David Kynaston: What should we do with private schools?

There is a piquant scene in Ralph Glasser’s classic autobiography Gorbals Boy. The setting is an Oxford college in the late 1930s; the only proletarian member of the study group is the undergraduate Glasser; its leader is the Wykehamist and future Labour politician Richard Crossman, “beautifully groomed in silver grey suit and dove grey silk tie”; and to Glasser’s amazement and ire, Crossman leans forward in his leather wing chair and asks the question: “Why do people work?” Glasser notes in his account that the subject of the study group was social mobility – “a favourite hobby horse of Oxford progressives in those days”.

Three-quarters of a century later, not just Oxford progressives. Indeed, rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes to which it is almost rude not to sign up. “You’ve got to get out there and find people, win them over, get them to raise aspirations, get them to think they can get all the way to the top,” David Cameron tells us. His fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson also exalts social mobility, though in his model it is making sure the right “cornflakes” get to the top of the packet; while according to Nick Clegg, the lack of social mobility is an “absolute scandal” and “we have to fight for a society where the fortunes of birth and background weigh less heavily on prospects and opportunities for the future”. Ed Miliband agrees with Nick. “The reality is that governments have not got this right for decades. It’s not just about qualifications, it’s about the culture of the country and what it celebrates and what it doesn’t.”

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Over the last decade or so, however, it has been from economists at the London School of Economics, notably Jo Blanden and Stephen Machin, that the highest-profile and most influential findings on social mobility have come. This has been, above all, through their use of two birth cohort studies – one of them tracking the lives of all children born in Britain in one week in 1958, the other doing the same for the children of one week in 1970. In essence, they have found that the economic status of the 1970 cohort is, compared with the earlier cohort, more dependent on family background – and that accordingly, social mobility in early 21st century Britain is in decline. Although the methodology of the LSE economists has not escaped criticism, that finding has now become (especially through the tireless efforts of the Sutton Trust) the conventional wisdom: at the very least social mobility has stalled.

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What to do? Clearly there is no single silver bullet. The Sutton Trust, for example, has recently issued a Mobility Manifesto setting out 10 practical policy steps intended to put social mobility at the heart of next year’s general election. These include greater use of ballots to ensure fairer admissions to oversubscribed state schools, more systematic use of the pupil premium and a significant increase in good-quality apprenticeships. Over and above (or often instead of) enhancing equality of outcome and thus opportunity, plenty of other ideas are also in the air, including in relation to the admissions policies of the top universities and the whole thorny area of internships.

Read his full piece here