The claims

“In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class.

 

“New Labour promised social improvement but delivered a collapse in social mobility.”

Sir John Major, 13 November 2013

The background

Sir John Major delivered a broadside against class-ridden modern Britain this week, bemoaning the over-representation of the privately educated among the nation’s high achievers.

The former Tory Prime Minister, who went to a grammar school in south London, told Conservative activists: “To me, from my background, I find that truly shocking. I remember enough of my past to be outraged on behalf of the people abandoned when social mobility is lost.”

The speech was interpreted in some quarters as a veiled attack on the former public schoolboys who dominated Eton-educated David Cameron’s cabinet, although Sir John was careful to blame New Labour for what he called a “collapse in social mobility”.

Today Mr Cameron responded, saying: “I absolutely agree with the thrust of what John Major said. You only have to look at the make-up of Parliament, the judiciary, the Army, the media. It’s not as diverse, there’s not as much social mobility as there needs to be.”

Has there really been a collapse in social mobility? And is the rest of Britain as dominated by independent school alumni as the coalition front bench?

The analysis

Private schools

Last year the Sutton Trust, a think tank that specialises in social mobility, found that 68 per cent of “public servants” (including royalty and people who work in national, public, or local government organisations) went to private schools.

Some 63 per cent of leading lawyers were privately educated, as were 60 per cent of the upper ranks of the armed forces. Independent schools produce more than half of the nation’s leading journalists, diplomats, financiers and business people.

Only 6.5 per cent of all British children and 18 per cent of pupils over 16 go to private schools, so there is an apparent concentration of power in the hands of a minority in many influential sections of society.

The Sutton Trust’s figures are not historical, so we generally can’t say whether the situation has got better or worse in recent years.

Parliament is an exception. While there are fewer private school alumni in the Commons now than there were in the 1970s and 1980s, the percentage has gone up in the last three parliaments (for a full FactCheck on the demographics of MPs, click here.)

 

Social mobility

Measuring social mobility involves a lot more than finding out where people went to school.

Academics make a distinction between absolute social mobility – the total number of people changing their class or status – and relative social mobility, which refers to your chances of moving up the ladder compared to someone else from a different class (how likely is your low-born FactChecker to better himself, compared to the rich boy in the next postal district?).

Sir John is not alone in assuming that social mobility has gone backwards in recent years. This appears to be a widespread belief, much of it traceable to research carried out by the London School of Economics (LSE) for the Sutton Trust in the mid-2000s which found that the earnings of children born in 1970 were more similar to the income of their parents than children born in 1958.

Dr John Goldthorpe from Oxford University says these findings helped shape a “concensus view” about social mobility among politicans and commentators on the left and right.

The received wisdom is that there was a golden age of upward mobility for working-class children after World War Two. The trend was perhaps linked to grammar schools – and the theory comes with an unbeatable selection of poster boys in the former of grammar school alumni like Paul McCartney, Michael Caine and Richard Burton. Everyone agrees that it has now ground to a halt.

Dr Goldthorpe thinks this is nonsense. He says the influential LSE study was flawed, and the best evidence shows “no decline in mobility, absolute or relative, occurred in the late twentieth century”.

The only notable change was that upward mobility among men, which increased for most of the twentieth century, began to level off towards the end of it, partly because men were facing more competition from women entering the labour market.

A number of different studies chime with this view. A Cabinet Office report for Tony Blair found that intergenerational class mobility was high for most of the 20th century but the picture did not change much.

There was no post-war golden age followed by a slump.  Britain did not become a more open or fluid society.

Should we bring back grammar schools?

If Dr Goldthorpe is right, the high rates of absolute social mobility last century had little to do with education and more to do with changes to the economy that created more “room at the top”: an expansion of professional and managerial jobs that needed to be filled.

The introduction of grammar schools appears to have made no difference overall to the chances of working-class children climbing the ladder, according to this 2011 paper, because “any assistance to low-origin children provided by grammar schools is cancelled out by the hindrance suffered by those who attended secondary moderns”.

Earlier this month the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in another Sutton Trust-funded paper, found that pupils eligible for free school meals or who live in poorer neighbourhoods are significantly less likely to go to a grammar school.

We don’t know whether that was true in the 1960s, but if Dr Goldthorpe is right, it is a fair assumption that richer families will always use their resources to out-compete others when it comes to securing a better education for their children.

He writes: “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’.”

International comparisons

A 2010 study of developed countries in the OECD group found that Britain had the worst intergenerational income mobility of all the countries studied. The height of the bars in this graph measures the extent to which sons’ earnings levels reflect those of their fathers.

One suggested explanation for this is a link between income inequality and poor social mobility.

US economists pioneered the use of the beautifully named “Great Gatsby curve” to measure this.

The UK scores badly for both inequality and social mobility in most Great Gatsby Curves.

The verdict

Sir John Major is quite right to say that the privately-educated still dominate the upper echelons of British life, if the Sutton Trust’s numbers are correct.

And there is less opportunity to climb the ladder of opporunity in the UK than in many other developed countries.

But the evidence for a recent “collapse in social mobility” is weak.

It could be argued that no such collapse took place. One persuasive, if depressing, theory is that people’s chances of transcending their class origins remained about the same over the whole of the last century.

If that theory is true, the implication is that bringing back grammar schools would not help to accelerate social mobility, and the government would do better to concentrate on income inequality rather than education policy.

By Patrick Worrall