Educational policies alone don’t provide social mobility in Britain, says study
16 October 2012
An Oxford University study suggests that educational policy is not likely to increase social mobility as much as politicians would have us believe. Dr John Goldthorpe, a researcher in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, argues that while politicians present educational policy as ‘the crucial instrument for increasing mobility’, what education alone can achieve in creating a more open society appears ‘far more limited’.
In his working paper Dr Goldthorpe argues that absolute rates of social mobility are determined primarily by changes in the occupational and class structures. In so far as policy is concerned, he says it will need to be aimed at shaping the pattern of future economic development and dependent on levels of investment in advanced technology and the public and social services infrastructure.
He also suggests that educational policy is limited in what it can do to make relative rates of social mobility more equal. Firstly, better-off parents have the means always to give their children better chances in life through using their resources in various ways to boost their educational attainment. Secondly, even children from advantaged backgrounds who don’t achieve academically still have family resources and personal attributes that protect them from any serious downgrading in social class, the study says.
Dr Goldthorpe concludes that policies aimed at creating more equal opportunities for higher educational attainment, essentially ‘levelling up’, would be more effective if pursued for their own sake: i.e. to allow all young people to realise their full academic and wider human potential with whatever economic effects follow. He suggests there is not enough evidence to show that educational policies created as instruments for increasing mobility are effective.
Dr Goldthorpe says: ‘If the creation of a more fluid and open society is a serious goal, then politicians will need to move out of the relative comfort zone of educational policy and accept that measures will be required, of a kind sure to be strongly contested, that seek to reduce inequalities of condition, of which those associated with social class would appear the most fundamental.’
The paper also says that despite a widely accepted view that in the second half of the 20th century social mobility sharply declined in Britain, in fact this is not borne out by the data.
He suggests that contrary ‘to the widely accepted factoid’, no decline in mobility, either absolute or relative, occurred in the late 20th century. Although men’s rates of upward mobility no longer increased as rapidly as before, women did become steadily more upwardly mobile. Relative mobility rates – capturing the inherent ‘stickiness’ between the class positions of parents and children – were much the same as for decades previously.
For more information, contact the University of Oxford Press Office on +44 (0)1865 280534 or email : john.goldthorpe@nuffield.ox.ac.uk