Britain has lost its aspiration. So why did we stop being a nation of social climbers?

We are now a nation of social sliders, and there are four key factors that explain it

It is often claimed that social mobility in the UK has “ground to a halt”. It isn’t true. Substantial numbers of us are still “going up in the world”. But a greater number of us are in lower-ranking occupations (and housing situations) than our parents were, despite being better educated.

In the post-war decades we were, on balance, a nation of social climbers. We are now a nation of social sliders.

In my book The End of Aspiration? (Policy Press), I set out to find out why. I worked in collaboration with people who have personal experience of pursuing “ideas above their station”. They include a billionaire entrepreneur, a politician, A TV presenter and a barrister. They also include my sister, Jane.

Now, when Jane was a toddler, her chances of educational success didn’t look good. Parents’ occupations and education are both very strong predictors of their children’s progress, and Jane was the daughter of a manual worker who’d failed the 11-plus exam.

Also, something unusual happened to Jane shortly after she was born: Dad’s first marriage ended in divorce, and he was granted custody of Jane. It doesn’t sound so unusual today, but in a Yorkshire mining town in the early 1960s, single parents were remarkable, and single fathers almost unheard of. Dad, as a single parent, faced a common problem: if he worked enough hours to provide for his daughter, how would he have enough time to care for her?

Combined with Dad’s social class and level of education, the odds of Jane doing well at school looked poor. The odds of her starting school — as she did — as the most educationally advanced child in the class, looked impossible. But in Jane’s case, Dad’s divorce wasn’t a disaster, because something else unusual happened to her: her aunt decided to put a teaching career on hold to care for Jane. Having been raised by a teacher gave Jane the first of her "lucky breaks".

Having followed Jane and the others from their early years to their later careers, I worked with academics and other experts to assess whether the barriers and opportunities they’d encountered had become more or less common. The key factors can be grouped into four themes:

First, children are more likely to develop and pursue ambitious aspirations if their families have security of income and of housing tenure: a feeling that life is under control.

Second, many social mobility stories involve a “posh friend” who can reveal the existence of previously unimagined educational and career options and act as a native guide to the unwritten protocols of life in privileged environments.

There are also tolls on the road to opportunity, which some can’t afford but which the privileged (who tend to be in the most influential positions) can afford and therefore are allowed to remain. These include well-known phenomena such as the cost of supporting oneself through an unpaid internship, as well as under-discussed issues like the sometimes prohibitively-high cost of uniforms and equipment at high-performing state schools.

And finally, crucially, upward social mobility happens mainly when new “room at the top” opens up.

It is striking how many of these factors now constitute cause for concern, not only for ‘the poor’ but for Middle Britain

Secure incomes are far from guaranteed for the growing number of us who are classed as self-employed or whose employment contracts do not offer guaranteed working hours (especially if the turbulence of Brexit causes economic shocks). Equally, a rising number of young families now find themselves in private-rented accommodation, prone to being evicted at short notice.

The “growing social class segregation” of our neighbourhoods, social activities and schools is making it harder to meet those posh friends who can offer a leg up.

And new tolls are being introduced on the road to opportunity (such as the growing expectation of a postgraduate as well as an undergraduate degree in some careers).

The supply of desirable jobs, and of homes, is not keeping up with demand: the post-war period of mass upward mobility happened because the government had an ambitious, hands-on strategy for creating such jobs (e.g. in the expanding public sector) and for homebuilding. Again, Brexit will undermine our ability to have a strategy for creating good jobs, because we will be negotiating trade deals from a position of desperation.

For all the talk of increasing the number of state-school educated children at Oxbridge and similar concerns, the numbers that benefit from such initiatives will always be marginal, while the big social and economic developments listed above affect far more of us.

But there is cause for hope. Because middle-Britain is now seeing their aspirations visibly slip further away, there is far more incentive for an observant politician to create a credible platform of proposals which address the problem. In other words, things may have got so bad, that someone can start to do some good.

Duncan Exley is the former Director of the Equality Trust and the author of The End of Aspiration? Social mobility and our children’s fading prospects, published by Policy Press.