Paul Gregg and Lindsey Macmillan of the ESRC Centre for Market and Public Organisation assess the government ’ s indicators of social mobility !

social mobility at the heart of its social policy agenda, downplaying child poverty relative to the previous government. When talking about social mobility, we are looking at how much the family background of an individual is associated with their later life chances. This can be measured in a number of different ways, most commonly by income and earnings, by social class or by education across two generations. The government is primarily interested in the differences in life chances of poor against more affluent children and hence are focusing on income mobility, but they are clear that they view educational attainment as a key driver of mobility. In Britain, intergenerational income mobility is low, meaning individuals from the poorest backgrounds have the worst life chances, compared to most European countries. The situation has got worse for children leaving school in the 1980s compared to previous generations. There is cross-party support for a move to reverse this trend, but many of the government interventions take place in childhood, and to capture the impact of this drive towards greater opportunity is often difficult as we can’t observe life chances until the children affected now are adults.