Another social mobility rethink

It turns out that improving access to education doesn’t solve social mobility all by itself.

If you are struggling through level 3 qualifications at a school in special measures somewhere in the post-industrial north, the fact that a fiendishly smart kid at the school down the road got a place at the University of Exeter is – to be fair – no help to you at all.

She represents one of the “lucky few” – and if social mobility is going to do any of the heavy lifting around economic growth, productivity, and what we used to call levelling up we need something that goes beyond that gilded group.

This, at least, is the contention of a new report – Innovation Generation – from the Social Mobility Commission. As author (and SMC chair) Alun Francis says in his introduction, previous approaches:

have tended to concentrate on education as the magic potion for improving social mobility. This is true in many respects, but it ignores the context in which education either does or does not work its spell. The economy is critical in terms of growing opportunities, and economy, place, community, neighbourhood and family are all critical in shaping their distribution and accessibility.

In essence, the argument he wants to have is about definitions. Readers may recall a similar attempt by Francis to start this conversation back in 2021, those with stronger stomachs may be thinking of erstwhile chair Katharine Birbalsingh’s pantomime-centric attempt in 2022. But let us be charitable and take this iteration at face value.

Here’s what’s being problematised this time round:

• Occupation and income mobility – poses the question of whether we care more about people moving between occupational categories or salary bands
• Relative and absolute mobility – is an underprivileged group improving their mobility when compared to a more privileged group what matters, or should we be more concerned about improving mobility (defined here as a different occupational or income class from your parents) for all?
• Long-term and intermediate mobility – Is it what you are doing in your 40s that counts, or should we also be concerned about what you are doing in your 20s?
• Upwards and downwards mobility – people can also do worse than their parents, and we should probably be interested in why that has happened.

The temptation here is to ask for all of this, but each dichotomy poses data collection and interpretation challenges. For instance, both relative and absolute mobility in the UK has remained stable (and comparable with competitors) for decades, but there is also evidence of a decline on both terms for the generations born since the early 1980s. That cohort are as likely to be in worse jobs than their parents as better ones.

The consensus reading may be (hello millennials!) that everything sucks right now, but an alternate take might be that there are more well paid people in professional jobs than ever before, and the rate of expansion in such opportunities has slowed. Again, that’s a take from back in 2022 but it still stands: the question posed in 2024 is what could we do more broadly to expand opportunities for upward mobility?

For broader sustained upward mobility to be possible, and to escape from the zero sum approach, we need occupational change – a growth of opportunities creating more room in the upper bands of occupation and income

Good quality jobs are geographically unevenly distributed, and there’s more people around all kind of places with the skills to do them. The big, hard, jobs of growth is persuading employers to offer opportunities in the kinds of places that don’t currently have them – and in encouraging people with suitable skills to want to live and work there.

With a government set on economic growth (at the time of writing, terms and conditions apply) it makes sense for the SMC to row in behind the oft-stated desire to ensure that this doesn’t just mean London and the South East.

Which is all well and good – but what does this mean for higher education? Is there a place-based understanding of the complementarity of civic, innovation, and education contributions? Nope – we’re still at the level of “far less attention has been paid to alternative routes”, even if there is a grudging recognition that “there is much to celebrated” (and also a fair amount still to be done).

SMC is also clear that:

those who graduated from more selective universities typically earned more, and that students from disadvantaged backgrounds who go to university are disproportionately less likely to attend universities or study subjects associated with higher earnings compared to their wealthier peers with similar grades

The approach to this issue recommended is a focus on interventions that focus on improving student skills and knowledge of the sector and the opportunities it offers, with the idea of “contextualised” lower entry standards seen as a zero sum game. It feels like a missed opportunity.