LINDSEY MACMILLAN OPINION Upwardly mobile?


Policies need to be aimed at raising school attainment of children from poorer backgrounds to increase social mobility, says Lindsey MacMillan


T


he coalition recently unveiled its blueprint for improving equality of opportunity in the UK. The Social Mobility Strategy Review was a little light on explicit policy


interventions and it is probably too soon to say whether the enthusiasm for improving social mobility will translate into better life chances for children. However one thing that is clear is how far there is to go to achieving a more equal society. Measuring mobility takes a long time, as we


need to study individuals from childhood through to their adult life. Hence the latest evidence relates to people now age 41 who were born in 1970. This data found that individuals born to poorer families were more likely to end up the lowest paid as adults than if they had been born to the same circumstances 12 years previously. Social mobility decreased across time in the UK (Blanden, Gregg, Goodman, Machin, 2004). Following on from this, research found that educational attainment was the main driver of immobility across generations. For the 1970 cohort of sons, family income was more closely related to their educational attainment than in the earlier cohort and this was a key factor in their lower mobility levels (Blanden, Gregg and Macmillan, 2007). Focusing in on access to the top professions, those who go on to become lawyers and doctors come from substantially richer families than the average individual and this pattern became stronger across time. In contrast, while those who became doctors and lawyers were of higher ability than the average, this trend has weakened across time. This would suggest that there is a widening social gap in entry to the top professions, not driven by ability. While individuals entering top professions in the last decade looked less like the average individual in terms of their family income in childhood, they looked more like the average individual in terms of their ability than the previous cohort (Macmillan, 2009). All of the evidence mentioned above focuses on individuals now in their 40s and 50s. For people born more recently we cannot yet observe their adult earnings but we can instead look at educational opportunity which is such a strong driver on mobility. A couple of new pieces of work have analysed the link between family background and educational attainment to get a picture of what we might expect for the future. The evidence is mixed. On the one hand, there is some evidence for


children born around 1990 that the association between family incomes, Key Stage 2 attainment


and GCSE attainment is weakening, reducing the socio-economic gradient. This could be a promising sign. There is also the suggestion that post-16 participation in education has become less associated with where you come from (Gregg and Macmillan, 2009). On the other hand, there is less evidence of this trend continuing into higher education and no change in the relationship between background and early attainment (age 3 to 5) for children born around 2000 (Blanden and Machin, 2009). So what can be done? Identifying effective


policies in this setting is often problematic. However, some research in the US from the Perry pre-school programme indicates that improving behavioural patterns in early childhood had positive effects in terms of greater employability,


“ There is a widening social gap


in entry to the top professions, not driven by ability


less contact with the police and higher completed education levels (Heckman et al Various). There is also evidence that lower family income in childhood causes lower educational attainment and lower education reduces life chances (Dahl and Lochner (2008), Oreopoulus et al (2006)). With this view that education is still a key policy


”


lever in changing patterns of mobility, policies need to be aimed at raising school attainment of children from poorer backgrounds. Increasing the numbers that stay on into post-compulsory education and specifically into university will be important in reversing the decline in mobility. The government has set up a sizeable research fund to work out what causes increased educational attainment of the poorest children as well as the new pupil premium to fund interventions in schools. Unfortunately the most recent policy announcements on the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance and trebling of tuition fees are unlikely to encourage such changes in behaviour. n


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Lindsey MacMillan is a Post-Graduate Research Assistant at the ESRC Centre for Market and Public Organisation. Her work focuses on the economics of the family, including intergenerational mobility, the role of education in mobility, inequality in educational attainment and intergenerational worklessness. Email lindsey.macmillan@bristol.ac.uk Telephone 0117 331 0799 Web www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo


SUMMER 2011 SOCIETY NOW 17


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