Inter-cohort Trends in Intergenerational Mobility in England and Wales: income, status, and class (InTIME)

Is Britain an open and fair society? Are the jobs people obtain and the incomes they earn down to hard work and ability, or to the wealth and status of their parents? Is it harder now than it was in the past for people from humble origins to rise to top of the occupational status ladder? Or are we becoming a more 'meritocratic' society as traditional class barriers break down and deference to authority seems increasingly to be a thing of the past? It is questions such as these that we are concerned with in this research project on trends in 'inter-generational social mobility' - the study of the extent to which our life chances are determined by the social and economic context of our origins and whether this is changing over time. In recent years, politicians in the United Kingdom have become very interested in social mobility, with parties of both left and right arguing that new strategies and policies are needed to make Britain a more socially open place to grow up in. The Blair and Brown governments initiated a number of high profile enquiries and reports on social mobility, while the current coalition government has specified increasing social mobility as its number one social policy objective for the parliament.

Yet, despite the political consensus on the desirability of making British society more open and meritocratic in the future, there is much that we still do not know about how social mobility has changed - if it has changed at all - over the course of the 20th and 21st Centuries. In the past ten years alone, academic researchers have concluded that social mobility in Britain has gone up, down, and stayed pretty much the same - a set of conclusions which clearly cannot all be correct. The inconsistent and contradictory nature of the existing evidence base is not helpful for policy-makers, because it is difficult to develop and implement policies which will change things for the better, if we do not even know what happened in the recent past. Thus, while our research is necessarily historical in perspective, it is very much intended to inform the debate about the development of policy in this crucial area in the future.

Our goal in this research project is, therefore, to bring clarity to the debate about recent trends in social mobility in the UK. We will do this by analysing a unique data source - the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Survey (LS) - which contains linked census records for over two million people in Britain between 1971 and 2011. The LS has a number of significant advantages over the sorts of data that researchers have used in the past, and will enable us to track people from childhood to adulthood, comparing the occupations they end up in at different points in their lives, to those of their parents decades earlier. We will use the LS to calculate and compare 'mobility rates' for cohorts of people born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s. The very large sample size of the LS means that we will be able to draw very fine-grained and robust conclusions about trends in social mobility, not just for the population as a whole but for sub-groups defined by year of birth and type of social origin. Importantly, we will calculate mobility rates along three different metrics: occupational status, social class and income, in order to ensure that our findings address the key dimensions of people's social and economic position rather than focusing on only one, as has generally been the case in existing studies. A distinctive feature of our project is that it connects with policy-makers and stakeholders from the outset, in order to ensure that our findings have an influence in the world of policy-making and not just in academic debate.

WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM THIS RESEARCH?

We anticipate that two main groups will benefit from this programme of research:

GROUP 1: Academic social scientists with substantive and methodololgical interests in intergenerational social mobility. This primarily comprises sociologists and economists but also includes demographers, social policy analysts, social statisticians and anthropologists. We expect that the approach we adopt in this research, which integrates econometric with more traditional sociological approaches to the estimation of mobility rates and trends, will serve to bring researchers from these disciplines into closer contact and to promote inter and cross-disciplinary reserach. The research will also highlight to academic researchers the utility of the ONS Longitudinal Study as a unique and under-utilised resource for longitudinal secondary analysis, including the addition of the 2011 data.

GROUP 2: Researchers and policy-makers in central and local government and third sector organisations with an interest in understanding and promoting social mobility in the United Kingdom. Because social mobility is a key focus of recent and current government policy, the findings of our research will be of interest to many government departments and ministries. In particular, our findings will benefit the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Office for National Statistics, who are both gathering evidence on social mobility to underpin the development of policy in this area. Our research will also be of benefit to third sector organisations such as the Sutton Trust. We have developed this proposal in light of discussions with both departments and with the Sutton Trust and all three have agreed to participate in the policy impact seminar, which is the key dissmination event for the project. We anticipate participation from additional government departments as well as researchers in local government and third sector organisations. Letters of support from the ODPM and the Sutton Trust are included as attachments to this proposal.

HOW WILL THEY BENEFIT?

GROUP 1: Our research addresses the acknowledged limitations of much of the existing literature on recent trends in inter-generational social mobility in the United Kingdom. In doing so, we hope to shed light on some key questions in this important field of study, which will be of benefit to all academic disciplines with an interest in social mobility. For example we will assess whether mobility rates and trends differ across measures of income, class and status. At present, the limitations of existing data sets mean that it has not been possible to adequately differentiate methodological from substantive variation. We will also, for the first time, be able to evaluate inter-cohort trends in mobility, with successive cohorts defined by year of birth. In turn, this will enable us to better understand the relative weights of period and cohort change underpinning mobility trends.

GROUP 2: policy-makers and third sector organisations will benefit from this research because our goal is to resolve fundamental questions about the actual direction of social mobility in England over recent decades. The inconsistent and contradictory state of the existing evidence base makes it difficult for policy makers to understand the sorts of strategies that might or might not be effective in promoting social fluidity. Our research will, therefore, provide a firm base upon which to formulate future social policy in this area. Although our research is, by definition, backward-looking, we believe it is likely to provide insights into the effectiveness of potential policy interventions due to our ability to pinpoint changes in mobility rates at the level of annual cohorts; the points at which mobility rates increase or decrease between cohorts (if they do) will indicate likely locations of policy and other macro-level changes that exerted a causal influence on mobility.