s social mobility would lead to an annual increase in the country’s GDP of between 2 and 4 per cent.25 To put these figures into context, a 4 per cent loss in GDP would be suffered in a major recession. In more mobile societies jobs are filled by those with the highest level of potential to perform well in that role, rather than someone who may be less well suited but better connected. Enhanced social
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The Harvard academic has documented how the American professional classes are investing more in family life, community networks and civic activities. In contrast, supportive family life is fracturing among poorer and less educated families. Society’s divide is not just economic but social, and this will likely limit future social mobility.18
Growing regional education inequalities had contributed to the Brexit vote, claimed the Government’s Chief Inspector of schools, Michael Wilshaw. Regions were in danger of adding a learning deficit to their economic one. ‘If they sense that their children and young people are being denied the opportunities that exist elsewhere that will feed into the general sense that they are being neglected,’ he argued. ‘It wasn’t just about leaving the European Union and immigration, it was the sense of disconnection with Westminster.’20
Our own analysis of the data confirms the link between social mobility and voting patterns across the country at local authority level.27 Brits with little chance of moving up tended to vote out. In South Derbyshire, six in ten people did so; in Barnsley, Normanton and Ashfield it was nearer seven in ten.28 The people of Knowsley also voted to leave.
Our analysis of the voting data suggests the Leave campaign won the referendum partly because it persuaded the country’s socially immobile that an independent Britain would hold better prospects for them – whether this was true or not.
In the intergenerational opportunity game, yesterday’s high-mobility areas can be today’s exclusive but stagnant communities. Schools become middle-class enclaves. Inequality in earnings balloons. Far from acting as the great social leveller, the education system is manipulated and taken over by elites and vested interests to ensure their offspring, irrespective of talent, do not slip down the social ladder.
There are no official estimates of tiger mum numbers in Britain.
In no developed country for which we have data is there evidence that early-years centres, schools or colleges consistently reduce attainment gaps, and life prospects, between the rich and poor.11 The education system at best acts as a counter-balance to the powerful forces outside the school gates driving bigger education gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged. The pattern observed is an ever-escalating educational arms race in which the poorest children are hopelessly ill-equipped to fight, and where the increasingly rich rewards go to the offspring of the social elites. Far from
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The sociologist John Goldthorpe observes that ‘parental – and, perhaps, grandparental – resources, even if not sufficient to allow for children to be educated in the private sector, are still widely deployed to buy houses in areas served by high-performing state schools, to pay for individual tutoring, to help manage student debt, to support entry into postgraduate courses for which no loans are available, or, in the case of educational failure, to fund “second chances”.’
One way to get ahead is to pay the inflated prices of houses in the vicinity of the ‘best’ schools. Poorer pupils have been priced out of the catchment areas of popular comprehensives in England because local houses cost £45,700 more than elsewhere.14 Meanwhile a school at the top of the education rankings attracts a house price premium of around 12 per cent relative to a school ranked at the bottom.
Surveys of parents confirm these middle-class manoeuvres. One in three (32 per cent) professional parents with school-aged children had moved to an area they thought had good schools, while one in five (18 per cent) had moved to the catchment area of a specific school.17
A significant minority of parents admitted to cheating in school admissions: buying a second home, or renting a property nearby. These admissions over admissions are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
‘The two children are already on a steep trajectory in opposite directions: the poor/bright one travelling fast downwards; the rich/dim one moving up, as their social backgrounds counteract their inborn abilities.’21
Figure 4.2 Cognitive development of young children and their parents’ socio-economic status.
The link between family income and test scores is found to be strongest in the UK, signalling that levels of educational inequality are higher than in more socially mobile countries.24
The proportion of young people from the poorest fifth of homes graduating from university increased by 12 percentage points between 1981 and 2013, growing from 6 to 18 per cent over the period. The graduation rate for young people from the richest fifth of homes meanwhile went up from 20 per cent to 55 per cent. Nearly twenty-five years on, the graduation rate for those from the poorest families has still to exceed the rate for those from the richest families in 1981.
Figure 4.4 Educational inequality, 1981 to 2013.32
In 1980, male graduates earned on average 46 per cent more than their non-graduate counterparts. In 2017 this earnings uplift was 66 per cent.
People in elite occupations whose parents were employed in semi-routine and routine working-class jobs (‘the long-range upwardly mobile’) earn on average £6,200 a year less than their colleagues from higher professional and managerial backgrounds (‘the intergenerationally stable’). This was the case even after taking into account a host of factors including educational qualifications, job tenure, the ‘London effect’, ethnicity, gender, age, hours worked, firm size, and whether a person worked in the public or private sector. There was striking variation across different elite occupations. At
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Children from poorer homes tend to exhibit, on average, worse self-control (conduct) and emotional health than their wealthier peers. These differences are apparent for children aged three years old. The gap in essential life skills between poorer children and everyone else has widened over the past thirty years.
Against this backdrop of change, a movement to introduce evidence-led practices emerged. The Sutton Trust published a ‘pupil premium toolkit’ to help schools spend funds on ‘best bets’ according to research on what had worked in the classroom.26 The Education Endowment Foundation was established to evaluate effective approaches for improving the results of the poorest pupils.27
One report concluded there was ‘currently no prospect’ of the gap being eliminated at secondary school – despite billions of pounds being targeted on the poorest pupils.30 Another estimated that, based on the most optimistic assumptions, it would take another fifty years to reach an equitable school system.31
The link between parental background and adult skills among 16- to 24-year-olds was found to be stronger in England than in all other countries except the Slovak Republic.
The post-Brexit Referendum Conservative Government unveiled the creation of new grammar schools as its flagship education policy.40 Whatever the arguments over grammars, no one would claim they are the vehicle to address the country’s basic skills problem. New measures to judge schools meanwhile prompted concerns that children with the poorest exam prospects will be excluded from schools to maximize their headline test scores.41 And the National Audit Office warned that state schools faced the biggest real-terms cuts in a generation.42
The country’s public school boys made up a larger share of leaders 120 years ago, yet this may be because modern elites shy away from public attention. Public school old boys once sought fame serving the nation overseas as military or political leaders; now they are just as likely to hide away in offshore tax havens as hedge-fund managers.
Another Sutton Trust study in 2016 found three-quarters (74 per cent) of the top judiciary (in the High Court and Appeals Court), 71 per cent of the top military brass (two-star generals and above) and over half of leading print journalists, bankers and medics were privately educated.
Another recurring finding is that the higher you climb up the career ladder in modern Britain, the more likely you are to be privately educated. While a third of MPs attended independent schools, half of the Cabinet in 2015 did so. Half of leading lawyers were privately educated compared with 70 per cent of High Court judges. Half of leading bankers went to private schools; yet over 70 per cent of those working in exclusive hedge funds and private equity firms did so.
Business leaders buck this trend. But this is because far more foreigners now run businesses in Britain. The proportion of FTSE 100 chief executives educated at independent schools has fallen from 70 per cent in the late 1980s, to 54 per cent in the late 2000s, to 34 per cent in 2016.
A report on the socio-economic diversity in the civil service Fast Stream found it had a less diverse intake than the student population at the University of Oxford.28
Figure 6.2 Private / State school wage differentials for 33–34-year-olds.36
Other research has suggested these social skills are what elite firms demand when defining the ‘talent’ they are seeking from potential recruits.40
The evidence suggests there is no one panacea that will magically enhance social mobility. Life just is not that simple. Reducing inequality, enhancing economic growth and equalizing education are all necessary in the fight to open up opportunities to people from less advantaged backgrounds. But none are sufficient on their own to win the battle. Enhancing social mobility – both at the top and bottom – is likely to involve working on several interconnecting fronts. Navigating a way ahead requires careful balance rather than extreme measures.
Introducing his memorable ‘cornflakes box’ model of social mobility, Boris Johnson argued it would be wrong to try to stamp out inequality: it is an invaluable spur to economic activity and wealth creation. The wealth gap, according to Johnson, should be tolerated as long as there are healthy levels of social (or cornflake) mobility: ‘There are too many cornflakes who aren’t being given a good enough chance to rustle and hustle their way to the top. We gave the packet a good shake in the 1960s; and Mrs Thatcher gave it another good shake in the 1980s.’1
Yet Stanford University Professor Cristobal Young concludes that far from fleeing higher taxes, financial elites are surprisingly reluctant to leave home. Young found that 84 per cent of the world’s wealthiest individuals, as listed in Forbes magazine, still live in the country of their birth. Most billionaires live where they were born or where their careers first blossomed. Only 5 per cent moved abroad after making their fortunes. Famous billionaires such as Richard Branson who relocate to tropical tax havens are the exception not the rule. ‘The British elite live in Britain, the Chinese
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‘A labour market in which college graduates earn so much more than others is not only resulting in greater inequality, it is also sending a signal to the rich that their extra resources should be invested strongly in the education of the next generation,’ argues the Canadian economist Miles Corak. ‘Making the tax system more progressive hits two targets with one arrow, it not only reduces inequality in the here and now but in levelling outcomes in the current generation it also diminishes disparities in the next.’11 The
‘faster growth is necessary but not sufficient to restore higher intergenerational income mobility,’ conclude Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger in their deconstruction of declining absolute mobility in the United States. ‘Evidence suggests that, to increase income mobility, policy-makers should focus on raising middle-class and lower-income household incomes.’17
‘It used to be that General Motors had people throughout the education and income distributions working there,’ says Katz. ‘Whereas, today’s large firms, the Apples and Goldmans, tend to mainly directly employ college graduates and elites.’18
The numbers of children on free school meals passing national school benchmarks at age 16 and going on to university has rocketed over recent decades. It is just that the middle classes have leaped further ahead.
The truth is schools can only do so much. They are governed by the ‘80:20 rule’: on average 80 per cent of the variation in children’s school results is due to individual and family characteristics, while the remaining 20 per cent is due to what happens in school.25 Some schools excel by producing better results with very similar intakes of children. But the idea that teachers on their own can cancel out extreme inequalities outside the school gates is fanciful.
A good education system is a necessary but not sufficient condition to improve social mobility.
Socially diverse elites make for better leaders and decision makers. They understand and empathize with the people they are meant to serve. They are less likely to suffer from the ‘group think’ and narrow perspectives that characterize homogenous ruling classes. ‘It is entirely possible for politicians to rely on advisors to advise, civil servants to devise policy solutions and journalists to report on their actions having all studied the same courses at the same universities, having read the same books, heard the same lectures and even being taught by the same tutors,’ the Social Mobility
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Baroness Hale, the only woman judge in the Supreme Court at the time, warned that judges may lack common sense because they have lived sheltered lives. She said it was dangerous for the common law to rely upon the experience and common sense of a comparatively narrow section of society.
‘Cognitive diversity’, like gender or ethnic diversity, improves decision-making in the world of business.47
