Children of the 1990s - extending understanding of social mobility in England and Wales

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Is modern Britain an open and fair society? Have the life-chances of children born in the late 1990s improved or deteriorated compared to their predecessors? How do characteristics of local areas such as industrial composition, school quality, and social capital relate to the life-chances of residents? It is questions such as these that we are concerned with in this research project. We will use data from the recently completed 2021 census, linked to previous censuses back to 1971, in order to further our understanding of 'social mobility' - the study of how people's jobs and standards of living are shaped by the social and economic context of their upbringing. These are timely questions. Living standards in the United Kingdom have been declining, with stagnating productivity, declining real wages, and big increases in the cost of living. The question of how more recent generations are faring compared to their parents is therefore a very pertinent one. However, despite the frequency with which the topic is referred to by politicians and commentators, very little is actually known about the social mobility experiences of recent cohorts. This is primarily because the high-quality data that is required for the analysis of intergenerational social mobility has simply not been available until now. Filling this gap in the national evidence-base will be the key contribution of this research. Our findings will provide important new evidence on intergenerational social mobility in England and Wales using a unique and newly available data source - the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS) which links individuals across censuses between 1971 and 2021.The ONS-LS has several key benefits for studying social mobility, in particular its very large sample size, with over half a million people included at each successive decade. Its size and longevity will enable us to follow the lives of study members across successive generations 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 ONS-LS to calculate social mobility rates, for the first time, for children born in the 1990s and compare them to earlier cohorts, ranging from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. In addition to tracking individuals over time at the national level, we will also examine how social mobility chances have varied across regions and local authorities and how geographic differences in mobility chances are related to the characteristics of the areas people live in. We will work hard to ensure that our findings are used to inform local and national policies to improve life-chances and reduce inequalities.