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

英国是一个开放和公平的社会吗？人们通过天赋和努力工作获得事业上的成功和社会地位吗？还是说，我们的人生归宿主要取决于我们出生的环境？在这个研究项目中，我们所关心的就是这些问题。最近对“社会流动性”的研究揭示了一些令人不安的事实，即英国的精英统治是多么的真实，以及它与世界上其他现代民主国家相比如何。简而言之，有证据表明，英国的社会流动性并没有提高，与国际上的其他国家相比，英国的社会流动性相当差。然而，现有的关于社会流动的研究主要集中在国家层面上关于社会流动趋势的问题。我们对英国不同地区、城市和城镇的社会流动性是如何变化的知之甚少，也不知道社会流动性的变化是如何受到学校制度变化的影响的。在这项研究中，我们解决了我们对英国社会流动的理解中的一些差距。我们会问，这个国家的某些地区是否比其他地区更精英化；伦敦是向上流动的唯一阶梯吗？还是那些背景较差的人也能在布里斯托尔、曼彻斯特、伯明翰和纽卡斯尔等城市获得成功？随着时间的推移，社会流动性的地区差异是稳定的，还是一些地区见证了流动性的上升或下降？最近的研究表明，在美国，“热”和“冷”的社会流动点很明显。我们将考虑，在英国，社会流动性的地方差异是否也很明显。除了评估英国社会流动性的地区差异程度外，我们还将考虑20世纪70年代从以选择性为主的教育系统到综合教育系统的变化如何影响社会流动性。文法学校的支持者和反对者都认为，选择性教育促进（或阻碍）了社会流动性。然而，这种说法所依据的证据并不充分。在这项研究中，我们将为一个长期的辩论提供新的证据，这个辩论最近因政府承诺在下一届议会中扩大文法学校的数量而重新活跃起来。我们将通过分析一个独特的数据来源来解决这些问题——国家统计纵向调查办公室（ONS-LS）——其中包含1971年至2011年间英国200多万人的相关人口普查记录。LS在研究社会流动性方面有许多有用的特性，这意味着我们将能够追踪英国人口从童年到成年的代表性样本。我们将把人们在职业生涯的不同阶段的职业与几十年前他们的父母在LS成员还是孩子时的职业进行比较。我们将计算并比较上世纪50年代中期至90年代中期出生的人群的“流动性”。LS的非常大的样本量意味着我们将能够估计绝对和相对代际流动率在地区，县和地方当局区水平。此外，利用LS的地理信息，可以区分选择性学校集中程度高和低的地区，以及随时间的变化情况，从而可以根据LS成员所接触的学校制度比较社会流动性。申请人在他们之前关于社会流动性的研究中广泛使用了ONS-LS，因此非常适合进行这些分析。

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.