To ask what the social classes are?

[nicea]

Never understood it.

Have only heard of working class, middle class etc and wouldn't know how to identify someone as one.

What are the classes and the stereotypes/generalisations linked to them?

There's so much overlap and inconsistency these days that traditional working or middle classes are fairly meaningless, especially in what many people cite as class markers such as education, employment and cultural interests.

Me, DP and many people I work with are from Northern working class mining or factory worker type families, yet I have post graduate qualifications and work with people who are worldwide experts in our field.

DP was always encouraged to pursue his musical interests and played an instrument at a high level. In my experience it is absolutely not the case that interest in education and cultural activities is a middle class marker.

My understanding is that nowadays class is determined by a very comprehensive list of occupations and the classes or subclasses they belong to. As far as I know, this classification only takes into account the occupations of the adults in a household, not what their ancestors did. By that definition you yourself could change class more than once in a lifetime. I'm not sure what's supposed to happen if two parents who are both working fall into very different categories - is the the occupation of the higher earner that counts?

We still have the hangover of inherited titles and the like but I don't think the "class system" is really that different in any western democracy. It's pretty easy to stratify by the way someone decorates their house (irrespective of the size and location), clothing (irrespective of cost), their accent/grammar etc. no matter what their education or occupation if that's what you're into, and that's the same in the numerous countries I've lived and worked in.

www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/employmentbyoccupationemp04/apriltojune2018/emp04sep2018.xls

If you want to see how jobs are “ranked.”