Jnl Soc. Pol.

(2013), 42, 3, 431–450 

C Cambridge University Press 2013

doi:10.1017/S004727941300024X

Understanding – and Misunderstanding –

Social Mobility in Britain: The Entry of the
Economists, the Confusion of Politicians
and the Limits of Educational Policy

J OH N H. G OLDTH OR PE

Nuffield College, New Road, Oxford, OX1 1NF

email: [email protected]

Abstract
A consensus has developed in political and also media circles that in Britain over recent
decades social mobility has been in decline. According to the consensus view, as construed in
political circles, educational policy is seen as the crucial instrument for increasing mobility.
This article shows how the consensus emerged from the research of a group of economists into
intergenerational income mobility. It is argued that, primarily on account of various limitations
of the available data, the economists’ finding of declining mobility is open to question; and,
further, that, because no explicit distinction is made in their work between absolute and relative
rates of mobility, its reception, among politicians especially, has been attended by considerable
confusion. An alternative to the consensus view is put forward, based on extensive research by
sociologists into social class mobility, which is seen as better capturing the intergenerational
transmission of economic advantage and disadvantage. This research indicates that the only
recent change of note is that the rising rates of upward, absolute mobility of the middle decades
of the last century have levelled out. Relative rates have remained more or less constant back to
the inter-war years. According to this alternative view, what can be achieved through education,
whether in regard to absolute or relative mobility, appears limited.

In Britain over the last decade a remarkable consensus has emerged in political
and also in media circles that social mobility is in decline and has in fact reached
an exceptionally low level. The aims of this paper are: (i) to give an account of
how this consensus developed; (ii) to show that the consensus view is open to
serious question, while also giving rise to much confusion among politicians; (iii)
to present an alternative view that has a more secure social science grounding;
and (iv) to suggest that, in the light of this alternative view, educational policy
appears far more limited as a means of increasing mobility than is now supposed
across the political spectrum.

The development of the consensus

The origins of the present political concern with social mobility can be traced
back to the rise of New Labour: specifically, to the party’s median-voter electoral

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 432 john h. goldthorpe

strategy and to its efforts at policy ‘triangulation’. A focus on social mobility had
obvious attractions for New Labour as a means of appealing to the supposed
electoral middle-ground of ‘aspirational’ families, while at the same time taking
over a recognised Conservative emphasis on greater equality of opportunity
as opposed to greater equality of condition. Increased social mobility could be
represented as being, in Tony Blair’s words (speech, 9 June 2002), in itself ‘the great
force for social equality in dynamic market economies’. And, further, the goal
of increasing social mobility could plausibly be linked to policies of educational
expansion and reform that the party wished to prioritise.
Following New Labour’s access to power, the Performance and Innovation
Unit (later the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit) within the Cabinet Office was
charged with carrying out a comprehensive review of research on social mobility
in Britain, in consultation with academics working in the field – at this time,
largely sociologists. The review was written by Stephen Aldridge, Chief Economist
at the Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU), and appeared in April 2001
(Aldridge, 2001).
Aldridge noted that most of the research undertaken related to
intergenerational mobility as between social classes, and in this regard the
principal source on which he drew was Heath and Payne (2000), supplemented
by Breen and Goldthorpe (2001) and an early version of what became Goldthorpe
and Mills (2004). Aldridge recognised at the outset the crucial importance that
sociologists attach to the distinction between absolute and relative mobility
rates. Absolute rates refer to the actual proportions of individuals of given
class origins who are mobile to different class destinations, while relative rates
compare the chances of individuals of differing class origins arriving at different
class destinations and thus indicate the extent of social fluidity. In these two
respects, Aldridge then accurately summarised the major research findings as
follows:

(i) Absolute rates of intergenerational class mobility, as measured in

percentage terms, appear quite high. Most notably, rates of upward mobility
steadily increased in the course of the twentieth century, primarily as
a consequence of class structural change – that is, of the expansion of
professional and managerial positions creating ‘more room at the top’.
However, immobility at the ‘top’ also increased, and there were indications
that towards the end of the century rates of upward mobility among men
were stabilising, as the growth of professional and managerial positions
began to slacken and as men faced greater competition for these positions
from women.
(ii) Relative rates of intergenerational class mobility, as measured by odds
ratios, showed a basic constancy over most of the twentieth century, or
at all events no sustained directional change, with the possible exception

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 433

of some recent slight increase in fluidity among women. In other words,

the strength of the association between the class positions of children and
their parents, considered net of class structural effects, appeared remarkably
robust. Although increasing upward mobility might create a contrary
impression, Britain had not in fact become a significantly more fluid or
‘open’ society.

Despite the importance attached to the work of the PIU within government, it
would appear to have attracted little wider attention. Media coverage was limited,
and at this point social mobility still remained a matter of primarily academic
concern. However, all this was soon to change, with the catalyst being research
carried out by a group of economists associated with the Centre for Economic
Performance at the London School of Economics, among whom Jo Blanden and
Stephen Machin were most prominent. Their findings were first published as a
CEP Discussion Paper (Blanden et al., 2001) and then in an important collective
volume (Blanden et al., 2004).1
In their research, the economists sought to follow in the steps of colleagues,
notably in the US and Sweden, who had revived interest in intergenerational
mobility treated not in terms of social class but rather of earnings or income. To
this end, Blanden and her colleagues analysed data from two British birth cohort
studies, the National Child Development Study and the British Cohort Study,
which aim to follow through their life-courses all children born in Britain in one
week in 1958 and in 1970, respectively. The major finding that the economists
reported was the following. There was a stronger association in the 1970 cohort
than in the 1958 cohort between the earnings of men and women when in their
early thirties and their family incomes when they were age sixteen. In other words,
between the two cohorts there had been a decline in intergenerational mobility
in what was termed ‘economic status’ – and, it was held, one of a statistically
significant and indeed substantial kind. The economists further argued that
this decline could be associated with widening income inequality in Britain
from the later 1970s and, more specifically, with the fact that children from
better-off families had benefited disproportionately from the expansion of higher
education, from which increasing earnings returns were being obtained (Blanden
et al., 2005a; cf. Blanden et al., 2007; Lindley and Machin, 2012).
This one piece of research did then have a remarkable impact, becoming the
empirical basis for the view that levels of social mobility in Britain have fallen
to a disturbing degree – that is, for the view that in public discourse has by now
assumed the status of unquestionable fact. In explaining how this impact was
achieved, and the consensus view thus formed, three influences appear important.
First, the CEP economists’ research was from an early stage financed by the
Sutton Trust, a charitable foundation committed to a programme of promoting
mobility through reducing social inequalities in educational opportunity and

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 434 john h. goldthorpe

attainment. Special reports on the research were prepared for the Trust (see,
e.g., Blanden et al., 2005b; Blanden and Machin, 2007) and were very effectively
disseminated. The reports also referred to certain new findings of a kind likely to
attract media attention. Most strikingly, it was claimed that rates of social (that is,
income) mobility in Britain were at a lower level than in most other economically
advanced societies.2
Second, in governmental and political circles the economists’ findings
proved highly opportune. For the New Labour government, evidence that
mobility had declined and that this decline began in the period following the
Conservatives’ return to power in 1979 was obviously welcome. It helped validate
their commitment to a social mobility agenda, and the economists’ explanation
of the decline could also be presented as confirmation of the view that the
priorities of ‘education, education, education’ (Tony Blair, speech, 26 September
2000) would be crucial to restoring high levels of mobility.3 References to the
economists’ research figured prominently in a Cabinet Office discussion paper
(Cabinet Office, 2008),4 leading up to the government’s White Paper on social
mobility (HM Government, 2009a), and additional analyses were drawn on by
the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions to show that chances of access had
become more unequal in relation to family income (HM Government, 2009b).
At the same time, though, the Conservatives also saw advantage in taking up the
finding of declining mobility. It could be used to support the argument that the
abolition of grammar schools had damaged the chances of upward mobility of
working-class children and, as New Labour continued in power, the persistence
and prevalence of the idea of declining mobility was increasingly drawn on
as evidence of the ineffectiveness of its policies in dealing with the problem
(see, e.g., Conservative Party, 2008). The Conservative–Liberal Democrat
Coalition government formed in 2010 pursued this theme and proposed a new
‘strategy’ for social mobility (HM Government, 2011; cf. Liberal Democrat Party,
2009).
Third, the influence has also to be appreciated of what might be called
‘media hysteresis’: that is, the tendency within the media, once a particular ‘line’
on any issue has become widely accepted, for this line to be maintained as the
standard output, regardless of any further inputs. Once the CEP economists
had successfully got across the idea of declining mobility to the socio-political
commentariat, any different view had little chance of serious consideration.
Commentators apparently read each other rather than taking note of new research
developments. In fact, rather than any more balanced assessments emerging, a
spiral of hyperbole would appear to have set in, so that from the situation being
one of declining mobility, it progressed to being one in which mobility had
‘fallen to its lowest recorded level’ or had indeed ‘ground to a halt’ (as some
recent examples, see John Humphrys, YouGov, 14 May 2012; Suzanne Moore,
Mail Online, 16 May 2012; Deborah Orr, Guardian, 20 May 2012).5

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 435

Problems with the consensus view

Problems with the consensus view arise of both an empirical and an analytical
kind. The source of the empirical problems is one that has been little commented
on: namely, that for Britain there are in fact no high quality data available for the
study of intergenerational earnings or income mobility. The economists on whose
work the consensus view rests were from the start labouring under this handicap.
Two main problems arise with the earnings and family income data in
the birth cohort studies that they use. First, for a large proportion of cohort
members, such data are missing, partly on account of cohort attrition but also of
item non-response. And, further, there are good grounds, accepted by the CEP
economists, for regarding income data provided by small proprietors and the self-
employed as being too unreliable to use. Second, the measures of individuals’
earnings and of their families’ incomes on which the economists have to base
their analyses are ‘one-shot’ measures, while the desirability has been recognised,
from the pioneering work of Atkinson et al. (1983) onwards, of having several
measures that can be ‘time-averaged’: that is, in order to control for the transitory
fluctuations in earnings or incomes that one-shot measures will reflect. Blanden
et al. were well aware of the difficulty that they faced here, and acknowledged at
the outset (2004: 136–8) that the validity of the comparison of levels of mobility
that they made between the 1958 and 1970 cohorts would crucially depend upon
the transitory component, in family income especially, being of much the same
magnitude from one cohort to the other.
One critic of the economists’ work, Gorard (2008), has focused sharply on
the first problem of missing data and on the biases that could result. In fact, these
biases may be less serious than feared (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 2010), and it is
the second problem that must be regarded as the more serious: specifically, in
that the transitory component in the family income variable for the 1958 cohort
may well not be the same as in this variable for the 1970 cohort, but significantly
larger (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 2010). If so, this would in itself help explain the
weaker association in the 1958 cohort between family income and children’s later
earnings and, to this extent, the apparent decline in mobility would be artefactual
rather than real. Critical comment on these lines is, not surprisingly, resisted by
the CEP economists (Blanden et al., 2013), and the debate is likely to continue.
But, for present purposes, the following point may be made. Not only does the
consensus view of declining mobility in Britain rest empirically on a single piece
of research, it rests in effect on the interpretation of a single variable, the family
income variable, constructed in the course of this research. Insofar as the cross-
cohort comparability of this variable as regards its transitory component is not
as secure as the economists would suppose, the empirical basis of the consensus
view disappears; there is no back-up.
It should, moreover, be noted that this comparability is similarly crucial to
the economists’ argument that a major factor in declining mobility between the

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 436 john h. goldthorpe

1958 and 1970 cohorts was an increasing inequality in access to higher education.
If the weaker association between 1958 cohort members’ family incomes and their
subsequent earnings could be, at least in some part, artefactual, then so too could
the weaker association that shows up between their family incomes and their
educational attainment. And a recent study by Boliver (2011; see also Ianelli et al.,
2011) does in fact indicate that from the 1960s through to the mid-1990s social
class differences in access to higher education, though wide, remained essentially
unchanged.
Apart from the inadequacies of the income and earnings data that they
contain, there is one further way in which the 1958 and 1970 cohort studies were
unsuited to the economists’ purposes: that is in providing information not for the
population as a whole but only for two birth cohorts within this population, and
only twelve years apart – a very limited basis for claims about mobility trends. This
is indeed a point that Blanden and Machin have recognised in warning against
the over-interpretation of their findings (Evidence to House of Commons Select
Committee on Children, Schools and Families, 23 January 2008, Q.9).
Turning now to analytical problems of the consensus view, these stem
primarily from the fact that the distinction between absolute and relative rates of
mobility – recognised as crucial in the sociological literature – was not taken up in
the CEP economists’ work, or at least not in any explicit way. Economists have in
fact, until very recently, given little attention to absolute income mobility: that is,
to the association between the real incomes of parents and their children as these
reflect economic growth, the distribution of productivity increases, etc. Rather,
they have been concerned with the relative positions of parents and children
within income or earnings distributions and with the association between these
positions. Blanden et al. (2004) followed in this tradition, and chiefly relied on
the standard method in the economics literature for measuring this association:
that is, of estimating the loglinear regression of, in their case, children’s earnings
on family income. However, the β coefficients thus produced, taken to represent
the intergenerational ‘elasticities’ of children’s income with respect to that of their
parents, are not an entirely satisfactory measure of relative mobility – as Blanden
et al. recognise – in that they will be influenced by differences in the degree of
inequality in the generational distributions as well as by the net intergenerational
association (Björklund and Jäntti, 2009: 497). Consequently, Blanden et al. also
report the correlation, r, between children’s earnings and family income, which
they treat as ‘β adjusted for changes in inequality’ (2004: 127–8). And in turn
their focus on relative mobility emerges yet more clearly when, as a further
method of analysis, they present mobility tables that cross-classify the positions
of children and their families within earnings and income quartiles, respectively
(2004, Tables 6.6a and 6.6b). In this case, of course, all marginal distributions are
equal by construction, and it is thus only relative mobility that is in question: that
is, only mobility reflecting the net association between the positions of parents

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 437

and children. What, then, has to be recognised – as in the sociological literature –

is that where mobility is understood in this relative sense, an equality must always
exist between upward and downward movement; that is, if the net association
between parents’ and children’s positions strengthens or weakens, it must follow
that upward and downward mobility will decrease or increase together and to
exactly the same extent (for a formal proof, see Goldthorpe and Mills, 2008:
n. 9).
However, because the CEP economists did not make the distinction between
absolute and relative mobility explicit, while actually concentrating on the latter,
the reception of their findings in political and media circles, and the formation
of the consensus view, was from the start attended by a large degree of confusion.
To take an early example, in a major speech on social mobility (11 October 2004),
Tony Blair noted the evidence on declining mobility and then expressed his wish
and determination to see mobility rising again ‘as it did in the decades after the
war’. But what happened in this ‘Golden Age’ of social mobility, as Blair could
have readily learnt from the Aldridge review, was an increase in absolute rates of
upward mobility – in terms of class and, one could suppose, in terms of income
too – that was a consequence of structural change, while relative rates remained
essentially unaltered. And what would be involved in redressing a situation of
declining relative mobility, as claimed by Blanden et al. (2004), would of necessity
be increases in upward mobility that were complemented by exactly corresponding
increases in downward mobility, which was not, one could suppose, what Prime
Minister Blair had in mind – downward mobility being a more or less taboo
political topic.
Blair’s confusion has in fact remained pervasive within the consensus view.
In later official reports (e.g. HM Government, 2009a; HM Government, 2012),
the distinction between absolute and relative mobility is referred to but is not
always correctly explained,6 nor in any event is it systematically applied in sections
dealing with proposed policies and their objectives. And how far it has gained
any wider political recognition must be thought highly doubtful. For example,
in the Interim Report of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility
(2012), it receives only passing mention and again with no consideration of its
policy implications. Politicians can still urge (see further below) that the decline
in mobility should be reversed yet at the same time insist that mobility need not
be seen as a ‘zero-sum game’ in which upward and downward movements have
to balance out, when the only evidence they have of a decline – that resulting
from the CEP economists’ work – relates to mobility in just this zero-sum sense.

An alternative view
The essentials of an alternative to the consensus view can be readily presented:
they are in fact contained in the conclusions reached by the Aldridge review of

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 438 john h. goldthorpe

2001, as earlier set out. Over the following years, research has served in large part
to confirm these conclusions.
For example, in one important study – almost entirely ignored by the media
– Paterson and Iannelli (2007) constructed four ten-year birth cohorts from the
British Household Panel Study, ranging from men and women born 1937–46
to those born 1967–76, and on this basis reinforced previous findings on class
mobility in two main respects. First, as regards absolute rates, increasing upward
mobility among the earlier cohorts was shown to level out somewhat among later
cohorts. Second, relative rates of mobility were shown to remain more or less
constant across the cohorts, indicating that the change observed in absolute rates
was in very large part structurally determined.
Subsequently, Goldthorpe and Mills (2008) brought together data from
thirteen representative surveys of the adult British population carried out between
1972 and 2005 and, with this largely different data-base, obtained findings on class
mobility in most respects similar to those of Paterson and Iannelli, in particular
as regards the levelling out of rates of upward mobility for men – though not for
women – and no clear directional change in relative rates.
Why, then, should this alternative view be preferred to the consensus view?
One rather obvious reason is that the alternative view is based on a far greater
body of evidence. Instead of resting on the results of just one piece of research
comparing the experience of two birth cohorts only twelve years apart (and in
which the reliability of the comparison can be queried), the alternative view rests
on a whole series of studies using different designs and data sources but covering
the experience of men and women within the British population at large from
the 1930s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and producing
generally consistent findings.
There is, however, a second reason, of no less importance, for preferring
the alternative view. If the basic concern that economists and sociologists share
is to establish the extent to which more or less advantaged economic status is
transmitted across generations, then class can be regarded as a better indicator
of economic status than current income or earnings. Where class is treated, as
in the research referred to above, on the basis of the EGP schema (Erikson et al.,
1979; Goldthorpe, 2007: vol. II: chapter 5) or of the National Statistics Socio-
Economic Classification (Rose et al., 2005) – that is, in terms of individuals’
positions in employment relations – it is not only associated, and increasingly
strongly (McGovern et al., 2008: 87–93; Williams, 2012), with level of current
earnings but, further, with earnings security, short-term earnings stability and
longer-term earnings prospects and with the extent of fringe benefits gained
from employment (Goldthorpe and McKnight, 2006; Chan and Goldthorpe,
2007; McGovern et al., 2008: 91–103).7
Evidence that brings out the significance of the above argument can be found
in reverting to the comparison of the mobility experience of members of the 1958

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 439

TABLE 1. Family income/earnings quintile mobility tables and adjusted

five-class mobility tables for identical sub-samples (N = 3,415) of male 1958
and 1970 birth cohort members, percentage by row – i.e., by family income
quintile and father’s class, respectively (percentages more than ±2% points
different from the 20% ‘perfect mobility’ expectation are in bold)

Earnings quintile Class1

1 2 3 4 5 I II IIIa+V VI IIIb+VII

1958
top 31 22 22 15 11 I 36 28 18 9 9
2 22 22 21 18 17 II 28 27 19 16 10
3 17 17 22 21 22 IIIa+V 16 20 23 19 22
4 15 19 21 22 22 VI 13 17 20 26 24
Bottom 14 19 14 24 28 IIIb+VII 7 9 19 30 34
1970
top 37 19 22 15 8 I 39 23 19 9 10
2 24 25 20 17 14 II 26 28 19 15 12
3 15 22 22 22 18 IIIa+V 16 19 22 24 19
4 14 18 19 24 26 VI 11 15 21 28 25
Bottom 10 16 17 22 35 IIIb+VII 8 15 20 24 34

Note: 1 Class I, Professional and managerial, higher; Class II, Professional and managerial,
lower; Class IIIa+V, Routine nonmanual, higher and Lower supervisory and technical; Class
VI, Skilled manual; Class IIIb+VII, Routine nonmanual, lower and Non-skilled manual.
Source: Adapted from Erikson and Goldthorpe (2010).

and 1970 birth cohorts – the empirical basis of the consensus view. It can be
shown (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 2010) that, for identical sub-samples of cohort
members (that is, those for whom all relevant information is available) analyses
based on five-class mobility tables, while indicating no change in relative rates
between the two cohorts, capture a stronger intergenerational association than do
quintile family income/earnings tables based on the CEP economists’ own data.
Table 1 presents the above findings, for men, in a less rigorous but more
accessible form than originally. The class mobility tables have been adjusted (see
Mosteller, 1968) so as to have all marginal percentages at 20 per cent, in the same
way as the quintile family income/earnings tables, while preserving the underlying
odds ratios that express relative mobility rates. It is evident that the class tables
show up stronger propensities for immobility and for the persistence of advantage
and disadvantage across generations, and especially so in the case of the 1958
cohort (where the number of cells in the family income/earnings table with
values close to the ‘perfect mobility’ expectation of 20 per cent must underline
doubts earlier noted about this table). The corresponding findings for women
(available on request) display a very similar pattern.
What is then implied is that while treating mobility in terms of class, as an
index of economic status, does not point to any recent decline in relative mobility

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 440 john h. goldthorpe

in the way that Blanden et al. (2004) have claimed, it does reveal the prevalence
in Britain of a mobility regime clearly less fluid than that which is apparent if
economic status is indexed simply by current income or earnings.

Implications for policy

Whether the consensus view or the alternative view is accepted is important not
only from an academic standpoint but also in that the two views lead to very
different ideas about the nature of Britain’s social mobility problem and about
the ways in which, and the extent to which, it might be addressed through public
policy.
According to the consensus view, based on the work of Blanden et al.(2004)
on income mobility – and on over-interpretations or misunderstandings of this
work – the problem is one of relatively recent origin; around the end of the
twentieth century mobility in Britain declined, sharply and to a very low level,
thus creating a situation in marked contrast to the Golden Age of mobility
in the decades after World War II. According to the alternative view, based
largely on the study of class mobility, the main way in which mobility rates
have changed in the recent past is that the steady increase in absolute upward
mobility that characterised the Golden Age has levelled out, at least so far as
men are concerned – although any suggestion that, even with men, such mobility
has ‘ground to a halt’ is quite nonsensical (see, e.g., Goldthorpe and Mills, 2008:
figures 4, 5 and 6). At the same time, though, a longer-term and more fundamental
problem is identified: relative rates of class mobility, which reflect the extent of the
intergenerational transmission of economic advantage and disadvantage more
fully than do relative rates of income mobility, have shown an essential constancy
over a period extending back, through the Golden Age itself, to the inter-war
years – apart, possibly, for some emergent increase in fluidity among women.
These two different ideas, of what the problem of mobility actually is, do then in
turn critically shape ideas on policy.
Adherents of the consensus view, focusing on the period from the end of
the 1970s and on the supposed decline in mobility, tend to accept the CEP
economists’ explanation of this as a consequence of increasing inequality in
incomes as reflected in similarly increasing inequalities in children’s educational
attainment. Following from this, the prevailing policy emphasis has been on the
central role that education must play in overcoming the mobility problem – the
major differences among the parties being over the particular lines of policy
development that are required in order to ‘level up’ educational attainment
(cf. HM Government, 2009a; HM Government, 2011; HM Government, 2012).
However, the understanding of the relationship between education and social
mobility implied here is one that, according to the alternative view with its much
longer time perspective, appears very much open to question.

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 441

TABLE 2. Probabilities (%) of men with differing levels of qualification in

the 1946, 1958 and 1970 birth cohorts being found in the higher or lower
levels of the professional and managerial salariat1

% found in

Higher salariat Lower salariat Other

Level of qualification (NS-SEC Class 1) (NS-SEC Class 2) (NS-SEC Classes 3–7)

Higher tertiary
1946 cohort 50 44 6
1958 cohort 48 38 14
1970 cohort 53 34 13
Lower tertiary
1946 cohort 17 38 45
1958 cohort 27 34 39
1970 cohort 24 36 40
Higher secondary
1946 cohort 13 36 51
1958 cohort 17 33 50
1970 cohort 25 37 38
Lower secondary (or below)
1946 cohort 7 11 82
1958 cohort 8 13 79
1970 cohort 10 17 73

Note: 1 Men regarded as having achieved ‘occupational maturity’.

Source: See further Bukodi and Goldthorpe (2011).

To begin with absolute rates, what has to be understood is that the rising
upward mobility of the Golden Age had little at all to do with educational
expansion or reform. It was, rather, essentially demand driven: that is, by
the growth of professional and managerial employment that far outstripped
the supply of highly qualified personnel. This is illustrated in Table 2, which
includes data from the 1946 National Survey of Health and Development birth
cohort as well as from the 1958 and 1970 cohorts. It can be seen that while
in all three cohorts those with university degrees, or equivalents, were almost
assured of professional and managerial positions (‘graduate jobs’), the chances of
accessing the professional and managerial salariat were also high, and in general
increasing, for the less well qualified – typically, through mobility in the course
of their working lives. Thus, even for men with, at best, only lower secondary
qualifications these chances had risen to above one in four for those in the
1970 cohort. Over the whole period covered, the relative advantage of having a
degree actually declined (Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2011). Of course, still in this
period, as at other times, an association can be observed between education and
mobility chances; but it is important to recognise that this association relates to
the individual rather than to the population level. Education has an effect on who
is mobile, or immobile, rather than on the overall rate of mobility.

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 442 john h. goldthorpe

Correspondingly, then, the stabilising of rates of upward mobility towards

the end of the twentieth century, at least in the case of men, can be associated
with a slowing rate of growth of the salariat. And, again, it is difficult to see
education as an explanatory factor, except insofar as women’s rising – but still
strongly class-linked – levels of qualification have enabled them to compete
more effectively with men for the professional and managerial positions that are
available (Goldthorpe and Mills, 2008).
In an attempt to sustain the case for the importance of education in reversing
the – supposed – decline in mobility, New Labour under Gordon Brown resorted
to a radical supply-side position, presumably under the influence of some rather
naı̈ve version of human capital theory. The argument was (e.g. Brown, 2008; and
speech, 16 January 2010; HM Government, 2009a: chs. 1,2) that there is now ‘no
ceiling’ on the extent to which ‘top-end’ jobs can be created in Britain, since,
in the context of a global economy, such jobs can be drawn in from around the
world, provided only that Britain has a workforce sufficiently well-educated and
skilled to perform them. In other words, through educational expansion and
reform, supply can create its own demand, and a return can in this way be made
to a situation of ever-increasing ‘room at the top’ in which – the great political
attraction of the position – no need arises for mobility to become a zero-sum
game.
However, the realism of this scenario can be doubted, and an alternative
would be that, with the rapid expansion of tertiary education in the 1990s, a
reversal of the mid-twentieth century situation is being brought about: that is,
the supply of the higher qualified is tending to run ahead of demand. The concept
of the ‘graduate job’ does in fact seem already to have disappeared, and research
into ‘over-qualification’ indicates that in Britain, as in other advanced societies,
this is increasing and becoming a prevailing feature of labour markets rather
than the temporary disequilibrium that human capital theory might allow for
(Chevalier and Lindley, 2009; Green and Zhu, 2010; Wolf, 2011: part 2). Moreover,
the idea that this situation could be redressed by attracting ‘top-end’ jobs into
Britain from within the global economy faces the rather obvious difficulty that
the newly industrialising countries, of Asia especially, can abundantly supply
well-qualified personnel and at much lower cost (cf. Brown et al., 2011).
While, then, claims are still being made, as, for example, by the ‘social
mobility Tsar’, Alan Milburn (2009, 2012), that a further period of rapid expansion
of professional and managerial employment lies ahead, it would seem, to say the
least, no less probable – and especially given the unfavourable economic outlook –
that something like the present situation will continue: that is, any upgrading of
the occupational and class structures will occur at a much slower rate than in
the past. And, to the extent that governments are able to sustain such upgrading,
this will need to be through economic rather than educational policy: that is,
through policy aimed at economic growth – or, rather, development – in which

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 443

investment in advanced technology and the ‘knowledge economy’ and also in the
public and social services infrastructure is given high priority.
If, then, education had little to do with the rising (absolute) rates of upward
mobility of the Golden Age, and cannot in itself be expected to produce a return
to the benign structural conditions of that time, is the emphasis placed on
educational policy any more justifiable in the case of relative rates?
In this case, two crucial assumptions underlying the consensus view should
be noted: first, that raising levels of educational attainment among young people
from less advantaged backgrounds is tantamount to achieving greater educational
equality; and, second, that generally higher and more equal levels of educational
attainment will, more or less automatically, translate into an increase in relative
mobility (see, e.g., Blanden and Machin, 2007).
The view here implied of the relation between education and mobility can be
questioned, first of all, at an empirical level. What in this case is significant is the
essential constancy of relative rates of class mobility back to the inter-war years:
that is, over a period characterised by a series of major educational reforms, all
carried through with some degree of egalitarian intent, including the introduction
of secondary education for all following the Butler Act of 1944, the increase in
the school leaving age to fifteen in 1947 and to sixteen in 1972, the move from
the selective tripartite system of secondary education to comprehensive schools
from the later 1960s, the replacement of O-levels by GCSEs in 1988 and two major
waves of expansion in tertiary education in the 1960s and 1990s. It is possible that
these developments were associated with some, albeit modest, reduction in class-
linked inequalities in educational attainment (Breen et al., 2009, 2010), although
the issue is still debatable. But there is no indication whatever of them having any
impact on mobility. And, in at least one respect, there is now direct evidence that
they did not. Boliver and Swift (2011) exploit the fact that children in the 1958 birth
cohort were divided between those educated under selective and comprehensive
systems, and in a careful comparison they find that the mobility chances of
the two sets of children, whether considered in terms of class or income, were
essentially the same. Conservative claims that the abolition of grammar schools
has been damaging to social mobility are thus not supported; but neither are the
hopes of those who saw in comprehensive schools the agencies of a more open
society.8
What the historical evidence suggests is that those who suppose it possible to
modify the class mobility regime directly through educational policy overlook the
regime’s important self-maintaining properties: that is, properties that stem from
the capacity of families with greater resources to use these resources specifically
in reaction to situations in which some threat to their positions might arise. This
capacity is manifested in at least two important ways.
First, parents in more advantaged class positions show in effect a clear
awareness that education, in its relation to employment, operates primarily as

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 444 john h. goldthorpe

TABLE 3. Probabilities (%) of being found in the professional and

managerial salariat of individuals of salariat and working-class origins
with high (degree level or equivalent) and low (some O-level or GCSE
or below) qualifications, 1970s and 1990s

1970s 1990s

% in % of all % in % of all
Origin Qualifications salariat of origin salariat of origin

Salariat High 90 10 91 21
(Classes I+II)
Working class High 89 1 88 4
(Classes VI+VII)
Salariat Low 20 36 35 21
(Classes I+II)
Working class Low 8 72 10 51
(Classes VI+VII)

Source: General Household Surveys.

a positional good (Wolf, 2002: ch. 8). What matters is not how much education
individuals acquire but rather how much relative to others – within, say, the same
birth cohort – with whom they will be in closest competition in labour markets.
Thus, in the face of some general improvement in educational standards, these
parents can be expected to respond by using their superior economic resources
to engage in what Thurow (1976: 95–7) has called ‘defensive expenditure’: that
is, expenditure aimed at preserving their children’s competitive edge. It is,
for example, evident enough in Britain today that parental – and, perhaps,
grandparental – resources, even if not sufficient to allow for children to be
educated in the private sector, are still widely deployed to buy houses in areas
served by high-performing state schools, to pay for individual tutoring, to help
manage student debt, to support entry into postgraduate courses for which no
loans are available or, in the case of educational failure, to fund ‘second chances’.
And such courses of action, resulting in what Lucas (2001) has called ‘effectively
maintained’ educational inequality, are ones that can scarcely be precluded in a
liberal society.
Second, it has to be recognised that even if children from more advantaged
backgrounds do not achieve great educational success, this does not have the
same damaging effect on their employment prospects as with children from
less advantaged backgrounds; and this differential effect would appear to have
been widening in later twentieth-century Britain, even as overall levels of
educational qualification increased. Table 3 shows that in this period graduates’
chances of accessing the professional and managerial salariat were very high,
regardless of their class origins. But while individuals of working-class origin

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 445

with low-level qualifications had only slight chances of entering the salariat, their
counterparts with parents in the salariat had far from negligible, and rising,
chances of maintaining their parents’ position – chiefly, the indications are,
through obtaining managerial positions in the expanding sales and personal
services sectors (Goldthorpe and Jackson, 2008). And important here, it would
seem, in addition perhaps to helpful social networks, are the – very marketable
– ‘soft skills’ and lifestyle and personal characteristics that these individuals
acquire, less through their education than through their family, community
and peer-group socialisation (Jackson, Goldthorpe and Mills, 2005), reflecting
their parents’ superior social and cultural, as well as economic resources. There
is, in other words, little evidence of, or reason to expect, sustained movement
towards an ‘education-based meritocracy’ – a prime feature of which would
be significantly more downward mobility than is in fact observed. Indeed, for
most advanced societies, the evidence is that the effect of education on class
destinations is actually tending to weaken (Breen and Luijkx, 2004).
In sum, attempts at increasing equality of opportunity, in the sense of a
greater equality of mobility chances, would seem unlikely to be effective, whether
made through educational policy or otherwise, unless the class-linked inequalities
of condition on which class mobility regimes are founded are themselves
significantly reduced. It is notable that in discussion of Scandinavian societies,
in which increased social fluidity can be most persuasively claimed as a political
accomplishment, the emphasis has fallen less on educational policy per se than
on the reduction of class differences in incomes and levels of living through
redistributive fiscal and welfare policies and, further, on strong trade unionism
and employment protection that help maintain the security and stability of
incomes, of wage-earners especially, and on models of political economy that,
again to the advantage of wage-earners, prioritise full employment (Erikson, 1990,
1996; Ringdal, 2004; Breen and Jonsson, 2007). While educational expansion and
reform may have played a part, their effects have been regarded as secondary to,
if not dependent upon, more fundamental processes of what Marshall (1950) in
another time, but still aptly, called ‘class abatement’.9

Conclusions
The finding reported by a group of economists that in the last decades of the
twentieth century social – sc. income – mobility sharply declined in Britain has
become widely accepted in political and media circles. However, on account of
data problems, the reliability of this finding is open to doubt, and this is of greater
significance than might otherwise be the case since the consensus that has formed
has no other empirical basis. Moreover, a good deal of confusion has arisen in
that the economists did not make any explicit distinction between absolute and
relative mobility, so that, while they were in fact essentially concerned with relative

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 446 john h. goldthorpe

mobility, among politicians and the socio-political commentariat their research

has been widely interpreted as if it referred also, if not primarily, to absolute
mobility.
An alternative to the consensus view can be put forward deriving from
research into class mobility covering a lengthy historical period. In this case, no
decline in mobility, absolute or relative, occurred in the late twentieth century,
contrary to the widely accepted ‘factoid’. In this period, the main change was that
the rising rates of upward mobility of the mid-twentieth century tended to level
out, certainly so far as men were concerned. Relative mobility rates remained
much the same as for decades previously, although if any directional change were
in evidence, it was an actual increase in fluidity among women. This alternative
view is grounded in a number of quite independent studies that have produced
largely consistent findings. At the same time, there is evidence to indicate that
analyses of class mobility more fully capture the degree of intergenerational
continuities in economic status than do those of income mobility.
These two contrasting views lead to different understandings of the nature
of Britain’s social mobility problem and carry different implications for policy.
According to the consensus view, educational policy appears as all-important.
The decline in mobility that is believed to have occurred in the late twentieth
century is seen as following from widening differences in children’s educational
attainment in relation to family income; and it is then supposed that if policies
can be implemented that will raise the level of attainment of children from less
advantaged backgrounds, these policies will in turn generate greater mobility.
According to the alternative view, the part that can be played by educational
policy appears far more limited. What happens to absolute rates will be primarily
determined, as it has been in the past, by changes in the occupational and class
structures, and insofar as policy can have any impact here, it will be policy aimed
at shaping the pattern of future economic development. As regards relative rates,
what can be achieved by educational policy has to be seen as constrained in
two different ways: first, by the ability of more advantaged parents always to use
their superior economic resources as necessary in order to further their children’s
educational attainment and thus help maintain their positional advantage; and,
second, by the fact that children from more advantaged backgrounds who do not
do well educationally will still have family resources and personal attributes that
can serve to protect them against any serious déclassement.
Given this perspective, what is then suggested is that policies aimed at
creating more equal opportunities for higher educational attainment, essentially
by ‘levelling up’, would best be advocated and pursued for their own sake: that is,
in order to allow all young people to realise their full academic and wider human
potentialities – with whatever beneficial economic effects might follow – and not
as instruments of increasing mobility of very uncertain effectiveness. If, however,
the creation of a more fluid and open society is a serious goal, then politicians will

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 understanding – and misunderstanding – social mobility in britain 447

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.

Notes
1 Jonathan Portes informs me that awareness of an early paper from this research was a factor
prompting governmental interest in social mobility. However, there is no reference to the
research in the Aldridge report.
2 This claim is in fact open to question. For a different view, see Björklund and Jäntti, (2009:
501–3). However, the issue is not pursued in the present paper.
3 See also speeches by David Miliband, 3 March 2005; Ruth Kelly, 26 July, 2005; Jim Murphy,
4 April, 2006; and Alan Johnson, 13 September, 2006.
4 This paper is of some further interest in its – not very convincing – attempt to reconcile the
economists’ findings on the trend in mobility with those presented in the Aldridge report
previously referred to.
5 An abundance of earlier media references to ‘declining social mobility’ can be found on the
web by entering this phrase into any search engine.
6 For example, in the former report one finds the following (p. 16): ‘People gaining better
jobs is the essence of social mobility. For a country as a whole, each successive generation
gaining better jobs is known as absolute social mobility’ (emphasis in original).
7 Economists appear to be largely unaware of the conceptualisation and measurement of
social class that is here involved, supposing (e.g. Blanden et al., 2005a) that classes are
treated simply as aggregates of occupations rather than occupation being taken, together
with employment status, as a – by now well-validated – indicator of employment relations.
8 Preliminary results from work in progress by Franz Buscha and Patrick Sturgis of the
University of Southampton indicate that the 1972 increase in the school leaving age had
likewise a minimal effect on relative mobility rates (personal communication).
9 A common view among economists has been that inequality actually promotes mobility
through the incentives for self-advancement that it provides. Of late, however, a contrary
position has emerged. Some economists have suggested, on the basis of cross-national
analyses, that the greater income inequality, the stronger will be the association between
parents’ and children’s earnings – the so-called ‘Great Gatsby curve’ (Alan Krueger, speech
to the Center for American Progress, 12 January 2012). This seems a move in the right
direction but, to return to a point earlier made, relating income distributions to income
mobility would appear an unduly limited way of treating the issue of how inequality of
condition constrains equality of opportunity, even in regard to economic status.

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