Inquiring Minds

Gordon Brown announced yesterday a raft of measures designed to improve chances for poorer people;  and Alan Milburn has reentered the political scene to reenergise performance on social mobility, focussing on giving all young people a ‘fair crack of the whip’ .   This is all good stuff. and the individual measures make excellent sense. 

But in a way the notion of ’social mobility’  as usually measured, ie the relationship between parental social or occupational position and that of their children,  risks trapping us in a front-end model which is doomed to failure, or at best to very partial success.  I mean by this that it focusses attention solely on giving young people a fair start, and then looking to see how this plays out over the lifecourse - do the kids do better than their parents?  This has two drawbacks.  First, it is inevitable that some people will not succeed in the first phase - partly because they take time to mature, and partly because there are only a limited number of places at college or university, and, more importantly, only a limited number of ‘good’ jobs.  So some young people will be at the back of the cohort.  You simply cannot achieve some absolute standard of equity if you look only at one stage in people’s lives.

Secondly, though, it diverts attention from the need  to provide recurrent opportunities constantly, across the whole lifecourse - and to do this in the full consciousness that the initial achievements in school and college will not have been perfectly fair.  The dynamics of the labour market mean that people who get off to a good start tend to have the best opportunities later on, so early advantages are magnified.  Unless this is recognised, social mobility as an index of fairness will always be an even steeper uphill struggle than it already is.

These two points should make the development of lifelong learning entitlements a key part of any strategy for improving social mobility.