More than half a century of sweeping educational reforms have done little to improve Britain’s social mobility, according to one of the country’s leading experts on equality.
Instead, young people from less well-off families entering today’s labour market have far less favourable prospects than their parents or even their grandparents, despite having gained much better qualifications.
Giving the British Academy sociology lecture on 15 March, Dr John Goldthorpe, a sociologist at the University of Oxford, whose work on class has proven widely influential, will claim that little has changed in British society since the second world war, largely because more advantaged families are using their economic, cultural and social advantages to ensure that their children remain at the top of the social class ladder.
The new findings offer a sobering corrective to the prevailing view, favoured by successive governments, that improving access to education has been a powerful weapon in promoting social mobility in Britain