Friends of Grammar Schools

“Grammars did help to move a few people from close to the bottom to the very top and Labour’s abolition of most such schools is one factor behind the continued private-school domination of Oxbridge and key professions.”

David Goodhart            2116 words

Publication date: 26 July 2009   Source: The Sunday Times

Page: 2             (c) 2009 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved

Last November America elected not just a black president but also a leader who is the son of a single mother who was, at least briefly, dependent on food stamps. All very well … but it couldn’t have happened here, said the political and media consensus in Britain. Why not? Ah, you see, the great post-war surge in mobility ground to a halt in the 1980s and continues to be held back by a combination of lack of aspiration and the “closed shop” mentality of the professions. That’s why not.

It’s a narrative as familiar and dispiriting as a bank holiday forecast of traffic jams. Last week it was once again recited by a government committee chaired by Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, who himself made the journey from a council estate to the cabinet. “Professions close their doors to the poor”, ran the headlines; “Society’s barriers are still in place”.

This story is marked by dubious sort of naive pessimism based on the failure to observe an obvious, cheering truth about human nature: that people, on the whole, strive to be upwardly mobile, not just for themselves but for their children and grandchildren, too. Oh, and as for the professions being such a “closed shop” now, can they really have been any less “closed” in the 1950s and 1960s? Scepticism about the naively pessimistic consensus on social mobility is shared by some of the leading academic experts. “There really has been a lot of nonsense talked about the death of mobility,” says John Goldthorpe, the eminent sociologist. He is himself a beneficiary of social mobility, having been born 74 years ago in Yorkshire, the son of a colliery clerk.

He rose via Wath-uponDearne grammar school to University College London. As a young sociologist he wrote a famous study of affluent workers in Luton and went on to become one of the world’s most respected academic analysts of social mobility.

One of the people who is most responsible for the “death of mobility” consensus is Sir Peter Lampl, the education philanthropist. By chance, like Goldthorpe, Lampl spent some of his early years in the Yorkshire coalfield, the son of an immigrant Czech mining engineer.

When his father moved south to the National Coal Board office in London, Lampl went to Reigate grammar school in Surrey and thence to Oxford and business success in America. When he returned in the 1990s, he was horrified to find fewer bright children from state schools going to Oxbridge than had been the case in the 1960s and 1970s and he set up the Sutton Trust to try to do something about it.

In 2005 the Sutton Trust funded and publicised the work of three economists – Jo Blanden, Stephen Machin and Paul Gregg – who burrowed into the British Cohort studies (social data on a big sample of individuals born in a particular year) and found a significant decline in upward mobility between the cohort born in 1958 and in 1970. They attributed this fall to the growing income inequality of the 1980s and the expansion of higher education being monopolised by the better-off.

This slender analysis has, arguably, had more influence on public debate than any academic paper of the past 20 years. Every commentator and politician who “knows” that mobility has fallen off a cliff in recent years is almost certainly basing his assumption on the Sutton Trust report. It is the cornerstone of the Milburn report. Yet it is a highly controversial and contested piece of work.

Social mobility is not only hard to measure; it is also conceptually complex. When most people talk about social mobility, they mean a society in which the link between parents’ income and class position and that of their children is not too fixed – and a society that allows bright poorer people to rise up the scale and dim richer people to fall.

This latter sort of mobility is called “relative mobility” or “zero-sum mobility”: for everyone that goes up, someone comes down. But there is another kind of mobility, “absolute” or “positive-sum mobility”, in which people can rise to better jobs without anyone going down. That is because the economic structure can change, as it did rapidly between the 1940s and the 1970s, and continues to do more slowly, to produce what Goldthorpe calls more “room at the top”. In the 1960s that meant fewer blue-collar jobs and more managerial and professional jobs, many in the expanding welfare state. In the 1930s, less than 10% of the population belonged to the professional and managerial class; now more than 40% does.

There are also two ways of measuring these two types of mobility: measurement by income over generations and measurement by class/occupation over generations. The two measurements can give strikingly different results; and since economists tend to measure by income and sociologists by class, there is rivalry, too.

The Sutton Trust study was the work of economists and emphasised the fall-off in mobility as measured by income between the 1958 British Cohort Study and the 1970 one. For both cohorts, family income when a child was aged 16 was compared with the child’s earnings when aged 30.

But if you look at the actual figures for movement between different income quartiles, two things strike you. First, the difference between the 1958 and 1970 cohort is rather small – surely not big enough to support a claim of a dramatic fall-off in mobility. Second, the level of movement across the quartiles for both cohorts is rather high for a country that is said to be so rigid.

Of the 1958-ers who were born to fathers in the lowest income quartile, only 31% stayed in the lowest quartile, which means more than two-thirds went up in the world and nearly 40% reached the top two quartiles. For the 1970-ers the position had deteriorated a little, with 38% of those born into the bottom quartile still there at age 30, and 33% graduating to the top two quartiles.

At the high-earning end, only 35% of children born to fathers in the highest income quartile stayed there in the 1958 cohort, rising to 42% for the 1970 cohort. The handwringing about social mobility looks quite different from this angle: about six out of 10 children born to the “top” in 1970 later found themselves earning less than their fathers, while six out of 10 of those born “low” were earning more.

Sociologists such as Goldthorpe consider such income data too unreliable to study change, chiefly because family income is not comparable between the two cohorts. Moreover, sociologists find no evidence from their alternative class/occupational data for any significant falling-off in mobil-itin the 1980s or 1990s.

The other big difference between the economists’ income-distribution approach to mobility and the sociologists’ occupational approach is where it puts Britain in the international league tables of mobility. The income figures put us close to the bottom, usually just above the more unequal United States. In the occupational-mobility tables, however, we do much better, with a mid-table place usually above Italy and even Germany.

Where does that leave us? Sociologists and economists agree there has been some falling off from the high levels of mobility in the mid-20th century, although both record higher continuing levels of mobility – absolute and relative – than most nonexperts would expect.

The economists connect the 1980s slowdown in mobility to the sharp rise in inequality in that decade, which seems logical because as the income spectrum widens you have to get a bigger pay rise to move up from one quartile to another.

Yet this does not show up in the sociologists’ occupational analysis, perhaps because a lot of the increase in income inequality was happening within occupations, especially at the top end – a humble conveyancing solicitor versus a top City lawyer. Moreover, lots of other things have been going on – socially and politically – that are not necessarily picked up by these aggregate analyses. There has, for example, been a huge increase in women taking higher-status jobs and there are now many more female students than male.

These are mainly middleclass women, but there is also a lot of upward mobility among women. This must have had some effect in reducing “room at the top” for lower-income men. “Feminism has trumped egalitarian-ism,concludes David Willetts, the Tory thinker.

Similarly, the recent high levels of immigration have been mainly into lower-paid jobs, but in professions such as medicine and finance there has been a stream of migrants into top jobs, too.

Then there is the effect of the abolition of most grammar schools. Both left and right have invested too much significance in this. But grammars did help to move a few people from close to the bottom to the very top and Labour’s abolition of most such schools is one factor behind the continued private-school domination of Oxbridge and key professions.

Fewer grammar schools and more middle-class-colonised universities also seem to have contributed to that hardening of the link between educational attainment and family background – the opposite of what the advocates of university expansion wanted.

Nevertheless, the lazy consensus that has decreed the end of social mobility is wrong and damaging, implying that, despite the billions poured into pre-school support, primary and secondary education, relieving child poverty and so on, nothing will ever change.

That is not to say everything is set fair, and it may be that the longer-term trend is for high levels of social mobility to become ever harder to achieve. Social mobility has always been “sticky” downwards – once people reach a certain level of wealth, or position, their children tend not to fall back too far. When, for exam-plethe Big Bang in 1986 swept out dull but well connected City brokers, they were more likely to become estate agents than binmen.

There is today, among middle-class families, an unprecedented focus of attention on improving, or at least maintaining, their own children’s position – a kind of “arms race” in everything from schools to job internships. And as the group of immovable professional and managerial families slowly expands, it is likely there will be less overall movement, at least through relative mobility.

Britain also has a stickiness problem at the other end of the scale, with a “long tail” of social failure – often reproduced over generations. Technology and free trade have wiped out many “good” working-class jobs and the young who would once have done those jobs often don’t feel able to compete in the education race, so more or less drop out in secondary school. Some go on to join the ranks of the Neets (not in employment, education or training).

To sum up: although mobility, both absolute and relative, has dropped off from the high levels of the mid-20th century, it still remains quite high, except at the very top and in the long tail at the bottom. The trouble is, they are the places that matter most.

Although all political parties say they want more social mobility, it is not an easy issue for politicians to grapple with. Improving relative social mobility means one person goes down for every one who goes up. Gordon Brown naturally prefers to emphasise the positive-sum future of absolute mobility and yet more “room at the top”. Indeed, Milburn’s report claims, unblushingly, that Britain is set to create many more such higher-status jobs. Surely a prediction based as much on wishful thinking as on evidence.

Perhaps, in the end, mobility, like happiness, is best pursued indirectly. Goldthorpe, the doyen of mobility sociologists, agrees. “I am sceptical about placing too much emphasis on mobility,” he says. This is not because he supports a rigid social order, but rather because he worries about the esteem of those left behind. He would prefer, for example, to spend more money sorting out the Neets than trying to push the university participation rate to 50%.

“If I was in charge,” he concludes, “I would push for more genuine equality of opportunity and let the mobility chips fall where they will.”

David Goodhart is the editor of Prospect. This is adapted from an article first published in Prospect. www.prospect-magazine.co.uk

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