As the recent report by the New Economics Foundation (referred to below) entitled A Bit Rich: Calculating the real value to society of different professions touched on, one of the biggest determinants of the extent to which pay differentials can be justified in market economies is the degree of social mobility within that society.  The case of low paid hospital cleaners may, for example, seem less unfair “if her descendants are able to climb the ladder of remuneration, smoothing out the distribution of rewards across the generations”.

But, the report asks, “what about the sons of our City bankers becoming hospital cleaners? How many of those stories have we heard?” Surely, if social mobility really were a reality in the UK, wouldn’t ‘riches-to-rags’ stories be just as common as tales of ‘rags-to-riches’?

As the report correctly asserts, “there are only a very limited number of positions available as City bankers. For the ablest children of our recycling plant workers to climb the ladder, an equivalent number of City bankers’ children would have to move down”. We know both anecdotally and statistically, that this situation – or anything nearing it – simply does not exist in the UK in 2010.

This raises a fundamental question that none of UK’s major political parties currently wish to grapple with: What do we do about the calcification of social mobility? While I expect no more from the Conservative Party than to assist the ruling class in its attempt to retain and consolidate its position within the class structure, unjustifiably low levels of social mobility in the UK should be a major cause for concern for the Labour Party. However, with the advent of ‘New Labour’ and its pathological fear of ‘class’ as the major determinant of a person’s life chances, the party has taken a positively regressive step in its approach to social mobility. The consequence is, sadly, a failure to address this problem in any meaningful way.

While no reasonable person could deny that the Labour Party – of which I am a committed member – has invested unprecedented amounts of money in the education system since 1997, its failure to address the deeply inequitable infrastructure of the UK’s education system means the positive effects of this investment will only ever be marginal and, worse still, easily undone out by a future ‘slash-and-burn’ Tory government. 

As a party, we have for too long suffered from the delusion that if we increase the ‘spend-per-head’ on state school pupils to the level of those who are educated in private education sector (euphemistically referred to as the ‘independent education sector’) then we will somehow equalise the distortions in social mobility created by the private education industry.

Deluding oneself, and others, that state schools can be ‘dragged up’ to the standard of Wellington, Harrow, Stowe et al is to fundamentally fail to understand the way in which a private education confers advantage upon its recipient. To be educated at Eton is not merely about class sizes or access to learning materials, it’s about ensuring that a child is not only equipped to ‘succeed’ academically – although the intensive one-to-one tutoring and small class sizes are certainly an advantage – but also to provide a child with the kind of interpersonal skills, extracurricular achievements and life experience that makes places at top universities an inevitability.

In short, when you send your children to be privately educated or, for that matter, squirrel them in to a selective school through intense exam preparation or fastidious attendance at church, you are not merely obtaining a better education for them but, more importantly, purposely providing them with access to the kind of opportunities that their peers educated at state comprehensives can only dream about – and no amount of government spending on education is going to change that.

The advantages of a private education can not only be seen in school performance and university admissions but also through the career trajectories of those educated in this way.  This assertion is clearly demonstrated by a 2007 Sutton Trust report in to the educational backgrounds of 500 leading figures in variety of different professions, in which was found, for example, that despite the fact that only 6% of UK the school-age population is privately educated, an average of 53% of the leading positions in law, business, journalism, politics and variety of other fields were occupied by those who were privately educated; with a further 29% occupied by those who went to highly selective schools.

The fact that just 2% of judges in the U.K went to a state comprehensive makes the advantage provided by selective and, in particular, private schooling blindingly obvious.

The purpose of private education is to confer advantage, if it did not offer high socio-economic returns, why would anybody make this investment on behalf of their children? Given these returns, the wealthy can, and do, pay ever-greater sums to ensure that this advantage maintained. As such, the state sector and, in particular, non-selective comprehensives, will always be chasing the unassailable advantages afforded to the children of the wealthy by selective and private schools to their pupils.

As we have seen from research conducted by the Sutton Trust, one of the ways that the wealthy can maintain their children’s position within the class structure is through the private education system. While criticism of parents engaging in such practices may, to an extent, be valid, it does not help us get to the heart of the problem since parents themselves are merely operating within a framework maintained and, in certain cases, promoted by the state. Since it is governments that have been the active agents of inequality by creating – or allow to persist – the educational circumstances that lead to unfair distribution of life chances, it is they who bear the sole burden of responsibility in this matter, and therefore it is they who must provide solutions it.

While governments within liberal democracies - which, by their nature, are founded upon egalitarian principles - have a moral obligation to ensure equality of opportunity, there are also powerful economic arguments for using the education system to oil the wheels of social mobility.

By levelling the educational playing field, governments can create ‘real meritocracy’, which will inevitably lead to more competitive labour market in which in which business leaders, high court judges, politicians and those at the top of their professions really have obtained their position – and the significant benefits that come with it – because of talent and hard work, and not because of the significant advantages afforded to them by their parents.

As we have seen, the educational inequalities created by mixed provision of private, selective and state schools actively frustrate the process of social mobility by affording those with ability to pay the opportunity to benefit from an elite education, going on to occupy all the best universities and, later, the most senior jobs both in the private and the public sector.

One of the main ways to improve equality of opportunity, then, is to prevent people – in so far as is reasonably possible – from using their socio-economic status to place their children at an unjustifiable advantage over the children of other less well-educated, less wealthy parents.

Since only the state can objectively provide equality of opportunity through the education system, it must be the state that organises a system that provides all children with an equal opportunity to reach their full potential.

While politically difficult in the UK, one of the single most effective measures that could be employed to bring about improvements to social mobility is to legislate for private schools to be brought under the umbrella of state education. This would not only create the circumstances in which peers could compete on a much more equal basis, but would also break down socio-economic barriers – thereby improving communitarian values – over the long-term by allowing children with parents from different parts of the income gradient to mix socially.

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