John Goldthorpe (“Decades of investment in education have not improved social mobility”, Comment) has got it right in three important respects, which will not be to everyone’s liking:
1. The “golden age” of social mobility was largely due to the increase in middle-class job opportunities for the postwar generation whose educational opportunities were greater than those of their parents.
2. The generation that benefited from this quite naturally have done their damnedest to ensure that their children maintain or improve their position, thus making it more difficult for those below.
3. People advocating social mobility have always assumed, without saying so, that this means upward mobility, which is of course desirable. In a jobs market that is not expanding or is emphasising low-level jobs, the corollary has to be downward mobility, but who dares to advocate that?
Les Masters
Weston-super-Mare
Given the number of articles that have been published bemoaning the apparent failure to maintain the initial rate of social mobility, however that might be defined, it seems odd that no one has pointed out that there is an inevitable limit to the process (“Quality of work will shape our youth’s future”, leading article).
There are a great many families that, some decades ago, saw their first member go to university to take a degree. There are now families where grandparents who had no more than elementary education have seen all their grandchildren go to university.
What does common sense tell us?
Professor Tony Pointon
Portsmouth
I would suggest there is far more that education can do than John Goldthorpe supposes. We need to be far more enlightened in schools as to the true nature of intelligence. We now understand that there are very many ways of being “intelligent”. We also know that intelligence is not a fixed condition, but is, instead, responsive to context, temperament and stimulus.
The phrase “mixed-ability classes” is a misnomer. Instead, we should be talking about “mixed-attainment classes”. If pupils were organised in “mixed-attainment classes”, all our children would have the opportunity to learn at their own pace, in a range of contexts and in collaboration with their peers through group work and the sharing of what has been learned.
Teaching mixed-attainment classes is not easy. It would require thorough teacher training. Mixed-attainment teachers would be adept at organising their pupils into groups appropriate to the work in hand; at setting and recording individual as well as class learning objectives; at offering a choice of materials and teaching styles to pupils as they saw fit, and at orchestrating the class so that pupils began and ended a session together, while working as individuals and groups during the body of the lesson.
The consequence of a well-run mixed-attainment class would be higher morale and mutual respect among all the pupils and greater opportunity for all pupils to discover and express more of their potential. All pupils would have the chance to become confident and effective “life-long learners”.
David Curtis
Solihull
West Midlands
John Goldthorpe points out that parents and their children “are more concerned to avoid downward mobility than they are to achieve upward mobility”. This, to put it mildly, is an understatement. The British middle class is in a state of panic about its offspring skidding down the class structure. Yet there is a positive downside to rising rates of downward mobility. Once privileged groups realise that their own children could end up in low-status occupations, the importance of improving pay and conditions for those at the bottom could gain some political traction.
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln
