Mobility The long shadow of childhood poverty Beating the odds to attend university isn't enough to remove the poverty penalty 24 March 2026 by Greg Thwaites Here’s some uncomfortable reading for you. If you grew up in deep poverty and managed to get yourself a university degree – already a long-odds achievement – you will still earn thousands of pounds a year less than your more privileged peers a decade into your career. Even if you studied the same subject, at … Continued READ MORE
Incomes· Inequality & poverty· Mobility To understand inequality, we need to understand its intersections too 6 March 2019 by Fahmida Rahman and Matthew Whittaker Inequality has been moving up the political agenda in recent years. Public concern about the issue is at record levels. Politicians across the spectrum – from Theresa May’s emphasis on the ‘burning injustice’ faced by many in modern Britain, to Jeremy Corbyn’s lamentation of the ‘grotesque inequality’ that characterises the UK and other rich countries … Continued READ MORE
Wealth & assets· Mobility· Generations Widening inequalities between generations are impeding social mobility 8 May 2018 by Fahmida Rahman Intergenerational progress – the principle that each generation will do better than the one before – has come to a halt. Millennials in their late 20s are earning less than generation X did 15 years earlier, own half as many homes as the baby boomers, and shoulder greater levels of risk than previous generations. It’s … Continued READ MORE
Mobility· Generations Today’s problems of intergenerational inequality risk becoming tomorrow’s big social mobility divide 12 March 2018 by Fahmida Rahman Launching a review of higher education recently, the Prime Minister spoke of her wish to make the UK a country ‘where your background does not define your future’. Naturally, education is almost always pitched as the key to upward social mobility – but to what extent does it really level the playing field? It is … Continued READ MORE
Incomes· Social security· Mobility A wider range of subjects? 13 April 2017 by David Finch Today Justine Greening is giving a speech about education and specifically the attainment of children from low and middle income families. The reaction to the speech will focus on the rights (not many) and wrongs (many) of grammar schools, but that should not wholly drown out some very welcome data work released by the Department … Continued READ MORE
Incomes· Work· Mobility Our education system is tilted against social mobility 12 September 2016 by David Willetts We like to think that a modern society is open and mobile – and our failures on social mobility really matter to Theresa May. It is one of the reasons for successive waves of education reform, the latest of which is being debated in parliament today, sparking a fiery debate about grammar schools not seen for … Continued READ MORE
Incomes· Public finances· Mobility Prime Minister’s ambition to help the 2.1 million “just managing” families means tearing down the “here and now” barriers to social mobility 9 September 2016 by Torsten Bell It’s understandable and right that all politicians want to focus on social mobility. Having “a fair chance to go as far as their talent and their hard work will allow”, as the Prime Minister said today, is what everyone wants for themselves and their children. And as a society the last thing we can afford … Continued READ MORE
Incomes· Mobility Stuck or just passing through: how can policy-makers improve social mobility? 11 November 2014 by Gavin Kelly One of the recurring fixtures of British political life is a bout of soul-searching about social mobility. Depending on the point of view of the pundit, this tends to involve a nostalgic backward glance to an era when things were supposedly better (cue unevidenced claims about the mobility-boosting virtues of grammar schools) or, less commonly, … Continued READ MORE
Incomes· Mobility Mobility and the squeezed middle 22 April 2014 by Craig Holmes A common criticism of the recent concern over rising inequality is that it looks at the distribution of earnings and wealth at one point in time. Individuals are mobile and tend, on balance, to find better paying jobs over the course of their lifetime, which might mean that looking at their wages at any one … Continued READ MORE
