Social mobility – some clarification
Clearly I angered a few people with my comments about social mobility earlier this week. In particular, people objected to the implication that I dissaproved of the efforts of middle class people to pass on advantages to their children. Let me try to clarify.
Middle class families will automatically tend to pass on privilege through their possession of cultural and social capital. These are the understandings, assumptions and networks that shape the expectations of young people and provide the routes to personal advancement. While social policy may seek to enhance the capital available to poorer communities there is no case for seeking to disrupt this way of passing on social advantage; after all it is not much more than good parenting.
But there are other ways of protecting privilige which are less benign. The point I was making earlier in the week was about the tendency of middle class people to colonise so-called ‘good’ schools through their home buying or sudden religious conversion. I highlighted ESRC research which showed, using value added data, that there is little correlation between how successful a school was in the past and how good it will be in the future. The reason some schools seem to get better year on year is more a consequence of social sorting (middle class colonisation) than inherent school quality.
It would be better both for schools and for wider society if middle class parents put less energy in trying to get into ‘good’ schools and more in supporting their children and being active parents in more socially mixed schools (which, as it happens, is what I have done with my two boys). There is a marginally greater risk of a child failing in a more mixed school but people (and media comment) exaggerate this danger hugely ; as I pointed out, 90% of the performance of children can be predicted from the resources and support they get at home. But, while going to a mixed school is a small risk for the well-off there is clear evidence that greater social mixing and a wider range of ability in a school are most definitely good for children from poorer backgrounds.
I’m not in the business of lecturing anyone about their school choices, but this is, it seems to me, an instance where the desire to give our own kids the very best chance runs against what may be in the interests of society as a whole.
It is because, when faced with this dilemma, most people will put the marginal advantages of their own child over the social good that the aspiration to transform social mobility may continue to be a pious hope.
Social mobility, the brain and good news for the RSA
Filed under: Public policy, Social brain, The RSA
As I write I’m listening to the Today programme item about the social mobility white paper. The RSA will soon be hearing from someone whose work may be one of the most important contributions to this debate.
After yesterday’s discussion on this site it is interesting that the Government is leading with the idea of paying the best teachers to teach in the most deprived schools. This is a straightforward piece of public service redistribution, and no bad thing for that. As always, the success of such an initiative will depend on the way it is implemented; just because someone succeeds as a teacher in a middle class school in Richmond upon Thames doesn’t mean they would do as well in a school like Lilian Bayliss, which includes my younger son amongst its pupils. Indeed, arguably, in a school like Bayliss, which is overwhelmingly made up of working class children from minority ethnic families, it is important to inspire the pupils with successful teachers with a similar background to the pupils.
Liam Byrne has just disagreed with David Willetts that the Government is putting too much emphasis on early years in seeking to tackle entrenched inequality. Whether the Government’s interventions work is one question but the evidence that infant experience does have a major impact of future prospects does seem to be getting stronger. Yesterday we heard the fantastic news that our nominee for the Benjamin Franklin Medal (awarded to an international figure who has contributed to enlightenment thought) has accepted; she is Professor Elizabeth Gould from Princeton University.
Professor Gould is responsible for one of the recent decade’s most important breakthroughs in neuroscience. Taking on one of the most established and dogmatically adhered to nostrums of her discipline, Gould painstakingly demonstrated the existence of neurogenesis – the generation of new neurons – in mammals. And, even more significantly for social policy, she found in her work with monkeys that the scope for neurogenesis - in other words the ability of the brain to generate and repair brain cells – was significantly affected by the circumstances in which the monkey was reared. Mothers who had experienced high stress and suffered from being low in the dominance hierarchy produced offspring with a lower capacity for neurogenesis.
The good news, and why David Willetts may be right to question too great an emphasis on the early years, is that these effects can be corrected in later life. If monkeys brought up in deprived circumstances were then transferred to stimulating environments, their capacity for neurogenesis recovered, over time, to the average.
It is fantastic that Professor Gould will soon be sharing her latest research findings and their social implications with an RSA audience; we’ll be sure to invite Liam Byrne and David Willets.
Is social mobility a good thing?
Social mobility will be in the news again this week, with the Lib Dems’ commission reporting today and Liam Byrne unveiling the Government white paper tomorrow . But is social mobility necessarily a good thing? This is what I wrote a few weeks ago in the context of the general rise of social pessimism.
‘Is it in the nature of some of the things that seem to be getting better – for example, growing affluence or tolerance – that they contribute to making (some of us) feeling worse? Should we give greater weight in social policy to the subjective than the objective? Interestingly this has been the general shift in how the Government measures public service performance, moving from outcome based indicators to user satisfaction.
‘One example is social mobility. Everyone says they are in favour of having more of it. This is fine when we are talking about absolute social mobility – increasing the numbers getting into the middle class, as happened in the fifties and sixties. But the only way to increase relative social mobility (or to increase absolute social mobility when the middle class has stopped expanding) is to make it easier for people to come down as well as go up.
‘But it is far from clear that a society in which it is easier for middle class people to be downwardly socially mobile would be a more content society. Behavioural economics teaches us that the pleasure of upward social mobility (getting something we didn’t have before) is less than the pain of downward social mobility (losing something we have now). So the net social contentment impact of increasing relative social mobility (disregarding other knock-on effects) is negative. In other words the one thing all leading politician say they want more of is something that will make us less happy as a society!’
Given this it is perhaps not surprising that Liam Byrne called the idea that social mobility must be about people going down as up ‘a classic liberal error’. Gordon Brown intends to emphasise the scope for the managerial and professional classes to grow thus boosting absolutely social mobility. But even if we focus on absolute mobility there is still a distributional aspect.
If our objective is to increase the number of people in higher occupational groups, presumably we want to do this by elevating those (and the offspring of those) currently in the lowest levels; this is certainly the implication of the Government’s messaging. If this is the case the objective is to redistribute opportunity among the middle and lower strata so that the poor have as good a chance as rising up as those just below the higher levels.
But if this is the case – and there are perfectly good grounds of equity and releasing talent for thinking so - then the effect on aggregate social contentment will again be negative. Those just outside the top strata are much more focussed on, and expectant of, shifting up a notch, and will thus be more disappointed when they don’t, than would be those at the bottom who will tend to compare themselves with the people just above them.
I support attempts to improve social mobility, and was pleased to see the most recent data confirming that things have improved over the last few years. But the latest international data indicates that the single best policy is simply to reduce inequality. By lowering the distance people have to travel to move up or down, and making downward mobility less disastrous for personal finances and status, relatively equal societies lower the economic and social barriers to mobility.
But while ‘increasing social mobility’ is a buzz phrase ‘redistributing wealth’ is not. So we can expect all our politicians to conspire it the story that mobility can rise in an unequal society without anyone having to suffer.
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