Positive thinking

Paul Gregg, University of Bath   Jeremy Corbyn has signalled that a new Labour government under his premiership would drop social mobility as a policy goal and replace it with a focus on social justice. Labour said it would replace the current Social Mobility Commission with a Social Justice Commission, claiming the move would be a break from 40 years of political consensus around social mobility. But Corbyn’s speech at an education policy event in Birmingham in early June was part sense and part nonsense. He argued that social mobility was the idea that “only a few talented or lucky people deserve to escape the disadvantage they were born into” and it had resulted in “the talents of millions of children being squandered.” Yet the pursuit of social mobility in policy and research has never just been about the opportunities of a few bright poor kids. Such an argument is like arguing that gender equality is merely about getting more women on the boards of FTSE 100 com...

   Matt Dickson, University of Bath Social mobility has rarely been far from the top of the political agenda in Britain in recent years. Yet despite two decades of rhetorical commitment to the cause, Britain is still a deeply divided country. There remains a stubborn gap in higher education attendance between children from better- and worse-off families, and the top professions continue to recruit disproportionately from a narrow strata of society. Only 6% of doctors, 12% of journalists and 12% of chief executives come from working-class backgrounds. And there is a particular dominance of the privately educated in society’s upper echelons. Education policies at all ages – from provision of affordable quality pre-school, to initiatives to widen participation at university – can make a difference. But such policies alone will never solve all of the issues. The problems of social mobility extend far beyond the education system. Even people with the same ed...