An Investigation of Social Mobility Using the ONS Longitudinal Study: sub-national variation and effects of selective education

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Is Britain an open and fair society? Do people achieve career success and social status through talent and hard work? Or, is where we end up in life primarily determined by the circumstances into which we are born? It is questions such as these that we will be concerned with in this research project. Recent research into 'social mobility' has uncovered some uncomfortable truths about how meritocratic Britain really is and how it compares to other modern democracies around the world. In short, the evidence suggests that Britain is not becoming more socially mobile and compares rather unfavourably with its international peers.Yet, existing research on social mobility has focused primarily on national level questions about trends in social mobility over time. We know much less about how rates of social mobility vary across different regions, cities, and towns in Britain, or how variation in social mobility has been affected by changes in the school system. In this research, we address some of these gaps in our understanding of social mobility in Britain. We ask whether some parts of the country are more meritocratic than others; is London the only stepladder to upward mobility, or can those from less advantaged backgrounds also find success in cities like Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, and Newcastle? Have regional differences in social mobility been stable over time, or have some regions witnessed increasing or declining rates of mobility? Recent research has revealed that 'hot' and 'cold' social mobility spots are evident in the United States. We will consider whether more local variation in social mobility is also evident in Britain. In addition to assessing the extent of regional variation in social mobility in Britain, we will also consider how the change from a predominantly selective to a comprehensive system of education in the 1970s affected social mobility. It is often contended by advocates and opponents of grammar schools alike that selective education promotes (or hinders) social mobility. Yet the evidence base on which such claims rest is thin. In this research we will produce new evidence on a longstanding debate that has been reinvigorated of late by the Government's pledge to expand the number of grammar schools in the next parliament.We will address these questions by analysing a unique data source - the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Survey (ONS-LS) - which contains linked census records for over two million people in Britain between 1971 and 2011. The LS has a number of useful properties for studying social mobility, which mean we will be able to track representative samples of the British population from childhood to adulthood. We will compare people's occupations at different points in their working lives to those of their parents when LS members were children, decades earlier. We will 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 estimate rates of absolute and relative inter-generational mobility at regional, county, and Local Authority District levels. In addition, by making use of the geographic information in the LS we will be able to differentiate between areas with high and low concentrations of selective schooling and how this has changed over time, so we can compare social mobility rates according to the school system that LS members were exposed to.The applicants have made extensive use of the ONS-LS in their previous research on social mobility and are thus ideally placed to undertake these analyses.