Social mobility: the politics, the reality, the alternative

Social mobility – something we all think is wonderful, or do we? Certainly all the UK’s major political parties appear to be all for it, expressing concern about clear evidence that mobility between social classes in Britain has levelled off, and more contested evidence that there is now less mobility up and down the income ladder than there used to be. But what exactly do politicians and academics mean when they talk about social mobility? And is a more socially mobile society as achievable or even as desirable a goal as many seem to think?

Social mobility: the politics, the reality, the alternative

Vikki Boliver and David Byrne
For the right social mobility offers an individual solution to the problem of inequality.
S o much attention has recently been focused on social mobility that one could be forgiven for thinking that it is a key measure of a good society. The reality is somewhat different, as this article explores.
Certainly the mainstream political parties in the UK are all for social mobility. They express concern at the evidence that mobility between social classes in Britain has levelled off; and some of them are also troubled by the more contested evidence that there is now less mobility up and down the income ladder than there used to be. But what exactly do politicians and academics mean when they talk about social mobility? And is a more socially mobile society as achievable -or even as desirableas many seem to think?

Absolute or relative mobility?
The academic literature on social mobility differentiates between absolute and relative social mobility, and measures both in terms of the occupational status and income of parents and their children, traditionally fathers and sons. Absolute mobility simply refers to the total amount of movement between occupational classes from one generation to the next, much of which results from shifts in the occupational structure. In the UK there was a lot of absolute mobility in the years from 1945 until the mid-1980s, because of a massive growth in the numbers in professional and semi-professional occupations; this was driven by the 'tertiarisation' of the economy -growth in service sector employment, and in particular in professional employment across education, health and other parts of the welfare state. Before deindustrialisation really got underway in the mid-1980s, there was also a very large and growing industrial middle class, and an important form of personal mobility was the move from skilled manual industrial work to technical and managerial roles, often on the basis of systematic pursuit of part-time higher education. This continued expansion of top positions meant that, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, unprecedented numbers of people were able to move up.
Relative social mobility, in contrast, is concerned not with total rates of movement between social class positions, but with the rates at which those from lower down manage to move up compared to the rates at which those from higher up avoid falling down. Despite high and rising rates of absolute mobility throughout much of the twentieth century, relative mobility has shown little, if any, sign of becoming any more equal. The reason for this is simple: an occupational structure that is expanding at the top enables more people to move up, but at the same time it also enables more people to avoid falling down. Growing 'room at the top' means it is possible to have a high degree of upward mobility even while inequalities in relative mobility chances remain unchanged.
However, when you have an occupational structure that has stopped expanding at the top, relative social mobility becomes a zero sum game: for some people from below to move up, some people from above have to move down to make way for them. And this is precisely the direction in which the British occupational structure has been heading since the mid-1980s -a trend that the latest economic recession will no doubt have accelerated. The industrial middle class, once large, is now much reduced in size, and the new service-sector middle class has seen its ranks decimated and demoted, particularly in the wake of the drastic public spending cuts imposed in the 1980s by Thatcher and reinstituted by Cameron in the 2010s. The upshot of all of this is that for any upward social mobility to occur there is an increasing necessity for some downward mobility. The question then arises of whether those at the top -who might have been content to allow upward social mobility when it posed little threat to the successful intergenerational transmission of their own social standing -will be as keen on upward mobility when it threatens to displace their children.
The current political debate on social mobility is all about relative social mobility measured in occupational terms, although it is striking how much the talk focuses on upward mobility rather than downward -its less politically palatable counterpart. Relative mobility has been the focus of a series of studies and reports, in particular those associated with Alan Milburn' s role as 'social mobility tsar', and the work of the Social Mobility Foundation, the Sutton Trust and the all-party parliamentary group on Social Mobility (whose recent report was promoted by the right-wing think tank, the Policy Exchange). All of these have promoted the idea of 'meritocracy': a society in which social position is absolutely a product of innate ability, coupled with application or effort -with the implication that social origins have no influence on outcomes. (Ability is here defined in terms of traditional elitist conceptions.) The political corollary of such a focus on meritocracy -a society in which people are able to rise solely through merit -is that improved social mobility is seen as making inequality more acceptable.

Mobility and inequality
It is worth dwelling for a moment on the logic that lies behind this kind of political thinking. Inequality in terms of pay and conditions and social esteem (and consequently living conditions, health, life expectancy, and so on) is fine, so the thinking goes, so long as there is equality of opportunity to compete for these unequal outcomes. But the logic immediately breaks down as soon as we realise that one generation' s unequal outcomes are the next generation' s unequal starting points. It doesn't take much brain power to realise that equality of opportunity is practically impossible in the absence of equality of condition. When it comes down to it, the concern to increase social mobility is something of a diversion from the far more important, and in fact prerequisite, goal of reducing social inequality. Clearly we should think rather more carefully about the political relationship between mobility and inequality. After all, the old working-class slogan was: rise with your class, not from it.
While social mobility trends have been flat in recent decades, inequality has soared. Real incomes in the UK have doubled over the past forty years, but a great deal of that increase has gone to a very small group of households. (Note the shift here from individuals, the focus of classic social mobility studies, to households, because the household is the significant unit for income.) Since the 1970s, by whatever measure you take, household income inequality in the UK has increased by more than 30 per cent. There has been a massive absolute and relative increase in the incomes of the top 10 per cent of households, and particularly for the top 1 per cent of households. Over the last decade, 40 per cent of all income growth has gone to the top 10 per cent. In contrast, the poorest tenth of households have actually seen a fall in real incomes. While any cut in a continuous distribution is relatively arbitrary, there does seem to be a real difference between the top 10 per cent and those households below them. Despite considerable under-representation of really affluent households in the survey base for income distribution data, that data shows that the top 10 per cent have moved away from the rest of us very rapidly. This will become even more the case in the future, given the current systematic attack on public sector professional salaries, a key programme of the present Coalition government. The drivers for the acceleration upwards of the most affluent include reduction in progressive income taxes, the activities of the tax avoidance industry, the weakness of trade unions, and the tendency of high income earners to form domestic partnerships with other high earners.
All this means that inequality is increasing, regardless of social mobility patterns; and when this is coupled with a lack of social mobility, the problem becomes all the more evident. However, most current political concern about social mobility seems to be very much about opening up access to the highest levels of privilege and affluence -rather than a concern about inequality per se.

Education and mobility
In fact, while little has been done by governments to improve social mobility, those in the top ten per cent are doing all they can to prevent any increase in mobility that might result from downward movement; and their main means for securing their offspring' s position is through their education.
Secondary education is a crucial means of securing access to the top ten per cent in later life, particularly access to private schools but also access to the 'best' state schools, such as the 164 selective state grammar schools that have rejected comprehensivisation, and the 13 per cent of state schools currently rated as 'outstanding' by OFSTED. Graduates who went to ordinary state schools are substantially less likely to have attended one of the UK' s more prestigious universities, and are substantially less likely to enter professional occupations, than graduates who were privately educated. Even if they obtain a graduate level job, those who attended ordinary state schools earn less than those with comparable qualifications. To a considerable extent this reflects degree programme, since private schools and the top state schools very much dominate medical and dental school intakes as well as intakes to elite universities.
It is worth paying attention to the nature of UK private schools. A particularly significant group in England and Wales are those which were once 'Direct Grant Schools' -schools which were not under the control of Local Education Authorities but received direct funding from central government, and took in free-place scholarship students as well as fee-paying pupils. There were 179 of these, and before comprehensivisation their students generally were the highest achieving at A-level -doing better than those at private schools and state grammar schools. In the 1970s these schools were faced with the prospect of either going comprehensive or wholly private. Forty-five, mostly Catholic, went comprehensive. The rest went wholly private, and continue to be schools with outstandingly high results. Typical fees for these schools are about £9000 a year, which represents about 40 per cent of the median household income for a household with children. They do have free or reduced-fee places, but typically their students are drawn precisely from high-income households. This is even more the case for schools which were always private, particularly boarding schools, but the former direct grant schools that were built up on state funding provide an example of the privatisation of privilege.
It is also worth looking at the nature of the UK' s top state schools. These are almost invariably located in the most affluent neighbourhoods. A house close to one of the UK' s thirty highest performing state secondary schools would typically set you back more than £300,000. Prospective homebuyers with a 10 per cent deposit would need a joint income of more than £70,000 to qualify for a mortgage on a property of this price, placing them in the top 10 per cent of the household income distribution. The research evidence suggests that schools in many LEAs, particularly those in London, have become more, not less, socially segregated in recent years, linked no doubt to the phenomenal increase in house prices in the most desirable neighbourhoods.
Through access to schools in the private sector and the top-performing state schools, high-income households are -directly or indirectly -able to purchase secondary educations that advantage their children in relation to access to elite universities and high-status university courses. Around 8 per cent of 11-16 year olds in Britain attend private schools, and a further 4 per cent attend selective state grammar schools; but private and grammar school students together make up more than 35 per cent of students at Russell Group universities, around 60 per cent of students at Oxbridge, and more than 45 per cent of students on medicine and dentistry courses. Young people who attend private and grammar schools are of course more likely to achieve the grades necessary for entry to the most selective universities and courses -parents paying £9000 a year in school fees would presumably expect no less, and grammar school pupils are pre-selected on the basis of measured ability. But in addition to this, private and grammar school educated students are considerably more likely to apply to the most selective universities and courses, compared to ordinary state school students who have equally good A-level grades; and, when they do apply, they are considerably more likely to be offered a place.
The fact that private schools and top-performing state schools provide unparalleled access to prestigious universities matters, because prestigious universities play an increasingly powerful role in helping parents pass privileges on to their children. This is not just a matter of qualifications: a degree from a low-status university simply doesn't carry the same cachet. Nor is this advantage a result of prestigious universities offering a higher quality of teaching than that delivered in institutions that have lower entry requirements and therefore often have to cope with less well prepared students. Instead it is a matter of the establishment of networks of contacts (or, to use the jargon, 'bonding social capital') and of 'badging' -of already being marked out, by virtue of institutional connections, as suitable for graduate recruitment to elite organisations and occupations. This is clear simply from looking at which graduate employers make 'milk-round' visits only to the most selective universities. We can see a whole institutional system geared exactly to making sure that the children of households who are up stay up, drawing on the purchasing power of those households to achieve this effect.
Clearly the cost of private schooling or a home near an excellent state school is well beyond the means of families in 'intermediate ' and 'working' class positions, and if the current £9000 per annum cap on university tuition fees is lifted in the coming years, then the cost of an elite university education will also become prohibitive. These institutions are also way beyond the reach of a large portion of nominally middle-class families -if only one parent is working, and is in a lower-professional job such as classroom teacher, social worker or middle manager. However, where both parents work in jobs that pay middling incomes or better, the use of private schools or of 'good' state schools in expensive neighbourhoods becomes a more affordable option. Clearly the joint income of two parents, rather than the income or occupation of any one individual, is what is key.
Also crucial is the fact that the capacity of middle-class parents to 'invest' in their children' s educational and occupational futures depends considerably on their own social mobility histories. Those who were themselves upwardly mobile into the middle class are much less likely to have parents who can help them cover the cost of their children' s school fees, or fund a large deposit and high mortgage repayments on a house a stone' s throw from an outstanding state school. No wonder, then, that recent research has shown that people' s social mobility chances are affected by their grandparents' as well as their parents' social class positions, and that those most likely to be downwardly socially mobile are those who have been 'up' for only one generation. Clearly we need to think of social mobility as being about the socioeconomic trajectories of families over multiple generations, rather than the simple movement of individuals between origins and destination.
Finally it should be noted here that even Oxbridge offers only potential access to the highest income positions -the best and safest route to income and wealth remains to be born to it.

Snakes and ladders
Despite the fact that social class and social mobility are in reality anything but an individual affair, a phrase often deployed in the discourse of social mobility is the 'ladder of opportunity'. Thus David Cameron -speaking at the 2013 Conservative Spring Forum, and quoting Winston Churchill said -'We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb.' Churchill himself went on to say of the socialist opposition of his day: 'They are for the queue. Let each wait his place until his turn comes.' This metaphor of the queue is, of course, a gross mischaracterisation of socialist principles: socialism is not about individuals waiting in line, it is about the collective advancing together. But the metaphor of the ladder is equally misleading -most obviously because it neglects the fact that some start off on the higher rungs, but more subtly because it presents as a collective ideal something that is inherently individualistic. Raymond Williams took a distinctly jaundiced view of the metaphor of the ladder: Another alternative to solidarity which has had some effect is the idea of individual opportunity -of the ladder … many workingclass leaders, men [sic] in fact who have used the ladder, have been dazzled by this alternative to solidarity. Yet the ladder is the perfect symbol of the bourgeois idea of society, because while it undoubtedly offers the opportunity to climb, it is a device which can only be used individually: you go up the ladder alone … The actual process of reform, in so far as it has not been governed by working-class pressure, has been, in large part, the giving of increased opportunity to climb. Many indeed have scrambled up, and gone off to play on the other side … My own view is that the ladder version of society is objectionable in two related respects: first, that it weakens the principle of common betterment, which ought to be an absolute value; second that it sweetens the poison of hierarchy, in particular by offering the hierarchy of merit as a thing different in kind from the hierarchy of money or birth. 1 Fifty years on this critique may be seen as radical socialist utopianism. But we consider that its time has come again. Some inequality may be inevitable in a capitalist society but the degree of that inequality can vary enormously. We believe that a programme directed towards 'equal opportunity' implicitly accepts levels of inequality as they exist -and today' s levels of inequality are fundamentally unacceptable.
In the UK in Hobsbawm' s 'fortunate third quarter' of the twentieth century, and in the Scandinavian democracies today, inequality in lived experience was/ is somewhat controlled or ameliorated -in consequence of relatively good 'lowpaid' earnings and income substitution benefits, as well as strongly progressive and enforced taxation. And during that fortunate post-war period in Britain, which began with the introduction of free grammar school places and university maintenance grants, changes in the occupational structure also allowed for the entry through secondary and higher education of a number of young adults from working-and lower middle-class backgrounds into well remunerated and regarded professional and managerial roles. 2 But today, while levels of inequality have risen, many of the previous routes out poverty have been closed; and at the same time the professional and managerial roles of previous generations of the socially mobile have undergone, or are undergoing, serious 'proletarianisation'. Teaching is a clear example of this, as are the middle ranks of the civil service (the old Executive Officer grades). Further Education teaching has been almost completely deprofessionalised and downgraded, and this may become the norm for many 'qualified' roles in the future. Other higher level occupations have been much reduced in volume as a consequence of deindustrialisation. The industrial middle class has declined in number alongside the old industrial working class from which it was recruited, as much by life course mobility as by intergenerational mobility.
As a result, many new university graduates today work in jobs that are the functional equivalent of clerical and retail work, and are relatively poorly paidas call-centre agents for example. Even those who find work in what used to be regarded as decent public sector professional jobs are embarking on a path that offers much less of a career than formerly. A degree pretty well guaranteed much higher lifetime earnings to people who graduated in the 1960s, but someone graduating in 2013 is far less likely to earn a lifetime premium. In a post-industrial society, where the re-creation of a large reserve army of labour is a key mechanism in the disciplining of workers, the acquisition of qualifications offers little in the way of guarantee of entry into an improved social position. 3 Social mobility -which for some seemed promised by the recent huge expansion of higher education -can thus be seen as a false prospectus even for individuals. And as a basis for political action it offers very little. A more useful slogan is the old one: it bears repeating. Rise with your class, not from it.
Our argument here, of course, is that we should focus on equality, not mobility -on solidarity, not meritocracy. The current solidification of the occupational structure, coupled with the massive appropriation of goods, resources and services by the super-rich and their closest associates, offers a particular historical opportunity for just that focus in the future. At the very least, we should think again about whether we are prepared to accept such wide disparities in income and wealth, and the considerable educational and other advantages they can buy, at a time when opportunities for social mobility are closing down.
Vikki Boliver is a lecturer in sociology/social policy at Newcastle University. David Byrne is a professor in the School of Applied Studies, Newcastle University. Culture and Society, 1780-1950, 1963. Williams of course did not accept the elite notion of merit, as is evident not only in his academic work but also in his fiction. 3. The creation of an unemployed 'reserve army of labour' is seen by many critical/and or marxist economists as a deliberate policy instrument, whose aim is to discipline those in work into accepting conditions that they would not accept if there were plenty of other available jobs, and if they were not fearful of losing their existing job.