To think social mobility in the UK is awful?

[cnwc]

AIBU to think that social mobility has actually got much worse in the last decades rather than better?

I think house prices in places like London have got a lot to do with it, and too many of the best jobs are located there.

It seems pretty much impossible for people to move up in the world

If you do actually work in that field I'll go back to this... I currently teach on an access course, an evening course because, despite not working, having partners who do not work, parents who do not work, most of our students cannot regularly make morning or afternoon classes.

So for the last 3 years we have offered an evening course. Students are given free transport in and home again, we have a creche, we are close to town centre for food etc etc.

And still we have a 50+% drop out rate (and low uptake). This despite every bit of research locally having access to education as the number one priority, the biggest obstacle our potential students face.

The political environment I achieved that under?

Mmmm! Financial crash, end of 'free' degrees, state if unrest, financial and civil!

I can categorically state that there are more opportunities to access all levels of education now than were available to me.

The current political environment is designed to hinder your clients I would need to see what you base that statement on. It doesn't reflect the work I have been involved with for the last 20 years!

My dc has to get three trains to get to a decent college. My home town is fucked. I know what I am talking about.

When was that? It wasn’t 20 years ago, that’s for sure

3 trains? Most FE colleges across the UK provide transport, mini buses, for students who live in areas without good transport links.

Anyway no offence but how good is a FE college for social mobility, really? Getting an unemployed person a job as a hairdresser or carpenter isn’t actually social mobility. It starts well before they aren’t FE age

Really in which world are colleges providing Mini buses ?

Passthecherrycoke Me? As an adult I went back to education in the 1990s. And I went into community work straight after, then FE in the same deprived areas. I still work / volunteer in an urban area that is in the top 10% of the England Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Curious

Ours doesn’t: one of our children is starting at sixth form college in September. An outstanding facility in a county city with nearly 3,000 students. We have to use public transport. Subsidised passes are arranged by student services but it’s still £600 per year.

Really in which world are colleges providing Mini buses ? Every one I have worked in, in very isolated rural areas and in urban areas of high social deprivation.

As I said, many FE colleges do so!

Anyway no offence but how good is a FE college for social mobility, really? Getting an unemployed person a job as a hairdresser or carpenter isn’t actually social mobility. It starts well before they aren’t FE age But FE colleges were made to do just that - though I have worked in one where the beauty course was considered to be the absolute be all and end all, so I know what you mean!

FE colleges provide education at all levels, I ran the English and maths dept (Functional Skills at Entry Level and up as well as GCSEs) for a couple of years - it's what I do in the Access Course too! They try to make up for the damage done in cash strapped schools.

Ach! I sound evangelic know. But the misunderstanding around FE colleges annoys me!

Langrish A sixth form is not an FE college. They are entirely different, differnt funding streams, different ethos etc.

A sixth form is an LEA / school sector. An FE college is in the independent education sector.

It has definitely got worse over the last few years. The year I would have gone to uni if I’d followed the ‘normal’ path (1998) was, I believe one of the first to have loans instead of grants. My family simply couldn’t afford it.

My parents (born late 1940s) and my DH (born late 1950s) had opportunities that no longer exist. Grammar school for one, nearest one to where we lived when I was that age was 30 miles away and impossible for a child to get to without being driven everyday. My DF had an OK paid job, but not enough to send my DB and I to private school (something he still regrets today). Their peers were able to ‘work their way up’ without needing a degree - a friend of my DPs started off as a teller/clerk in a bank and became an area manager by the time he retired. My DH started off in a very junior role and was at executive level by the time he retired. Such opportunities just don’t seem to exist now and employers can be quite restrictive over what qualifications they will pay for.

Access to jobs is another; I work 30 miles away from home and work shifts. I needed a car so DH bought me one, goes without saying that’s not possible for everyone. Then there’s the petrol cost, around £50 a week. Public transport unfortunately not an option with my shift times. Now, I’m not badly paid for what I do and didn’t need any specific qualifications apart from GCSE Maths & English but many people from my area think I’m mad for travelling so far and the amount I have to spend getting there and so only look for jobs in the local area, which restricts earning capacity. When I lived in the SE I could access 3 airports (I work at an airport now) by public transport 24/7.

Passthecherrycoke

Anyway no offence but how good is a FE college for social mobility, really? Getting an unemployed person a job as a hairdresser or carpenter isn’t actually social mobility. It starts well before they aren’t FE age”

I know some very well off and successful carpenters, plumbers and plasterers with kids at private schools. I wouldn’t knock the trades.

Curious

I didn’t know there was a difference! Thanks for that (you’ve saved me the embarrassment of phoning student services to ask why we didn’t have a mini bus ).

As I moaned in my previous post, many people have no idea that there is a difference.

Open Days were a bloody nightmare. Parents would moan about all osrts, especially that we didn't have their child's detail on our system like the sixth form did. We had to patiently explain, thousands of times a year, that they had to formally apply and sign a form allowing that information to be passed to us after a conditional offer was made - and that it was THE CHILD NOT THE PARENT who signed the form!

The disappearance of evening classes and adult colleges and the WEA has been disastrous for social mobility. When I was young it was entirely possible for someone who had missed out on education to pick it up in adult life. Or learn a trade or persue an interest while working full time. That’s just not an option nowadays.

The WEA aren't gone! They are still the biggest voluntary sector provider of adult education in the UK!

I started my education as a teacher with them. Now I work for them. AND teach in an class in 2 local schools!

Curious

I suppose we’re very lucky indeed that (stealth boast warning ) because ours have sailed through education with no major problems, a mix of both private and state depending on where the best provision was, we’ve never had to become particularly knowledgeable about systems.

Our youngest is leaving independent soon for state sixth form and the transition has been absolutely seamless so far, the College is really on the ball and we can already see that student services and pastoral care are fantastic. Much better than independent actually and come to think of it yes, both secondary independent schools did have minibuses. The state primaries didn’t either, though possibly because a majority of pupils were within a mile or two?

Here's a recent article about social mobility in the UK:

www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/30/social-mobility-in-uk-virtually-stagnant-since-2014

This is bigger read from 2017:

www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BCGSocial-Mobility-report-full-version_WEB_FINAL.pdf

The report notes that a significant aspect of the flattening of social mobility is the hollowing out of mid-range jobs that working class upwardly mobiles could get, leaving only lower and upper range jobs. The historically privileged have proven adept in protecting the interests of their children (and who shall blame them)?

There just aren't the number of better-paid jobs there were in earlier times, so in order for people to move up, someone has to move down, and you can bet it will not be the historically privileged.

That’s great news @CuriousabiurSamphire! ( have you tried it yet, by the way?) There is practically no adult education round our way- good to know that’s not a universal experience.

I agree with a lot of the points about education. It's not an explicit teaching of etiquette etc, it's just a completely different level of expectation of behaviour. I remember watching one of those life swap programmes based around a rough state school and an elite boarding school, and yes much of it was staged, but the most interesting contrast/moment for me was when one of the boys from the "poor" school was standing with some of the private school boys and absent mindedly started chewing on the string from his hoodie. Almost automatically, one of the other boys reached up, pulled it out of his mouth and said something like "Don't do that, it makes you look stupid." It was the fact he had the confidence to make a comment like that without thinking he was going to get his head kicked in, the fact he felt this was important/valuable information to share (it is) and the fact he noticed it gave a negative impression in the first place. Hoodie boy just looked totally stunned for a moment and you could tell he didn't quite know what to do in response but then accepted it.

Meanwhile state schools are in constant "petty" battles over uniform etc - which I agree is petty, BTW, and a lot of state schools have far more urgent things to worry about but appearance does have some bearing over people's first impression of you.

I totally feel I was let down by my state school and family background career guidance. Nobody I knew (except perhaps my uncle in the Navy, but that never interested me) had a career and I had absolutely nothing on which to base any of the information I was receiving so none of it really made the slightest bit of sense. My parents would absolutely think I had made it if I had a mediocre office job. DH's family does. I've never had anything close to that, despite being a straight-A pupil at school. All the potential, no direction. I went in the direction of art/graphics because that was what I liked doing, but I floundered at that because I'm neither outstanding at art, nor did I have the other skills/knowledge necessary to navigate a career. So I went into social science because it was interesting. That was a step closer, but it took me until I was about 25 to gain an inkling that all this time everything has pointed to maths/physics being my strong point and I should have been going in that direction and finding out what would have fit my interests there, rather than looking in the direction of my interests and trying to develop skills based on that. I was 28 by the time I really pulled that together, but I was still totally clueless about what I should have actually been doing with it. It is only really through seeing DH have a career and having friends with real grown up jobs that I'm starting to understand how companies work (which would have been fantastically useful to know at 16, when I was supposed to be planning a career) that I've realised the field I should have been aiming for all along, and then it hit me - I had had this mentioned/suggested/pointed out to me at 16 but because I had no foundation on which to base it, it didn't click into place or make sense, so at that time it was useless to me and I discarded it. I'm 30 and the career advice stuff only makes vague sense now because of third hand experience of jobs I've never had. And work experience was useless. You can only get in somewhere you know someone which once again means it's based on things you're probably already fairly familiar with. I'm not really blaming anyone for this BTW but I can absolutely see that there is a different playing field or starting point or whatever you want to call it, based on how you grew up.

It's so embarrassing to have this lack of knowledge at 30. Especially living abroad, so you come across people with such a different experience. OK, it's not quite the same, because people who have emigrated tend to be higher paid/higher educated, so I'm not comparing like with like, but even the local system is so different. We've just got DS1 into a state secondary school which has the most fantastic standard of education and such a massively different feeling, a huge pride and confidence and status that I've never come across at a UK state school. I just hope we can support him with it. Dunno what to do about my own now. I doubt we can afford for me to study so I'll just have to lump it probably. In the meantime I'm focusing on perfecting my language skills for this country.

Looking briefly through The Guardian link, don’t think it mentions AI. The implications of that for skilled, manual labour really worries me.

It’s ironic that social mobility was so much greater 50 years ago. A bright child, whatever their background, could win a grammar school place, go on to university without getting into debt and get a graduate job that paid a decent salary. Internships and unpaid work experience were unheard of. Equally, you could leave school with “O” levels, get a job in a bank and be managing it 20 years later.

Society really is going backwards.

“Almost automatically, one of the other boys reached up, pulled it out of his mouth and said something like "Don't do that, it makes you look stupid." It was the fact he had the confidence to make a comment like that without thinking he was going to get his head kicked in,”

I donnt think he should have got his head kicked in- but I would certainly have expected my children not to be so incredibly rude to a virtual stranger. Is that what you meant?

And whilst I don't read Hansard I too come from just such an area and have 'made good'.

I dont know anyone who reads Hansard for the fun of it - it is an edited verbatim record of what was said in Parliament. It also includes records of votes and written ministerial statements. The report is published daily covering the preceding day, and is followed by a bound final version.