Commenting on the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s social mobility index, Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust and of the Education Endowment Foundation, said:

“The Commission’s index paints a bleak picture of social mobility in some parts of the UK and confirms our own research that shows that the life chances of disadvantaged young people vary enormously according to where they live.

“As we showed last year in our Mobility Map – and which the Commission confirms today – it isn’t as simple as a North-South divide.  As a general rule coastal areas and industrial towns have low social mobility but there are places close to each other with very different results.

“Drilling into this data – and looking at what the best schools in the poorest areas are doing to improve results for their most challenging pupils and applying what they do to other schools – is vital to ensuring that opportunities are raised in low social mobility areas. ”

NOTES TO EDITORS:

  1. The Sutton Trust is a foundation set up in 1997, dedicated to improving social mobility through education. It has published over 160 research studies and funded and evaluated programmes that have helped hundreds of thousands of young people of all ages, from early years through to access to the professions.
  2. The Sutton Trust’s Social Mobility Index, published in April 2015 and presented in an interactive mobility map, ranks each parliamentary constituency in England according to five measures of social mobility through education. Looking at outcomes from the early years through to professional life, the data shows how well each constituency is doing in improving prospects for their most disadvantaged young people.

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