Our education list focuses on education policy and politics and the inequalities that are both built into education systems and perpetuated by them. It speaks to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.
Our titles, including Stephen Ball’s The Education Debate, now in its fourth edition, address the challenges in education, including those around technology and the digital divide. The list offers students and researchers internationally sourced evidence-based solutions that challenge traditional neoliberal approaches to learning.
Education
This chapter looks at how the idea of success in the education system in England is arrived at, and what may need to be done to try and adapt this idea so that social mobility can be defined differently. It examines the interaction between the three essential parts of the system: what is taught explicitly in the curriculum, what is taught implicitly through schooling and what happens in the home. The chapter concentrates on how these three elements manifest themselves in the 2010s in the context of social mobility debates. Where the curriculum is concerned this is via the debate around the classical curriculum vs 21st century skills. In the nature of schooling the rise of character as a defining feature of educational success is examined. Finally, there is the increasing importance placed on the early years and the role of parenting in shaping what happens over the life-course. The chapter argues that it is crucial to make every effort to increase educational attainment in particular for young people from lower socio-economic groups. However, the unquestioning pursuit of higher attainment may not be the best way of preparing young people to progress in their lives in the 21st century.
This chapter outlines why a new approach to understanding social mobility is required. It begins by discussing why social mobility has become such a central feature of political debate in the UK in the 2010s. It argues that social mobility is essentially about success: what it means, who achieves it and how it can be spread. However, ‘success’ in the early 21st century is a paradoxical thing. More money and more wealth does not guarantee a better life for the individual. Being richer is not the same thing as improving your happiness and well-being. It can also have a detrimental effect on the welfare of others. The chapter goes on to describe briefly the rest of the book which examines the political and academic discourses surrounding social mobility, followed by the education and labour market before going onto describe what a new politics for social mobility would look like.
This chapter outlines the three reasons why the present approach to social mobility is unsustainable. Firstly, It is contributing to dramatic rises in inequality. By focusing so much on economic measures of success this make it harder to construct cross-society coalitions in favour of redistribution policy. Secondly, it depends on jobs that are not there. The drive to raise educational attainment is necessary but not sufficient to lead to significant upward economic social mobility. The chapter argues that evidence suggests that there will not be an expansion of higher income jobs required to facilitate such mobility in the near future. Thirdly, the chapter argues that upward economic mobility doesn’t lead to a better life anyway drawing on the work into the Easterlin paradox to argue that happiness does not increase commensurate to income beyond a certain point. The chapter concludes by describing a holistic approach to social mobility that give greater weight to non-economic factors in understanding success and progress in life.
This chapter considers what a new politics of social mobility could look like. The notion that there is something wrong in the early 21st century due to a combination of marketisation, materialism and technology is a familiar refrain in the early 2010s. The notion creates the space for this new politics. It is particularly pertinent to younger generations who increasingly feel they are sharing a disproportionate burden of the economic challenges many European countries are facing and are increasingly disillusioned by the mainstream political offering. This new politics is one of the centre and not the margins. It needs to ask: How should school prepare young people for work and life? What is the point of Higher Education? How do I be a ‘good parent? How can work be more fulfilling (and remunerative)? What does a good work: life’ balance mean? How can inequality be reduced? Why should elites be more diverse? How important is being healthy? What should the state provide and who for? And how can my future and that of my family and/or children be more secure, successful and happy?
This final chapter outlines how to holistic approach the social mobility could be advanced and the paradox of success in the early 21st century UK addressed. What is argued here is that success needs to be re-framed. It argues for the centrality of well-being as a basis for the holistic social mobility approach. To develop this approach a number of areas need to be addressed including how stratification is understood, the mission of education, connecting social mobility with social change and in particular addressing the relationship between higher socio-economic groups and social mobility. The chapter ends by summarising the case for holistic social mobility the book has attempted to make. The aim has not been to ignore the importance of economic factors in shaping success and progress at the individual level, but they are increasingly inadequate as a sole mechanism of understanding success and progress. Examining social mobility in this holistic way provides a route to both addressing and understanding some of the fundamental challenges facing advanced economies like the UK in the early 21st century.
This chapter looks at the relationship between the economic changes affecting contemporary labour markets and the idea of holistic social mobility being developed through this book. It explores the rise of the hourglass economy. It argues though that the hourglass concept however, may however be actually a rather simplistic view of the economy useful to capture some broad changes but less useful at really describing the complexity of the changes that are underway. The chapter considers how looking at the labour market more forensically and in the context of what progression means both within and between jobs in the broader sense the labour market may resemble a pyramid or a molecule. In this more three dimensional conception of the labour market it is less easy to say what sort of mobility i.e. downward, upward or sideways, movement between jobs represents and how different jobs relate to each other.
This chapter analyses in detail how social mobility has been defined and then researched by sociologists and economists since the mid part of the 20th century. It shows how the strong association between social mobility and economic progress was only one route that could have been taken in understanding social mobility and it was one shaped to a great extent by the work of sociologists operating in a broad Marxist tradition. The chapter goes onto explore the disagreements between sociologists and economists in recent years regarding the extent of social mobility in the UK. It concludes by arguing that there is a lack of consensus where the extent of social mobility is concerned in the UK and depending on who you believe it may be going up, remaining static or going down.
This chapter explores the relationship between social mobility and the economic and social system. It argues the existing social mobility discourse stops short of connecting with a debate around the broader social and economic model. Equally, debates around the nature of the system rarely touch explicitly on social mobility. At the same time, more long standing concerns about what ‘success’ means in early 21st century capitalist economies, and whether the pursuit of purely economic goals is actually the best way of maximising societal welfare have led to a growing literature on economic and social well-being. However, neither the literature on alternative ways of running capitalist economies or the social mobility discourse engage with this work in a substantive way. Finally, there has been a growing literature in the last 20 years that goes beyond well-being to look at happiness and argue that we now have sufficient evidence and methodological capability to build on the philosophical claims regarding the primacy of happiness. The chapter connects the above debates together. It concludes by arguing for the importance of the growing work on understanding well-being for developing the theory of holistic social mobility.
Social mobility needs a re-boot. The narrow, economistic way of measuring it favoured by politicians and academics is unsustainable and is contributing to rising inequality.
This timely book provides an alternative, original vision of social mobility and a route-map to achieving it. It examines how the term ‘social mobility’ structures what success means and the impact that has on society. Providing a new holistic approach that encompasses education, the economy and politics, Atherton recasts the relationship with employers, embracing radical opportunities provided by technology and rethinking what higher education means. He also goes beyond employment to incorporate progress in non-work areas of life.
Based on the need to improve well-being, not just income or occupation, the book addresses one of the key issues facing 21st century society in a new way and provides valuable insights for policymakers and academics.
This chapter will look at the relationship between higher education (HE) and social mobility. It will explore whether HE as it is presently constructed can provide all students with the skills they need to progress in work or life. It asks whether HE should move from becoming something that 40%-50% of the population participate in to something that 90% of the population should participate in? The chapter examines the arguments surrounding the benefits of higher education both economic and non-economic. It argues that the latter are in need of empirical and theoretical development. It then goes onto argue that the model of what HE can and should be in the 21st century is in need of transformation to capture the unique contribution that HE can make to the individual and collective good. In conclusion it argues for the diversification of HE both in terms of who participates in HE and the benefits that HE can provide, if HE is to be the driver of holistic social mobility.
