Saturday 23, April 2022
The Conservative Party’s signature policy is “Levelling Up”. It is baffling, to me. It seems to have been originated by Justine Greening, who seemed to think it was equivalent to increasing social mobility. As someone who has achieved a measure of social mobility I wondered about how common it is. I remember reading Heath, A F (1981). Social Mobility. London: Fontana. without gaining any great insight into the answer. Although I think I read it around the time it was published, I can at least remember that a very large part of the book was taken up discussing the challenges of definition, and the difficulties of measurement that this lack of a clear definition leads to.
In the last century, there have been huge changes to the social structure of Britain. One factor, which is not widely appreciated, was the rise of the salariat, the cadre of white-collar workers who needed to be recruited after the second world war.
How is this stability in relative rates of social mobility (fluidity) to be explained, and why have decades of educational expansion and reform had so little effect? One part of the answer is that parents and their children themselves understand education in relative terms. Parents in more advantaged class positions will then respond to any expansion or reform of the educational system by using their own superior resources - economic, cultural and social - to whatever extent it takes to help their children retain a competitive edge, and thus be protected against the risk of downward mobility.
If the aim is to increase mobility by creating a greater equality in class chances, the implication is that what can be achieved through educational policy alone is limited - far more so than politicians find it convenient to suppose. The basic source of inequality of educational opportunity lies in the inequality of condition - the inequality in resources of various kinds - that exists among families with different locations within the class structure. This is what reformers should be tackling.
To improve the
Tech Apocalypse
None of these will see their previous ATH before a very long time…not sure if folks realize this pic.twitter.com/setaZsb5yd
— Carlo Kitty Casio (@INArteCarloDoss) April 23, 2022
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