The Government wants to unlock talent and fulfil potential with its plan to improve social mobility through education. It intends to do this by: targeting communities that are left behind, closing the ‘word-gap’ in early years, closing the attainment gap in schools between disadvantaged and more affluent children, providing high quality post 16 skills education and access to the best universities, working with businesses to support adult retraining and ‘upskilling’, building partnerships and identifying and spreading ‘what works’ throughout the system.
Most of this seems to make sense except for one glaring problem – it is extraordinarily difficult, maybe impossible, to improve social mobility through education.
Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California points out:
How do we know we cannot change the rate of social mobility? One piece of evidence is what happened to social mobility rates as England moved from the pre-industrial world of…
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The Echo Chamber 