CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC 281-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE THE
CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE
SOCIAL MOBILITY
Wednesday 23 January 2008
DR JOHN GOLDTHORPE, PROFESSOR STEPHEN MACHIN and DR
JO BLANDEN
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 -
81
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
1.
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This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in
private and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the
internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made
available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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2.
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The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It
will be printed in due course.
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Children, Schools and Families Committee
on Wednesday 23 January 2008
Members present:
Mr. Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Annette Brooke
Ms Dawn Butler
Mr. Douglas Carswell
Mr. David Chaytor
Mr. John Heppell
Fiona Mactaggart
Mr. Andy Slaughter
Mr. Graham Stuart
Stephen Williams
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses:
Dr. John Goldthorpe, Emeritus
Fellow, Sociology, Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Professor Stephen Machin, Professor of
Economics, University College London and Research Director, Centre for Economic
Performance, London School of Economics and Dr. Jo Blanden, Lecturer in Economics, University of Surrey and Research
Associate, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, gave
evidence.
Q1 <Chairman:>
I welcome Dr. John Goldthorpe, Professor Stephen Machin and Dr. Jo Blanden to
our proceedings. It is a pleasure to
have you here. You will know why you
are here. We committed ourselves to having
a look at social mobility, and this is by way of a taster to see whether we
need to take further evidence. It seemed
sensible, given that the work conducted by the London School of Economics,
particularly for the Sutton Trust, has opened up an interesting debate about
investment in education and whether it is responsible for social mobility. It raised some interesting questions that
all of us involved in education would like answered. I declare an
interest. I am a governor of the London
School of Economics, which probably means that I shall ask harder questions
rather than easier ones. John Goldthorpe, I have read much of your
work over the years, and I am somewhat of an admirer of your work-let us get
that out in the open. Again, I shall
not ask you any kinder questions. Do
any of you want to say anything briefly to open our discussion, perhaps about
your work and where we are with social mobility and how it affects
education? We always give people a
chance to say something if they want to.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I would be ready to join you in discussion.
Q2 <Chairman:>
You want to go straight into the cut and thrust?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Yes.
<Professor
Machin:> We could give a little overview of the
research we have done, if that would be helpful.
<Chairman:> Yes, if it is
not long.
<Professor
Machin:> No, it will not be long.
<Chairman:> Let us get
started then.
<Professor
Machin:> We have been involved in three strands of
research in this area. One is the
often-cited work in which we compared what had happened to social mobility
across two birth cohorts. We have
extremely rich birth cohort data in Britain, where people are followed from
when they are born through their lives at various stages. One of the birth cohorts was just under
20,000 people born in 1958; the other was about the same size but of people
born in 1970. That is where we have the
first finding. We related people's
earnings to their parents' across these cohorts, and this relationship
strengthened over time. That is when we
inferred that social mobility had been falling in Britain, because people's
earnings were more strongly associated with their parents' income. That was for the more recent cohort rather
than the first cohort. That was a
comparison between the 1958 and 1970 cohorts.
The second strand of work was to look at more recent changes. We were not able to undertake the same
exercise of relating people's labour market earnings to their parents' income,
because the people involved were yet not old enough to be in the labour
market. But we can look at the
relationship between a number of intervening factors, like education attainment
and early-age test scores, and how they are related to family income. We found much more constancy in our recent
work. The third area of research was
done by Jo and other colleagues. They
have been comparing what happens if you look at income mobility-looking at how
strongly income is correlated across generations as compared to social class
mobility. John has done a lot of work
on that in the past. There are two papers
out there-one by Robert Erikson and John Goldthorpe, the other by Jo Blanden,
Paul Gregg and Lindsey Macmillan-that compare what has happened through changes
over time, when you use income or when you use social class. That is the kind of research, with three
strands, that we have been involved with.
Q3 <Chairman:>
Can I ask you, Steve Machin, why did you do this research?
<Professor
Machin:> Why did we start doing this research? One of my long-term interests is in labour
market inequality and how it has moved over time. A lot of that looks within generations, to say how wide the
income distribution or the earnings distribution is for the population in a
given year. One key feature that
underpins that is people's family background and whether it maintains any
qualities or generates any qualities across generations as well. My overall interest is in terms of labour
market inequality and how the income distribution is evolving over time.
Q4 <Chairman:>
But you have been commissioned to do some of this research, have you not?
<Professor
Machin:> For the first strand, we were funded partly
by the Sutton Trust. We started that
work well before then, because we thought it was of significant academic
interest. Of course, it fed into the
policy process subsequently, but we were interested in it from a purely
academic point of view to start with.
<Dr.
Blanden:> It followed on from previous work that Steve
had done looking at the level of intergenerational income mobility in the UK.
<Professor
Machin:> The key innovation we made, from the academic
perspective, was to start looking at changes over time. There is a lot of work out there that
measures how strongly correlated people's earnings or income is with their
parents' earnings or income or how their social class is correlated with their
parents' social class at a point in time.
The main innovation in the newer work that we have done was to start
looking at trends or changes over time.
Q5 <Chairman:>
How did you and the Sutton Trust get together?
<Professor
Machin:> There are many sources of funding for
academic research. In relation to the
Sutton Trust, I cannot quite remember the details, but in the same way as we
get funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Economic and Social
Research Council, it was an opportunity to get funded.
<Dr.
Blanden:> I think you met Peter at some point, didn't
you?
<Professor
Machin:> Yes, I met Peter Lampl somewhere, but that is
back in history, I am afraid.
Q6 <Chairman:>
The reason why I am probing is this.
The Sutton Trust is a very respected education think tank and I know
that it commissions quite a lot of research.
Indeed, Sir Peter Lampl is a good friend, but he does have a particular
view, which I imagine he had before he came to you for the research, that there
is a lack of social mobility. Did he
hear that you were doing research that would back up his ideas?
<Professor
Machin:> Yes.
We must have been at a meeting somewhere where we spoke about common
interests. I probably told him that we
were very interested not just in looking at a snapshot or point in time, which
is how this work currently tends to be done, but in trying to say something
about how social mobility has changed over time. Of course, you can see why that would interest Peter.
Q7 <Chairman:>
Yes. If you had got your money from
Coca-Cola or any other commercial organisation, I would probably probe you on
this even harder. What was the research
brief that Sir Peter Lampl or the Sutton Trust gave you?
<Professor
Machin:> We wrote the research brief. We said we are interested in doing research
on changes over time in intergenerational mobility.
<Dr.
Blanden:> And we did have some preliminary results.
<Professor
Machin:> We had some preliminary results; that is
right. We made the case that this would
be-and it has subsequently turned out to be-original research. I think that is partly why it has received
so much attention-because people just had not done much on changes over time
before.
Q8 <Chairman:>
Why do you think that is? It is a
rather important issue, isn't it?
<Dr.
Blanden:> It was about data.
<Professor
Machin:> It was about at least two things, one of
which was data availability. In terms
of a consistent comparison over time, the data have not been available until
relatively recently to enable us to do that, in a very representative way. The other point is that the natural thing to
do in the earlier work was to look at a point in time and just say: how much or
how little social mobility is there?
Q9 <Chairman:>
Right. So, you completed the
research. It has obviously become quite
controversial, but certainly it has been used, by politicians of all kinds and
by groups. When you are reflecting on
the impact of your research, what do you think about it?
<Professor
Machin:> It has been used by different people in
different ways. It has sometimes been
used well; it has sometimes been misquoted badly. Sometimes people have pushed it much further than you might want
to push it. If we are talking just
about the first strand of work, it is a comparison just across two cohorts,
born in 1958 and born in 1970-a 12-year period-so it is rather specific in that
sense. Some people have made a lot more
of it than perhaps we would have made of it-certainly than we have made of it.
<Dr.
Blanden:> Can I follow that up? For example, there has been the idea that
social mobility-we should really call it income mobility, particularly when
John is here. "Income mobility is
falling" is often a headline you will see or a quote from a commentator or
politician. Based on these two
snapshots, we would never say that.
That is one of the reasons why we have gone on to look at what has
happened more recently-so that we can find out whether it is true, because
certainly our earlier research did not actually tell us that.
<Professor
Machin:> I think we would say that in that particular
period there was a fall in social mobility, intergenerational mobility, income
mobility. If you look at our paper,
that is what it says. It does not say
anything about what is going on today.
It does not say what was going on before that either, although there are
other pieces of research out there where you can start to pull together the
pieces of a jigsaw, if you think about the long time period as well.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> The research that my colleagues and I have
been doing is concerned with social mobility in terms of social class rather
than income. We are interested in the
relationship between children's social class and their parents' social
class. For that purpose, we treat class
on the basis of the National Statistics socio-economic classification, which
has been widely used in official statistics since 2001. That is one difference from the work that
Stephen and Jo have been doing.
The
second difference is that we try to work, as far as possible, using
representative samples of the entire active population. We also use the birth cohort studies that
Stephen has described, but only for want of better data. The position is that between 1972 and 1992,
the general household survey collected data that could be used for social
mobility analysis in terms of class. We
have analysed that run of data quite extensively. Unfortunately, for reasons that have never been clear to me GHS
ceased to collect the relevant data in 1993.
So, we have the rather ironic situation that at a time when social mobility
has become much more important as a political issue than previously, we do not
have good data-at least, not as good as that from between 1972 and 1992.
In
order to get information, we have resorted to the birth cohort studies. As Stephen has explained, there were two
birth cohorts only 12 years apart. So
far, we can compare their members only up to their early 30s, which is not
entirely satisfactory. I am currently working
on extending the nationally based analyses through to 2005, when GHS was required
to include an EU module on standards of living. In that module, there is information that is relevant to social
mobility. Unfortunately, it is not
strictly comparable with the data that we had for the period between 1972 and
1992, but we are working hard to make it as comparable as possible. We have had some preliminary results from
that work.
Taking
the whole set of analyses together, the main findings are as follows. First, in the period between 1972 and the
present, we have found no change in the total mobility rate. That is to say that we find no change in the
proportion of children in different class positions from their parents. Neither have we found any weakening during
that period, in the net association, or net stickiness, between parents' class
position and children's class position.
That might seem to be a more optimistic conclusion than the one that
Stephen outlined on declining income mobility, but in another sense, it is more
pessimistic, because we find that, throughout, class mobility seems to have
been at a lower level than income mobility.
We can use the birth cohort studies for that. We think that looking at mobility in terms of social class captures
more of the intergenerational continuity in economic circumstances.
Finally,
we have found one change. Although the
total mobility rate is unchanged, the composition of the rate is changing. In the middle decades of the last
century-from about 1940 to the 1980s-we saw steadily rising rates of upward
mobility and steadily falling rates of downward mobility. From about the 1990s, those trends
tended to level out. Now, especially
with men, we find that if anything, rates of upward mobility have flattened out
and may even be declining a little, while rates of downward mobility are no
longer decreasing and may even be increasing a little. For women, the situation is not quite so
bad. For us, that is the important
change. If you wish, I can try to
explain why I think that change came about.
<Chairman:> I had better
not ask you that, because my colleague is going to drill down on that in a
moment.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I am sorry?
Q10 <Chairman:>
I had better leave that to some of my colleagues. We will drill down on that in a moment. I have one more question for the moment. We have seen great change in the social
class composition of our country have we not?
Most of us believe that the number of people describing themselves as
being in the middle classes and living a middle-class lifestyle has grown.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Yes.
Q11 <Chairman:>
How does that impact on the very small numbers of people who would now be
classified as unskilled workers? I
think that the Leitch report said 3.2 million, and that the number is going to
down to 600,000 by 2020. Something
fundamental is happening in our class structure while you are researching
it. Is that all taken into account?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Oh yes.
You have put your finger exactly on the explanation for the change that
I referred to. During the middle
decades of the 20th century, there was very steady growth in the proportion of
the active population in professional and managerial employment, and a
contraction in the proportion in wage-earning, mainly manual employment. You could say that there was simply growing
room at the top. That drove the steady
increase in rates of upward social mobility over that period.
From
the 1990s, that growth in the proportionate size of the professional and
managerial salariat, as one might call it, has slowed down. It is still going on, but it has clearly
slowed down, especially insofar as higher-level managerial and professional
positions are concerned. That is really
behind the tailing off of the increase in upward mobility. That is especially marked in the case of
men, because they are facing greater competition from women for professional
and managerial positions. The change in
the shape of the class structure is absolutely crucial to the changing patterns
of upward and downward mobility.
One
point I would add is that over that whole period of major changes in the shape
of the class structure and corresponding differences in patterns of upward and
downward mobility, what is constant is the inherent what I call stickiness of
the relationship between parental class position and children's class
position. Once you net out, as we can,
statistically, all the effects of the structural change, that inherent,
underlying stickiness shows a remarkable constancy.
Q12 <Chairman:>
What do you say, Stephen, to people such as Stephen Gorard who really criticises
your methodology and conclusions? From
my reading of the literature, I take it that he is your fiercest critic?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I do not think that Stephen has criticised
my-
Q13 <Chairman:>
No, sorry, Dr. Goldthorpe, I have moved on.
Professor Gorard has fundamentally criticised the work of Stephen Machin
and Jo Blanden. I was asking them. He is your most consistent critic is he not,
Jo?
<Dr.
Blanden:> Yes.
I can say something about that.
Q14 <Chairman:>
Has he got it right or is he wrong?
<Dr. Blanden:>
Well, we obviously think he is wrong.
<Professor
Machin:> With very good reason.
<Dr.
Blanden:> With some quite good reason.
He
took a summary paper that we wrote in 2005 for the trust, which was a
simplification of our work. Perhaps we
did not present things in the first version as clearly as we should, because we
were talking about two different things: changes over time, and differences
across countries. We did not lay it out
clearly enough, in essence, and we responded to his comments and tried to be
clearer, but the thing is that the Sutton Trust report in 2005 was a summary of
a wealth of papers that we have written, and we also summarised other people's
work to give that picture to the trust.
However,
Professor Gorard seems to refuse to look at any of our other papers, or any
other work that is behind this, and he sticks to what was said in the 2005
paper. He also criticises us for using
a small sample of the cohort studies, because we have to look at only a
situation involving income and earnings, and he is absolutely right that that
is a concern. It is one that I looked
into during my PhD. When you restrict
the sample that you look at, you always have an element of doubt about whether
you are misrepresenting the overall picture.
One good thing that has come about from our work, looking at the issues
in tandem with John Goldthorpe and Robert Erikson, is that they use a much
larger sample, and when they restrict their larger sample of social class to
that which we used for income, the patterns do not change, so it seems unlikely
that our results are driven firmly by the restriction in sample. So, although that is a reasonable point, we
do not think that it applies in this case.
Q15 <Chairman:>
But the data are patchy, are they not?
You are not comparing like with like on data sets and the different
countries that you take. Some of the
countries are a bit strange, are they not?
You say in one passage of your work, "major industrial countries", but
many of them are Nordic countries and Canada.
In this Committee, I am always happy and safer when comparing Great
Britain as a 60-million population country with Germany, France, Italy and
Spain. But that is not who you compare
with, is it? You have the US, but many
of them are quite small countries.
<Dr.
Blanden:> I have written a chapter for a book that some
colleagues at the LSE are putting together on education and income
inequality. In it, I try to look more
widely at where the UK fits on intergenerational income mobility, and to link
it with the role of education. I do not
know whether Steve would necessarily agree with me, but if we look only at the
countries from which we can get really good data, we are possibly picking
countries where the UK and the US are often at the low end of mobility. For the UK and the US, that is probably
broadly true, but there are probably many other countries down there, too. I would argue that France, Italy and Spain
are, but that Germany is a little bit unclear.
Q16 <Chairman:>
Because most of your data are from West Germany, are they not?
<Dr.
Blanden:> Yes, which does not help.
If
you try to look around for as much data as you can, even if they are not
completely comparable, I would say that several large European countries are
equally as immobile as the UK. But then
there is other evidence from other sources, such as the PISA study, which show
that educational opportunities in the UK are very strongly related to family
background, so there is evidence on either side. We have some holes in our evidence; that is completely the
case. In that particular Sutton Trust
study, we picked only the countries where we had data that were quite similar,
so we compared with the UK and the US, Nordic countries, which are probably
fairly extreme cases.
<Professor
Machin:> I would add that Stephen Gorard is out on a
limb in what he says, if you compare what we say with other leading experts in
the area. Gary Solon is the leading US
economist on intergenerational income mobility. He has written a survey piece
bringing together the international evidence and he reaches very much the same
conclusions as we do, by drawing on studies from different countries. However, the US and the UK are towards the
bottom of the international league table for intergenerational earnings or
income mobility. If you take Stephen
Gorard's criticism literally, because he thinks that he has this methodological
point, which is not correct, about the way in which we presented the evidence,
he is actually saying that he thinks that the extent of intergenerational
mobility is rather like that in Norway, and I do not think that anybody would
think that that was the case.
Q17 <Chairman:>
Is the heart of the problem that he is attacking your truncated paper, or
perhaps even the gloss that the Sutton Trust put on your research, because in a
sense it did not do the research, but was making a case for other
purposes?
<Professor
Machin:> To be fair on him, I think his observation is
that the findings have been misused in certain quarters and he, therefore, is
commenting on it because it is a piece of research that has received so much
attention that he thinks that he should be saying something about what his
position on it would be.
<Chairman:> Okay. That has been some very good interpreting.
<Mr Carswell:> I have three
questions, if I may?
<Chairman:> On something
that has come up already? We are going
through the questions in sections.
<Mr. Carswell:> Can I ask
three questions at some stage?
<Chairman:> If you do not
repeat the questions that people have already bid to ask, yes.
<Mr. Carswell:> Sorry. You have been asking questions, do you want
me to ask questions now?
<Chairman:> Could you hold
back for a moment? Let me give the
people who asked to do the opening session a chance first.
Q18 <Mr.
Slaughter:> That was a very interesting
introduction. When we were talking in
private before you came in, I sensed a slight frustration among some of my
colleagues that some of us, like me, are statistically challenged, but probably
what we are more interested in are the more political questions about whether
social mobility is a good thing, and the role of education within that. In order to get to that stage, it is always
useful to have a coherent and consistent statistical base. Although there appears to be some level of
agreement between the various studies, that may be an unfair question. How would you reach a consensus between your
views, or what points would you pick out from the studies that we have had,
which would give us that clear base from which to go forward to the next
stage? In other words, can you
summarise what consistent findings you believe there are between the various
studies that you have done? Or indeed,
more controversially, do you think we should disregard points that have been
made?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> The first thing to say is that Steve and Jo
are looking, as we have established, at mobility in terms of income. In effect, they are comparing the earnings
of children with the incomes of the families from which they came. My colleagues and I are looking at mobility
in terms of social class. Those are
different phenomena; there is no reason in principle why they should give
exactly the same results, although of course it is interesting if results differ
to try to ask why that is so. We have
had a long series of exchanges, trying to work out why this is so and these
occasions get rather technical-we could go into that. My own reading is that intergenerational income mobility is more
subject to short-term social change than intergenerational class mobility. In the case of income mobility you can get
relatively short-term changes of some magnitude, and that is related to the
fact that changes in the structure of incomes, in income equality, can occur
rather more quickly than changes in the shape of the class structure. However, as far as the political and policy
implications of our research go, the differences are not that great.
<Professor
Machin:> I would tend to agree with much of what John
has said. Both the social class
findings and the income findings suggest that social mobility is a problem in
Britain. It should therefore, have a
high priority in policy debates and the fact that debates about the research
are giving it a higher profile is both good and important. In response to the question about why I was
interested in intergenerational mobility, I stated at the start that my
interest is in labour market inequalities, income disparities across the population,
and trying to ascertain whether they are too big or too small. We know that in Britain over the last 25 to
30 years, the gap between the highest and the lowest paid has widened
massively, with a particularly big increase during the 1980s. The findings on
social mobility suggest that this opening up of income disparities is not just
restricted to people's own generation but can be tracked back to where they
were born and the incomes of their parents at that point in time. That suggests that this work is even more
important, as growing inequality at a point in time is reinforced across generations. When we have looked at education, we have
looked at it as a transmission mechanism underpinning the extent of
intergenerational social mobility. As
we saw this episode of falling income mobility, we discovered that one of the
key factors underpinning it was an increased sensitivity of education to family
income. Basically, the expansion of
education, particularly higher education, that took place in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, disproportionately benefited people from richer families. That is one of the reasons why social
mobility has fallen. In terms of a
policy discussion and the political debate, these issues are becoming more
important than they were in the past.
Q19 <Mr.
Slaughter:> Yes.
From your comments so far it appears that there is a greater degree of
consensus that I had first thought.
That is good. However the
findings are rather concerning in the way that you have just indicated. In relation to the educational side of your
last point, obviously one of the things that we will be concerned with is the
chicken and egg aspect of education. In
your view, is access to education based on social class or income a barrier,
perhaps to increased social mobility, or is the way that the education system
is used widening that gap? If I understood your point correctly, are you saying
that what could be perceived as a widening of educational opportunity, or
something that in a simplistic way may increase opportunities within income and
wealth bands, may actually have had the opposite effect?
<Professor
Machin:> Yes, it can go either way. One easy way to think about it is that if
people who benefit from the expansion of education systems come from above
average income families, it reinforces the inequalities that are already
there. If they come from below average
income families, it will narrow the inequality that was there. It appears that the expansion of HE
disproportionately benefited people from above average income families, and that
has been one of the mechanisms as to why inter-generational income mobility has
fallen during this period.
Q20 <Mr.
Slaughter:> In relation to that, have you drawn any
conclusion as to whether it is consumer or producer pressure? Is it the way that the education system has
changed that has given more advantage to people who are already advantaged, or
is it down to people who have more ability and resources?
I was reading The Times lead story on my way
here. The Leader of the Opposition is
advocating that feigning religious conviction is an acceptable way for active
citizens, as he put it, to find their way into voluntary aided schools. That is a populist view of the situation,
but which side has the pressure come from?
<Professor
Machin:> It is very clear that people from richer
backgrounds took advantage of the expansion of HE. However, the problem is not HE per se-you must track such things
back to earlier in the schooling system and, indeed, to the early years
pre-school. That is where the inequalities
are set in the first instance. You see
the outcome in HE, but clearly what happens before matters. Lots of things that are happening in
schools-primary and secondary-and pre-school matter.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Could I add something else that is relevant
to the question? We have been doing
research on what happens at around age 16.
I entirely agree with Stephen that what happens before that is extremely
important. However, age 16 is important
as well. As you realise, children at
that stage face rather crucial educational decisions. Do you leave school or
stay on? What do you do in the
educational system if you stay on? Do
you go on to do A-levels with a view to university entry, or do you take more
vocational courses? We have found that
social class background plays an important part in making those educational
decisions.
If
you take children who perform equally well in GCSEs, you find that, holding
constant their demonstrated level of academic ability, children from more
advantaged class backgrounds, such as those from professional and managerial
families, are clearly more likely to go on to take A-levels than children from
working-class families. That is most
marked in children at around an average or somewhat above average level of
performance. Obviously, the real high
fliers tend to go on, and the people who do very poorly tend not to go on, more
or less regardless of class background.
For the swathe of people in the middle or just above the middle,
however, educational choice is very much influenced by class background. There is obviously a very serious wastage of
talent, human potential and human resources, and we need to know more about it.
Q21 <Mr.
Slaughter:> I have just two questions about that. I could not agree more that it is a problem,
but do you think that the situation has materially changed? A generation or so ago, when less post-16
education was available, by quantity, quality and variety, you would find that
the problem was much more identifiable-a relatively small cohort went to
university, in particular. That has
definitely changed. Are you saying that
it has had little effect on people's choices?
If that is right to some extent, do you think that the Government have
been wrong to focus a lot of their attention on the pre-school age-I am
thinking of Sure Start and other such programmes-rather than on the key
decisions that people take in their later careers?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I agree with what Stephen said. Educational expansion per se is neutral, as
it were, in its impact on greater equality of educational opportunity or
attainment-it depends who takes up the greater opportunities.
My
own interpretation-I have reported such findings-is that material constraints
are very important. If you are a young
person who has done reasonably but not outstandingly well at GCSE level, and
you think that you have a good chance of getting A-levels and a degree, but you
are not absolutely sure, you face a risky situation. You would have to decide what to do. If your parents are professional managerial people, you can look
forward to a certain amount of financial support as you go through. Even if you do not make it, there could be
some continuing support. Professional
and managerial incomes tend to rise with age up to about the 50s, so
professional and managerial parents can often support their children in higher
education without any reduction in their own standard of living.
Compare
that with a child who comes from a manual, wage-earning background. The risks of going on are much greater. They might go on and incur a certain amount
of debt. Their parents are less able to
help them, and when they are at university they may be torn between accumulating
more debt and taking paid work. We know
that students who take paid work while at university are more likely to fail or
drop out. The whole decision is much
riskier for children from less advantaged backgrounds, so I do not find it
altogether surprising that even when you hold demonstrated academic ability
constant, there are differences in the choices that people make. From that point of view, I very much welcome
the introduction of education maintenance allowances. They were a move in the right direction, but I would like them to
be rather more focused than they are at the moment. I have to say that I had doubts about the Government's policy on
tuition fees. I would have much
preferred a graduate tax.
Q22 <Mr.
Heppell:> I am not quite sure that I am getting my head
around this; I think I was confused when we started. You seem to be saying that there is no difference between the
outcomes of your research and that they are very close to each other, but my
reading is that they are very different.
Professor
Machin and Dr. Blanden, you seem to be saying that the implication of your
research is that there should be more interventions at an early age, in terms
of educational attainment, with programmes such as Sure Start to help deprived
children. However, you say in your
paper, Dr. Goldthorpe, that that sort of policy is almost negative. I may have misinterpreted what you said, but
you make the point that Labour's objectives on patterns of social mobility
cannot be achieved through education.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Oh no, not at all.
Q23 <Mr.
Heppell:> Okay, perhaps I have misinterpreted you. You have said that there is a pronounced
similarity between your work. In your
2007 paper, you said that the similarity was related to longer-term patterns in
mobility and that further work needed to be done on that. Can you explain what you mean?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I am not sure exactly to which statement you
are referring. In my latest paper, the
main point I was concerned to make was that we are in a far less benign
structural environment than we were in the middle decades of the 20th century
when we had steadily growing room at the top.
Now, we cannot rely on that kind of structural change to carry through
steadily rising rates of upward mobility.
If we want to keep rates of upward social mobility rising, we will have
to do that by reducing what I call the inherent stickiness between the class
positions of parents and their children.
One way of doing that is through educational policies, but the point I
was making was that if you increase upward mobility by reducing that inherent
stickiness, you will increase downward mobility by exactly the same
extent. Politicians have to face that
fact.
Q24 <Chairman:>
Is that not also happening with women against men?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> That is a complicating factor. Yes, even if we increase opportunities for
women, as I believe we should, there is only a fixed amount of higher-level
positions. In the past, you could say
women were not punching their weight in this regard; now increasingly they are,
so there are greater problems for men.
The point is this. In a lot of
political discussion, increasing social mobility-usually, implicitly,
increasing upward mobility-and increasing equality of opportunity are very
attractive ideas to politicians. They
are rather like motherhood and apple pie; it is difficult to be against
them. However, there will be a
downside, which will have to be taken on board. If you increase upward mobility, such as through education
measures, and weaken the inherent stickiness between parental class position
and children's class position, by the same token you must increase downward
mobility.
<Dr.
Blanden:> I just want to help to clarify a few of the
things that you were talking about a few moments ago. You seemed to be raising two issues. One was that Steve had said that we should be focusing on early
years, whereas John was developing the idea that there were two groups of
individuals with the same achievement at school and they were taking different
decisions. The point that Steve was
making was feeding into the difference in achievement at the end of school, so
there are two things going on here. If
you come out of school with the same qualifications, income at 16 or social
class at 16 would matter. However, you
are not that likely to come out of school, if you are from different income or
social class backgrounds, with the same qualifications, because of the
inequalities that are occurring in the school system and even before that.
There
is a debate going on in economics, social policy and sociology about where the
best place to intervene is: on balance, which of those two issues is the
larger? Is this about what happens
before you leave school, or is it about the decisions you take afterwards? That is where the EMA fits in and the debate
about the best way to fund higher education.
I think that both are important.
If you neglect the earlier one, you will have much larger problems at
16, whereas if you do not even consider the fact that people respond
differently even if they have the same attainment at 16, you will see the
problem that John is talking about manifested.
You
were also saying that you saw fundamental differences in our results on the
trend in mobility. That is probably
correct in some ways. I would like to
say a couple of things about that. Say
we were talking about some measure of underlying permanent income that governs
all the investments that parents are able to make when children are growing
up. For social class and our income
measures of mobility to move in the same way, you would have to believe that
they were equally correlated with this underlying thing, which was what you
thought was very important.
One
of the reasons we believe these two results are different is that we think-in
fact, John and I both think this-that the relationship between the concept that
we have chosen, or the concept that the other person has chosen, and the
underlying thing that governs investments and all these things has
changed. We would argue that John's
focus on looking at fathers' social class in childhood has perhaps a changing
relationship with these permanent characteristics, partly because of the fact
that mothers' interventions will be more important-what mother does, whether
she works and what her occupation is.
The relationship between that and permanent income will change, and that
is not taken into account by John's work.
Also, over a period when inequality is increasing both between and
within social classes in terms of permanent income, we think that that will affect
the differences in our results as well. John thinks that perhaps the measure of
current income that we use because we do not have a good measure of permanent
income has a different correlation with permanent income in the two periods
that we choose. There are differences, but John is saying that whether things
are constant or have changed, we still have a problem on our hands.
There
has been other work by sociologists in a new book, to which John has
contributed, by Richard Breen. I was having a read of it, and he identifies the
fact that, in recent years, relative class mobility-the stickiness that John
talks about-seems to have improved in a lot of other European countries,
whereas in the UK it is pretty constant. Relative to other countries, even if
nothing much has changed in social class in the UK, that may indicate that we
still have an issue to consider.
<Professor
Machin:> This is the critical thing, I think, in
comparing the two sets of findings. As economists, we say that a pound today is
the same as a pound was 30 years ago, even though it does not buy you as much.
Income is comparable over time. Social class of father's occupation is less
comparable over time, so you are not quite comparing like with like, for the
reasons that Jo has given. Mothers are much more important these days. The male
breadwinner model that might be used to justify fathers' occupations is much
less credible than it used to be. So you can reconcile why the results are
giving you different findings in short-run comparisons.
The
other point is that, even just considering fathers' occupations, the labour
market treats those occupations very differently now from 30 years ago. Income
or earnings within almost all the social class, father's occupation groups has
widened. You are not comparing the same things over time if you examine
father's occupation social class, whereas income is at least broadly comparable
over time.
On
the other hand, we do not have the measure of permanent income and lifetime
income that we would like; we have snapshot measures of income, which we hope
are strongly correlated to permanent income, but for some people they might not
be. We may be catching some people, at the point when they respond to a survey,
in a low-income period even though they are high-income people. That causes a
little bias in the results that we get.
<Dr.
Blanden:> I think-
<Chairman:> Sorry, we are
going to move on, because everyone likes to get their questions in.
<Mr. Heppell:> I wish to ask
a question that leads on from that subject.
<Chairman:> A very quick
one, John.
Q25 <Mr.
Heppell:> It will be quick.
You
seem to be giving us a lot of reasons why the two sets of figures do not
completely stack together. From our point of view as policy makers, which
should we give more credence to-the economic analysis, with its bumps, or the
social analysis?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> It depends, I think, on what you are
ultimately interested in. If you are interested in things like consumption
patterns, you should look at income. You can spend income, you cannot spend
social class. I would argue that, if you are interested in a range of life
chances, class is generally more consequential than income.
A
report by the Office for National Statistics came out a few weeks ago, on
social inequalities in adult male mortality, using the same class schema that
we use. It showed massive differences. Class is making a difference to life
chances in a quite literal sense. I also argue, although Steve and Jo might not
agree, that the link between parental class and children's educational attainment
is stronger than the link between family income and children's educational
attainment. I think that I will be able to show that within a few months. So it
depends what you want.
<Chairman:> This is
developing into a really high-class and very interesting seminar. In passing, I
noticed something that you said and I thought I ought to put on the record that
I thought the Jackson and Marsden research many years ago-in the early
1960s?-showed that the relationship between mothers and the educational attainment
of children was vital; much more important than the men. It is an old piece of
research, but it made me think that people had discovered this point an awfully
long time ago. The research was carried out in Huddersfield, incidentally.
Q26 <Mr.
Stuart:> I am finding this fascinating, but difficult to get my head
round. To return briefly to the Gorard
attack, or critique, of your findings, you mentioned table 1 in your 2005
paper. After his criticisms, you cited
other broader evidence to back your point; in particular you cited Jantti et
al. When Gorard checked that evidence,
he said that he was unsurprised-as you can tell, he is a pretty permanent
critic of yours-to find that Jantti did not say the same as you, but concluded
that the United Kingdom bears a closer resemblance to the Nordic countries than
to the United States. I do not want to
carry on this academic war for too long.
<Chairman:> I think that
we should enunciate it.
<Mr. Stuart:> Do you think
that it has been done to death?
<Chairman:> No. Do you want to come back on that point?
<Professor
Machin:> We can.
To move away from our findings, I tend to be in line with Gary Solon's
interpretation of international evidence.
You have got to ask whether Britain looks like the Nordic countries in terms
of income inequality, how egalitarian the education systems are and so on. You have to make a judgment call yourselves
on that matter. I think that it is
simply not right that they are similar.
Q27 <Fiona
Mactaggart:> So are you saying that we do not need your
work, if we have to make a judgment call ourselves?
<Professor
Machin:> No, I was trying to move the discussion away
from our work and say that there is independent evidence from elsewhere that is
very much in line with our findings. I
stand by our findings. I think that
they are right.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> If you look at cross-national comparisons of
class mobility, Britain is not bottom, but in a mediocre position. We are not Derby County, but are more like
Southampton. The Chelseas, Arsenals and
Manchester Uniteds that are right up at the top, with the greatest class
mobility, are undoubtedly the Nordic countries.
Q28 <Chairman:>
But they are funny little countries-especially Finland.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Funny little countries can, in some ways, set
us some examples. Down at the bottom
would be places like Germany-still-and Italy.
France is quite interesting. It
was pretty low down, but is one of the countries where fluidity within the
class structure has clearly been increasing.
It is something of a mystery as to why that is. Broadly, our findings on this matter are in
line with that assessment. I would not
put Britain at the bottom, but in a low to middling position. Incidentally, the idea that the United
States is the great land of opportunity is a complete myth.
Q29 <Mr.
Stuart:> Yes. Following on
from that, basically you are saying that the social mobility of the late-20th
century was due, essentially, to structural change and an increase in
opportunities higher up the ladder, rather than to any great increase in social
fluidity. There has been a closing of
those opportunities since the great post-war surge. Your evidence, disputed though it is, would suggest that we have
stayed fairly static in terms of social mobility and social fluidity, which is
about the symmetrical up and down movement between classes. There is some suggestion that there are
higher rates in other countries. Is
that a fair summary?
Some
questions that we, as policy makers, need to ask are whether that matters and
whether we should be focusing less on social mobility and fluidity and more on
educational attainment. The
Government's main focus, to be fair to them, is on getting people up to certain
grades at certain levels so that everybody gets a decent education and the
opportunities that come with that. In a
sense, it is up to them whether their social and cultural environment and
upbringing drives them to be more or less ambitious in terms of class or
income.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I would agree with you. I think that it is a mistake to review
education and educational policy purely on instrumental terms. It should not rely solely on what it will
contribute to people getting ahead and getting on, and being socially mobile. There are two strong arguments for why I would
like to see greater social mobility and fluidity. One argument is from the
standpoint of social justice. It is
important that every child should have as good an opportunity as he or she
possibly can to develop their potentialities to the fullest extent.
Q30 <Mr.
Stuart:> If you look at it from the traditional left-wing
perspective of a working-class party such as Labour has been, why should you
dictate, from your middle-class academic eyrie, what the aspirations and
outcomes should be for children, as long as the state ensures that they get a
decent education as of right, and that they and their families make choices
about where they want to go? Why should
everyone go into higher education because you say so, if they and their
families do not want them to?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> You mistake me. I am not trying to dictate to them at all. I am simply concerned that they should have
the widest possible range of choice. It
is then, of course, up to them what choices they make.
The
second argument for more social mobility is from the standpoint of social
efficiency. It is important that any
country makes the fullest possible use of its human resources. If you have a society in which there are
rather arbitrary limits on what people can achieve, simply as a result of the
accident of their birth, that is not a good situation for economic success or
the success of society more generally.
It worries me how much talent we see simply being wasted.
<Professor
Machin:> I was going to use similar logic, and talk
about the waste-of-talent argument. I
would make that argument on the basis of economic efficiency. If some talented people would be far more
productive in the labour market if they were given the opportunity to get
through to higher levels of education, for example-it does not necessarily have
to be education, it could also be working in the job market, in terms of who is
hired by particular kinds of employers-national productivity could rise because
those people with high levels of ability and talent are able to fulfil those
levels. If we think that we have low
levels of social mobility which is stopping people moving up the ladder as much
as they could or should do, you can make an argument for economic efficiency.
Q31 <Mr.
Stuart:> I suppose I was trying to identify the fact that it is
about educational outcomes, so the Government need to deliver the groundings in
a way that they have not done so far.
We know that at six years old, or at very early ages, you can determine
the educational outcomes of a child if they do not make early progress. So, targeting additional resources, skills,
or any structural change necessary, in order to ensure that children from the
poorest, least advantaged backgrounds get a decent basic education, is what you
can do materially to provide them with that opportunity.
<Professor
Machin:> We are not necessarily talking about people
with higher or frustrated levels of talent because they do not get to realise
their potential. We are still talking
about people who could even just stay on after the compulsory school leaving
age, who do not these days, for reasons that are set in place earlier on in the
system. It does not apply only to
people going to university or FE colleges.
It applies to people who are even leaving school and getting level 2
vocational qualifications, for which they do not seem to receive a return from
employers. Those kind of investments
need to be sharpened so that the potential of those people with talent, who are
not currently allowed to go through, can be realised.
Q32 <Ms
Butler:> My word, this throw up so many questions. I am not sure that I agree with Dr.
Goldthorpe that upward mobility also increases downward mobility. If there are more jobs at the top, as Leitch
says there will be, how would that be the case? I do not want you to get into that matter though, I simply wanted
to make that statement.
<Mr. Stuart:> You have to
let him answer.
<Ms Butler:> As Professor
Machin just touched on this, if we are to compete on the global market, as we
know that we must, do you think that the Government's direction with regard to
the Children's Plan, the education Bill and diplomas will help to resolve this
stickiness that you have talked about and the social inequalities? Do you think
that those measures are part of a solution to the problem?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Your first point is really a logical issue.
If you reduce the stickiness between parents' and children's class position, it
must mean that you increase mobility in every direction. That follows on
logically and mathematically.
Q33 <Chairman:>
But Dawn was saying that they might be getting jobs in New York or Paris. This
is not a UK-bound economy.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> They could indeed be moving elsewhere, and we
know that that is increasingly happening. In modern economies it is important
to ensure that we have an adequately trained and skilled work force if we are
going to compete globally. Ed Miliband put it to me that something like Say's
law, which is known by economists, may operate here. Supply may create its own
demand. If we have a very highly qualified work force, that may, in the global
context, attract higher-level professional and managerial positions to this
country. That is a valid point. The operation of that process may just help us
to keep the existing proportion of higher-level positions rather than leading
to any substantial increase in it.
On
the question of Government policy on qualifications and schools, I am rather
sceptical about how far diversifying school types is likely to help with the
problem of social mobility. It may have advantages in other respects. I do not
see it contributing very much to social mobility. For example, I remain
sceptical about what can be achieved in this direction by academies and
specialist or faith schools. We need much more research on the effects of such
schools. In the case of academies, it is too limited to look at only whether
academies are improving the performance of the children within them. You have
to look at what is happening to other schools in the academy's catchment area.
That is absolutely crucial. David Blunkett had some very good observations on
that point in the report that he has just produced.
Q34 <Chairman:>
John, is your view on diversity based on research, or is it just a view that
you have?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> It is based not on my research, but on
research that other people have carried out. The research looks at those areas
of the country in which grammar schools exist alongside comprehensives. If you
look at the overall performance of those areas, you focus not just on the
grammar schools, but on the whole school system in that area. Generally, the
overall level of performance is not as good as it is in areas in which there
are no selective schools. Although the academies are still in the very early
stages, my worry is that something of the same kind could happen. If you put a
lot of resources into one school in an area and make it a better school,
parents in that area will want to get their children into that school. The more
educationally aware and ambitious parents succeed in that, which then increases
the performance of that school. However, I want to know what happens to other
schools in the same catchment area.
<Chairman:> May we come
back to Dawn's second question or she will blame me for diverting you?
Q35 <Ms
Butler:> I have forgotten what my second question was. I will ask a
completely different question. In your 2007 paper, you talked about
non-cognitive factors and how they may be becoming more determinant in people's
employment prospects Can you explain that?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Yes.
We hear a lot of talk about a knowledge-based economy. In one sense that is true and we certainly
need a cadre of highly qualified professional and technical personnel to
service that economy, but if you look at the statistics of where the real
growth in employment is, it tends to be in the services sector, especially in
sales and personal services. In that
area, many positions even at a high level do not make enormous demands on
cognitive ability. Obviously, they
require a basic level of literacy and numeracy, but in personal services and
sales a whole range of non-cognitive attributes become important, such as
social and communication skills and even personal and lifestyle
characteristics.
Q36 <Ms
Butler:> But does not that mean that non-cognitive behaviour can get
you through the door, but for progression up the career ladder, non-cognitive
behaviour will only take you so far?
You would need to back it up by being able to do the job.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> It does mean that. It also means-here is another interesting finding about education
and social mobility that we have come up with-that high levels of education are
crucial for working-class children who want to make it into the professional
and managerial salariat. If you look at
children who were born into the professional and managerial salariat who do not
do all that well educationally, they often do not come down to any great
extent, because they have other resources.
They exploit the kind of soft skills and personal characteristics that
they acquired not through schools and colleges but from being socialised in
their families and communities to make their way-often in managerial positions
in the services sector. If, for
example, you are selling high-value real estate, cars of marque or high-value
fashion, you do not need a PhD in chemical engineering. It is much more important that you are on
the same wavelength as your clients and customers. The whole notion of meritocracy becomes very problematic
here.
Q37 <Chairman:>
You mean that you have to be as crass as your customers?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Those soft skills and personal
characteristics have real productive value, and employers in that field realise
that.
Q38 <Ms
Butler:> So, you agree that diplomas in non-cognitive skills would
be useful?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> This is a very interesting question. Can one really train people in those soft
skills and lifestyle characteristics in the same way that one can train people
in cognitive or technical skills? The
jury is still out on that. The point
that I am really making is that many children from more advantaged backgrounds
just have those skills through their socialisation. It is more of a problem for other children, I agree.
Q39 <Ms
Butler:> I disagree-what you have just touched on is
individual. An individual from a more
advantaged background would not necessarily have better cognitive skills than
someone from a less-advantaged background, because people from less-advantaged
backgrounds have to be more inventive to survive in life. Anyway, I wanted to end by telling the
African proverb that if you teach a woman, you educate a village. That probably came way before any academic
economist.
<Mr. Carswell:> I have four
questions for Stephen and Jo, and two for John.
<Chairman:> Get on with
it.
Q40 <Mr.
Carswell:> Thank you; it is very generous of you,
Chairman.
I
am looking at your 2005 and 2007 papers.
You note a sharp rise in the correlation between family and common
educational attainment.
<Dr.
Blanden:> Yes.
Q41 <Mr.
Carswell:> That suggests that more of those who are able
to afford it, by buying it either directly or indirectly through buying a house
in a nice catchment area, are able to buy a better education. There is less scope now than there was for
bright kids from low-income backgrounds to do well in education and to be
socially mobile. Does that not suggest
that the comprehensive education system itself has diminished social mobility,
and that the apartheid system of education in this country where 90-plus per
cent. go to state schools, a tiny percentage go to independent schools, and a
tiny number of children within the state system are able to go to selective
schools-that the status quo itself-is diminishing social mobility?
<Dr.
Blanden:> First, I shall say something about the
grammar schools question. When we
initially found the results, it was speculated that there could be a
contribution from comprehensivisation, so it is a difficult question to consider. However, an interesting finding from a
colleague of ours, Dr. Sandra McNally, indicates that what happened over that
period with grammar schools could not explain the fall in inter-generational
income mobility that we find, because it exists at age 11-before grammar
schools come into the picture.
Q42 <Mr.
Carswell:> I did not actually mention grammar
schools. That is a bit of a cul-de-sac
of an argument, in which I have little interest. The centrally driven state-run system of education has diminished
social mobility, as you say, pre-11. Do
you agree?
<Dr.
Blanden:> Diminished mobility? Steve, do you want to come in?
<Professor
Machin:> It is hard to think about that, but some
inequalities have arisen over time. If
you look at the labour market outcomes, one feature of rising income inequality
and widening income distribution has been the increasing labour market returns
to education. Given a higher
educational level now, people get paid more, relative to a lower educational
level, than they did 25 years ago. You
can break that down across different groups, but it is talking about an average
return to education going up over time, so education on average is becoming
more valuable in the labour market.
You
can break it up into different groups.
One group that has done better is people who are educated in independent
schools. The labour market returns to
an independent, private-school, education have gone up more than they have to a
state school education, so that is kind of in line with your argument. The long-term implications may well be
something to do with the structural nature of the education system.
Q43 <Mr.
Carswell:> I am interested in whether there is a
relationship between diminishing social mobility and the centralisation of big
Government involvement in education.
My
second question is that if one wants and believes that upward social mobility
is good, you presumably need to try to unhook-if that is the right
word-educational attainment from family income, and you therefore need as a
public policy maker a mechanism to allow people from low-income backgrounds the
choices that currently only those with money can buy. You need a mechanism whereby, rather than creating social
equality by restricting choice for everyone, you allow everyone the choices
that currently only the rich people have.
Do you agree?
<Professor
Machin:> I feel that there are various dimensions to
that, and various policies have been introduced to try to do precisely that:
the educational maintenance allowance tries to get children who would not
otherwise have stayed on at school to do so; and Sure Start is trying to level
the playing field before children enter the primary school system. So, if you
believe that education is a key driver of social mobility, such policies are
targeted at people from lower-than-average-income backgrounds.
Q44 <Mr.
Carswell:> Do you think that the Government's two recent
announcements, including raising the school leaving age, will help?
<Chairman:> The Government
have not mentioned any such thing.
<Mr. Carswell:> Okay. Do you think that using a lottery to
allocate places as one-
<Chairman:> You can ask
the first question, but do phrase it in terms of the fact that it is not
raising the school leaving age, but raising the level until you leave education
and training.
<Mr. Carswell:> Do you want to
ask my questions for me?
<Chairman:> No, but if you
ask them in such a loaded way you make it difficult for the professor to
answer.
<Mr. Carswell:> Can I ask my
question?
<Chairman:> Yes.
Q45 <Mr.
Carswell:> Thank you.
Do
you think that if the Government used or encouraged the use of a lottery to
allocate places, as an official suggested to the Committee the other week, that
would enhance or reduce social mobility?
<Professor
Machin:> The lottery system for school admissions is
presumably to try and take away the criteria of distance in terms of that being important for school
admissions. We know that one aspect of
inequality that has arisen in response to distance being the main criterion for
getting to school has been the selection by mortgage issue, about people buying
properties at higher house prices in places where there is a better school
nearby; so if you wanted to unlock that aspect of distortion in the housing
market, presumably relaxing the distance criterion-one way to do which is
through a lottery; it is not the only way to do it-would have the desired
impact in terms of weakening the link between house prices and perceived school
quality.
Whether
people think that is a good thing or a bad thing I do not know, but that is the
key outcome that would arise. Of
course, it would be going away from the traditional community school idea and
you would probably be making children travel further to school, if there was a
lottery to go anywhere. That might not
necessarily be a good thing. There are
pros and cons, I think. The key thing,
in terms of reforming school admissions in that way, would be the impact on
local housing markets. Of course that
is an aspect of inequality that we might be interested in. It is probably something that is related to
the extent of social mobility.
On
the first question, do you want me to answer about raising the age?
Q46 <Mr.
Carswell:> I would like you to, if that is allowed. Would raising the age at which people leave
education have an impact?
<Professor
Machin:> To 18?
Most of the evidence from across the world suggests that when you
increase compulsory school-leaving levels the level of education goes up, so
that people who are compelled to stay on clearly raise their educational
levels, and most of the evidence seems to suggest that that yields a labour
market return to education, so making them get an extra year's education has a
pay-off in the labour market. On
productivity grounds, from a purely economic viewpoint, that seems to be a good
thing.
<Dr.
Blanden:> Given that those people are likely to be from
poor backgrounds, you could see a knock-on impact on social mobility, because
those people are getting an earnings gain relative to what they would have had
before, because they are from the bottom, perhaps, of the income distribution;
but I would imagine it is not going to be huge.
<Professor
Machin:> There is a lot of evidence from different
places, so when different states in the US have raised their compulsory
school-leaving ages you can compare what happens in those states with what
happens in other states that do not raise their compulsory school-leaving
age. In different countries the raising
of the school-leaving age has been sequential, so in the Scandinavian
countries, for example, different municipalities raised the age at different
times, and it seems to yield labour market returns to the people who are
treated, if you like, by the increased compulsory school-leaving age. You can make a productivity argument for it
on those grounds.
Q47 <Mr.
Carswell:> Thank you. I have two further questions for
John, if I may. On the point that Dawn seemed to touch on, you seemed to
suggest that social mobility was a zero sum game-that one person's gain
necessarily means someone else's loss.
Indeed, I think you said in the context of women getting highly paid
jobs that men must do worse, as there are only a limited number of jobs. A number of economists have disagreed with
that view since the 1770s, but do you really think that social mobility is a
zero sum game? Can we not all be better
off socio-economically?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Certainly
we can all be socio-economically better off.
I do not say that social mobility is necessarily a zero sum game. As I tried to explain, in the middle decades
of the last century it was clearly a positive sum game, because as one aspect
of general economic growth and development you have this expansion of
professional and managerial positions growing room at the top, so you could in
that case have steadily rising rates of upward mobility and, at the same time,
rising rates of immobility within the more advantaged strata.
What
I am saying now is that we cannot expect anything like a repeat of that
mid-20th century experience. That was
an historical one-off that had to do with the massive growth in Government and
with the massive development of health, education, social welfare. Also, in the private sector, large business
firms created great administrative and managerial bureaucracies. We are not going to get back to that kind of
rapid and sustained growth at the top.
Under such structural conditions, social mobility becomes more of a zero
sum game. If you have a more or less
fixed structure, there must be balance between the number upwardly mobile
people and how far they go, and the number who are downwardly mobile, and how
far they go. That is a kind of
demographic-cum-mathematical fact.
<Chairman:> Last question.
Q48 <Mr.
Carswell:> I have just been reading a book called "The Long
Tail" by a guy called Anderson, and I imagine that he would disagree with what
you said.
Finally,
you said something about how the United States lacks social mobility. I respect your esteemed academic research
and I am sure that you have interviewed and studied lots of Americans, but do
you think the fact that tens of millions of people vote with their feet and go
to America because it is an aspirational country means that at least some
people disagree with you? They believe
that there is some sort of upward mobility in the States.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> In the period of mass emigration to the
United States from Europe, America had higher rates of social mobility but they
have subsequently declined. A recent
large-scale study by two American economic historians brings that out. I was talking about the period from the
1950s or 1960s to the present, when American mobility came much closer to the
European pattern.
Q49 <Stephen
Williams:> Thank you.
I need to ask one question on fluidity between groups to Dr.
Goldthorpe. In your paper, you say that
that might lead to uncomfortable policy choices or discussions for politicians
say, for example, on participation in higher education. It is not in any of the papers that you have
written that we have read before this sitting, but I have read elsewhere that
the child of a family in the highest social class by income-broadly, the
professional and managerial class, of whom many will have been to
university-has an 85% chance of participating in higher education. People at the other end of the income
distribution have a 13% to 15% chance, which is broadly unchanged in the past
20 years. Therefore, there is a
saturation at one end, and, arguably, massive untapped potential at the
other. Is your argument that politicians
ought to be thinking that fewer people from the higher backgrounds should go to
university so that more people from the lower background can go? Is that the sort of uncomfortable discussion
that we should be having?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> No, I would not want to restrict
opportunity.
Q50 <Stephen
Williams:> You said that if some people go up, some
people have to come down.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I am sorry, there is a difference. If you are talking about inequalities in
educational attainment, you would not be constrained in that way. You can expand the room at the top in
tertiary education. Indeed, that has
been done-massively.
Q51 <Stephen
Williams:> But the expanded space has been filled up by
people at the top of the social scale, who have benefited. Is it an inverse pyramid?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> That may be something that one must live
with. I do not believe that everybody
will want to go into tertiary education.
I am not too happy with targets such as 50% of people going into higher
education. The important thing ought to
be that any young person, or even older person, who wants to go into higher
education, and who has the minimum capacity to benefit from it, should have the
opportunity to do so. We should let the
numbers be what they are, rather than setting targets. There is an important difference between
social class and education and class mobility.
I do not think that reducing class differentials in educational
attainment can be thought of as a zero sum game. I see it more as creating a level playing field.
Q52 <Annette
Brooke:> May I backtrack to ensure that I am clear in my mind about
some of the things that you are saying?
First
of all, I think I have got this bit clear, in terms of the fall in
intergenerational mobility between the 1958 and 1970 cohorts, Dr. Goldthorpe,
you said fairly clearly that a lot of that was structural because occupations
have changed?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Yes.
Q53 <Annette
Brooke:> Professor Machin, in one of your conclusions you say that
that fall was an episode caused by particular circumstances of the time. Do you identify the same circumstances as
Dr. Goldthorpe, or are they different circumstances and time periods? I apologise if this is me not reading the
material thoroughly.
<Professor
Machin:> No, we are clearly studying the same time
period and thinking about the same structural changes. The one that I would tend to emphasise would
be the fact that income inequality rose a lot in Britain since the late 1970s. One way of thinking about that is that if you
are going to move up the income distribution in your own generation, or indeed
move down the income distribution in your own generation, you have further to
travel. If the distribution is wider,
to move up the distribution you have further to travel in income terms. One of the key structural changes that has
occurred is that the distribution of income has got wider and the other one
that we talk about in our work as a key factor is the link between education
and family income. That seemed to have
strengthened at the same time as we saw the fall in social mobility.
Q54 <Annette
Brooke:> Good, that follows on, so everybody is actually agreeing
that early education is quite important in terms of final outcomes, am I
correct? Dr. Goldthorpe is
nodding. Looking at actual policy
implications, now that I have got all of that clear in my head, there are lots
of statistics knocking around about children from disadvantaged backgrounds who
have a fraction of the vocabulary of somebody from a more middle-class background-or
a higher-income background, probably-at age three, and that is incredibly
pronounced by the age of five, when the child starts school. We are clearly identifying that early years
education is important. We have had
massive investment since 1997 in this area.
These are very early days, in terms of you making any firm conclusions
about it, but I would like to ask you individually whether you have any
comments on the effectiveness of the big investment in Sure Start and early
learning that we have had over the last 11 years?
<Professor
Machin:> I have already said this once, but most
people tend to think that you are likely to get a bigger return on educational
investments that take place early on in childhood. That is not to say that later investments do not yield a return
at all, in fact quite the opposite.
Q55 <Annette
Brooke:> Can we home in on the effectiveness, rather than this large
global sum of money? I am saying, have
we spent it wisely?
<Professor
Machin:> It is still too early days to properly
evaluate the impact of Sure Start, and indeed it will be many years away before
we can really do that, because we want to see whether it has long-standing
effects on children when they become adults, so we want to know how important
that will be. One can certainly make
the argument, and it is an argument that I agree with, that the returns to
early years investment are probably going to be higher than the returns to
later years investment in education.
Notwithstanding that, you have still got to carry on investing, because
there is certainly some evidence from the US to say that some pre-school
investments do have an impact on children's outcomes, although they tend to
decay as children enter their schooling years and particularly their teenage years. Some of them are actually not that
long-standing, so that still suggests that you have to be doing things later
on.
In
terms of Sure Start itself and the logic for it, you can compare it with what
has happened in the comparable policy in the US that was introduced many years
before-Head Start. Head Start seems to
have had some long-standing effects, particularly on outcomes like crime. Individuals who received benefits from Head
Start seem to be much less likely to participate in crime than people who did
not receive it, as teenagers and as young adults. It is too early days, but I would argue that it is probably the
right logic to think about intervening early because many of the inequalities
you see by age 16, when people are deciding whether to stay on at school or
not, or even by five when they enter school, many of the inequalities are
already in place there. Many of them
widen out during the school years, but the foundations of them are set in place
early on, I think.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I agree with Stephen that it is too early to
make any definitive assessment. My
reading of the evidence on pre-school programmes generally is that they work if
they are high value, and that means if they are fairly expensive. You have to
make a big investment. If they are not high value and high quality, there is
evidence of wash-out effects. They have an initial impact but it is not
sustained.
Sure
Start was a very good idea in principle. I have some worries, and I know that
they are shared by quite a few people, about the way in which it is developing.
It was developing primarily into a kind of child care programme. If that is so,
it worries me that one is not getting the targeting on those children who have
the greatest need for it, those children whose parents are perhaps not as
educationally aware and supportive as they might be. I see the difficulty here
in that there was a concern not to stigmatise these families by focusing Sure
Start too sharply on them, but it would be a danger if the families who benefited
most from Sure Start were not those in greatest need of the kind of support
that it can give. I hope that that can be looked at.
My
general position on this is that I would agree with what Jo and Stephen said:
fundamentally the most effective interventions are those in the pre-school and
early primary school years, but to be successful they have to be high quality
and therefore expensive. The kind of intervention that I am thinking about at
16 plus could be rather more cost-effective because EMAs are not all that
expensive compared with the cost of Sure Start programmes. I would like to see
more research being done on why there is this loss of talent aged 16, and
whether EMAs could be developed and sharpened up somewhat to try to remedy
that. There is real potential here that could be achieved at a relatively low
cost.
Q56 <Annette
Brooke:> I have one brief question. I know that this is strictly
speaking out of your particular fields, but if any of this is going to mean
anything we need evaluation of all these different policies. In your general
reading across all this-
<Chairman:> Who is this
directed at?
<Annette Brooke:> Both. One
at a time. In your view is there sufficient evaluation going on out there,
albeit at Government or university level, on these programmes?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> No.
<Chairman:> Stephen?
<Professor
Machin:> It is getting better, but it is still not
enough. There are more serious evaluations of lots of the initiatives that have
been introduced more recently, particularly education initiatives. But we could
do with more and we could do with some better designed experiments to try to
evaluate certain educational initiatives as well.
<Chairman:> Jo Blanden?
<Dr.
Blanden:> I agree with Stephen. The Centre for the
Economics of Education, which we are both members of, has been involved in
evaluating a number of these policy interventions, like Excellence in Cities,
the literacy hour and EMAs. We are building up a larger base of knowledge of
how to go about evaluating policies. That has been greatly helped by the fact
that we have been given more data in recent years to do that. We certainly
would not want to go backwards at all.
Q57 <Chairman:>
Have you seen some of the early research on Sure Start? One of the problems was
that it was left to local communities to design their own. Some of them did not
hit the proper targets because so much emphasis was placed on local design.
<Professor
Machin:> Some of the initial evidence that I have seen
was that in places where it worked well it tended to be hijacked by the middle
classes who used all the facilities, and in places where it was not designed so
well and was left to local decision making and stuff, people did not really
take advantage of it.
<Chairman:> Does that not put a big question mark over
the local example? I am not getting any response at all. Annette, I am moving
on to David.
Q58 <Mr.
Chaytor:> I want to ask Professor Machin and Dr.
Blanden about the way in which their initial report was picked up by a wide
range of people. To what extent do you
think that your evidence or conclusions were hijacked and distorted by this
interest?
<Professor
Machin:> I do not think that "hijacked" is quite
right.
<Dr.
Blanden:> No, I don't think so.
<Professor
Machin:> We wrote a report for the Sutton Trust
summarising our findings. Part of the
misuse of our work was because we had to write a very short summary, rather
than a long academic paper that covered every possible caveat, robustness
checks and so on. The summary piece was
very short and it was then used by people in different ways who gave it
different interpretations. One of the
key things about the work is that it has received so much attention that it
must be something that people find very interesting, relevant and
innovative. In some senses, we did the
research, and then it has gone to a secondary stage where people use the
research. Unlike a lot of academic
research, this has been used by many different people-practitioners, policy
makers and so on. In some senses,
however, it is true of all research that people will still put their own
interpretation on the findings that emerge.
Q59 <Mr.
Chaytor:> But when you became aware that politicians
and other public commentators were giving it a specific interpretation, and
actually making no reference to the issue of the structural change in the
economy between the early '50s and perhaps up to the 1974 oil price crisis, did
you make any effort to challenge the interpretations that were made?
<Professor
Machin:> We have written a series of papers on the
issue that look at different but related questions, and we clarify what we have
done in those papers. We have written
some survey pieces: we have a survey chapter in a book that I edited, where we
discuss more generally what the findings suggest and place them in a much wider
context. The research is still ongoing
for us because we are still very interested.
One of the things that I said on the three pieces of work we have done
thus far, was that we are very interested in trying to learn what we can say
about more recent patterns of change in intergenerational mobility. That is what concerns us from a policy
perspective: the children currently going through the education system, and
what social mobility will be like for them when they become adults. We are trying to think about ways in which
the academic work could be developed in that direction.
<Dr.
Blanden:> One of the reasons we have done a more recent
report-although we are a bit limited in what we know because the children are
still in school-is to find out what has happened for cohorts post 1970. We were interested in doing that so that
people were not using older results to extrapolate in a way that was not
justified. You cannot prevent people
from doing that, you can say it is wrong but they will carry on until you give
them something new to say. That is
something that we were very conscious of.
The debate that we have had with John, and the way that we have thought
about the interactions between income mobility and social class mobility is, to
my mind, a good example of how academic debate can move things forward and help
us to understand how different perspectives can give slightly different
findings. We have been very open to
that.
Q60 <Mr.
Chaytor:> Could I ask all of you, from your distinct
academic perspectives, what conclusions about educational policy we can draw
from this? We have talked about Sure
Start, we have talked about EMAs and the expansion of higher education, but
what conclusions do you draw in terms of the structure of schooling, both
primary and secondary-the relative merits of hierarchical structures as against
flatter structures?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Hierarchical or flatter in terms of
educational systems?
Q61 <Mr.
Chaytor:> In terms of the schooling system. You commented on diversity and expressed some
scepticism about that with regard to an increase in social mobility.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Yes.
Q62 <Mr.
Chaytor:> I am interested in the issue of hierarchy, of
a system of primary schools and secondary schools that are structured in a
hierarchical and highly selective way.
What conclusions do you draw from that?
Secondly, do you think there is any relevance to the issue of social
mobility in the system of testing and assessment we have? That is the subject of another inquiry that
the Committee is involved in at the moment.
Do you think that an intensive testing system in which certain groups of
children are repeatedly failed has any relationship to the level of social mobility
or not? That question is for Dr. Goldthorpe,
to start with.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> On testing, I have to say that I have not
done research in this area and I am not very expert about consequences of
it. My gut feeling, for what it is
worth, is that testing has become overdone, and there is evidence that exposing
children to the possibility of repeated failure is not good for their academic
confidence and performance.
On
school systems, I generally favour comprehensive systems. If we go back to considering the Nordic
countries, accepting that they are quite small and perhaps peculiar countries,
they do have fairly well developed comprehensive systems and there is some
evidence that that has played a part in the fact that they have lower class
differentials in educational attainment than we have in this country. That is comprehensive education combined
with what in British parlance we would call fairly extensive setting at older
ages. That seems to me the best way of
avoiding the essential arbitrariness of earlier selection, while still making adequate
provision for children of differing aptitudes in different directions. In general, I am in favour of what you call
flatter rather than more hierarchical educational systems.
<Professor
Machin:> On one aspect of the hierarchy, there is some
evidence that countries that have earlier tracking in the education system have
higher educational inequalities.
Germany is a very clear example.
They track at age 11 into the three-
Q63 <Mr.
Chaytor:> Earlier tracking-earlier selection?
<Dr.
Blanden:> Yes.
Selection.
<Professor
Machin:> Yes.
Putting people on a track at an earlier age. There is evidence that that leads to educational inequalities,
largely because people are not able to move across tracks very much, so that is
having some impact on mobility in the early years and then subsequently-
Q64 <Chairman:>
Decreasing or increasing?
<Professor
Machin:> It increases inequalities, because it
restricts people to being on a particular track.
On
the testing regimes, I do not know of any evidence that particularly links the
presence of a national testing regime to aspects of social mobility. You could make theoretical arguments either
way, I would have thought. If everybody
takes the same national tests, that is at least levelling the playing field so
that everybody has the potential to do quite well, rather than selecting people
according to certain examinations that they may or may not take, which was the
old system, certainly for O-levels rather than GCSEs. If we want to make the talent argument and if people are not
constrained by other things, presumably letting everybody have a go is quite a
good thing.
Whether
that is placing much more stress on people from different social backgrounds is
an open question. Again, I do not
know. I do not know of any research
that has looked at that in any detail and I cannot quite work out how you would
be able to do very good research on that question, notwithstanding the fact
that it is an important question. It is
not one I know much about myself.
<Dr.
Blanden:> I just wanted to follow on from the testing
point. High-stakes testing throughout
the schooling system may encourage parents to exercise their choices more at an
earlier age. To that extent, it could
be associated with selection by postcode.
It could be promoting that to a certain extent, but that is only a
theoretical thought that I had just as Steve was speaking.
Q65 <Mr.
Chaytor:> May I ask one other question? It relates to your conclusion about the
impact of access to the expanded higher education system being
disproportionately monopolised by young people from middle-class families. Surely the real test of the value of an
expanded HE sector will come only when we see the entry into the job market of
a broader base of HE entrants.
Inevitably,
when the system expanded from the mid-'80s, it was the group of middle-class
young people who had done quite well at school but had not previously gone into
HE who gobbled up the opportunities, because they were best placed to do so.
Surely we will have to wait until the post-'97 cohort, which is a much wider
social base of graduates, enters the labour market to see whether the expansion
has had any significant effect on social mobility. Is it not too early to say
whether there is an effect?
<Professor
Machin:> I would mostly agree. Some of the cohorts who
benefited from it in the early stages entered the labour market, but to
evaluate the whole expansion, yes, we probably need to wait a while.
Q66 <Mr.
Chaytor:> So when do you think we will have reliable
data about the real effect on social mobility of a significantly expanded HE
system?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> The next cohort after the 1970 one is the
2000 one, so we will be in the 2020s before we can see that. But something
could be done if those running the general lifestyle module, formerly the
general household survey, could be persuaded to reintroduce questions that
would help us with social mobility. They would not have to do it every year,
just once every three or five years.
Another
thing that is very important in Government statistics generally is that we need
to break down the unitary category of tertiary education or degree. I know that
would be invidious and create problems, but we have to recognise that as
tertiary education has expanded it has become increasingly stratified. We need
to make some distinction between different levels of university, however
controversial that might be-say, Oxbridge, Russell group and then so-called
modern universities, with whatever is in between. One could discuss that. We also
need to collect information on the subject areas in which people get degrees,
because it is clear that returns to higher education, whether in earnings or
social class, will become increasingly variable. If we want to evaluate the
outcome of the expansion of tertiary education, we must treat it in a far more
differentiated way than hitherto.
Q67 <Mr.
Chaytor:> So in respect of the changes necessary to the
GLM to provide the kind of evidence that you need to draw significant
conclusions, is there an agreed set of questions that you or other academics
have argued for? One of the most saddening things about the background papers
was the change in 1993, which took out the question of social background.
Should that be restored?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> There is a big difference. With the birth cohort studies, there are
standing committees of academics to discuss the questions. With the GLM, we
have little input-at least, as far as I know, not of any formalised kind.
Q68 <Mr.
Chaytor:> Who determines the questions that go into it?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> The Office for National Statistics, and
various Government Departments can-
Q69 <Mr.
Chaytor:> This is a highly politically charged issue,
is it not? The questions that are being asked are not delivering the relevant
answers that academics need to assess the impact of Government policy.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I tried very hard to find out why they
stopped collecting the relevant data in 1993, and I have never been able to get
a satisfactory answer. It may just have been an accident.
Q70 <Chairman:>
So would you academics like it reinstituted? Would you like this Committee to
recommend that that kind of data be reinstituted?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> Yes please.
<Professor
Machin:> That is of direct relevance to John's work,
and I concur-it would be a good thing. It would be of high practical relevance
to John's work on social class.
Q71 <Fiona
Mactaggart:> I have found the papers that we have looked
at very hard, which is relevant to the discussion. The things that I know about
statistics I mostly read in a book published in 1954 that has been read by 1.5
million other people, by Darrell Huff, called "How to Lie With Statistics". His
first chapter relates to the built-in bias in a sample. He refers to the 1924 class of Yale
graduates who earned $25,111 a year. He pointed out that in that group of
people, those who earned the least had fallen out so that the stayers were
likely to be higher earners. He pointed out that it was not clear from the way
the questions were asked what the difference was between salary and other
income. He also suggested, with some evidence, that you cannot trust people
when they report income. Every single point seems to be relevant to your work,
but is not addressed in it.
<Professor
Machin:> All the things you said are part of our
day-to-day research. We have to face all such questions when we analyse survey
data and look at who responded to the survey-whether they are people in the
labour market, employers or consumers. Those are the kinds of things that we
have to look at when we do quantitative statistical research. We are very aware
of all of those points. We spend a lot of time in our research papers
concentrating on whether our samples are representative, whether there is a
measurement error in people's responses to the survey, what the framing of the
questions is and whether the questions are framed in the same way across
cohorts or whether there are discrepancies in the way questions are asked. We
look at all that and many other minute details when we do research.
Things
have moved on since the 1950s. We have various statistical techniques for
dealing with issues such as measurement error.
Q72 <Fiona
Mactaggart:> But these are very specific measurement
errors. They are not classic measurement error. Such errors will produce bias
in your results.
<Professor
Machin:> They may produce bias.
Q73 <Fiona
Mactaggart:> They will, because we know that the people
who fall out of these long cohort studies are absolutely most likely to be the
least prosperous. The 2,000 missing people from the figures in 1958 are likely
to be the poorest. The odds on that are massive.
<Professor
Machin:> Yes, we know that. I would not have said that
the odds were massive. We have various tables in various papers that we have
written in which we start with a full sample. We work down on the sample
restrictions that we make to end up with the sample that we look at.
Inevitably, people are lost. Even when people respond to a survey, some do not
answer all the questions. If we use a sample of x thousand people out of an
initial sample of y thousand, it is very important to say how we have got from
the representative sample of y thousand down to x thousand. We spend a lot of
time in our research being very careful about that. It is true that it is more
of an issue in some data sets than other data sets. In certain papers, we write
with different data sets and we have to look at that. That is something that we
are very aware of in our research and we have to very rigorous about it. We
have to assess the robustness of our results. Sure, people can lie with
statistics. They can also tell very representative stories about what is going
on as well.
Q74 <Fiona
Mactaggart:> Do not think that I am accusing you of
intending to lie. What I am concerned about is this whole business of the
conversation between politicians and researchers. The conversation is, in my
view, a pathetic one. The only politician who is cited in any of this
work-apart from quoting politicians who quote you-is Dr. Goldthorpe's reference
to Ed Miliband looking at some of his data. It seems to me that there is a
failure to converse and a failure to understand, which leads politicians
sometimes to lay greater weight on some of your conclusions than perhaps even
you would. Of course, you want people to use your conclusions. That is quite
important if you are going out looking for research grants from elsewhere.
Partly because of this conversation failure, we can be wrong about what the
data show. I heard David Cameron cite your work to imply that, under the Labour
Government, social mobility had massively reduced, which nobody who has read it
carefully would claim. Am I right?
<Dr.
Blanden:> Yes.
In fact, I was involved with the Channel 4 spotting of mistakes-I am not
sure what it is called-and picking up on Cameron's exact quote and trying to
set it right. We do try-that is the
best we can say. That is why we have
tried to follow it up. In terms of
attrition and measurement error, we are okay if neither of those things change
substantially between the two cohorts.
To a certain extent, we can never know absolutely if those things have
not changed.
Q75 <Fiona
Mactaggart:> Exactly; you have to guess. There is no magic way.
<Dr.
Blanden:> It is not guessing.
<Professor
Machin:> Indeed.
We have to be as scientific as we can from a research perspective. That is not guessing. Guessing would be someone just saying "Oh
yeah, it looks representative," or "No, it doesn't." That is not what we do; we spend an enormous amount of time
trying to be as scientific as we can in doing the research, otherwise there
would be no point in doing it.
Q76 <Fiona
Mactaggart:> I understand that. I am trying to point out that one consequence of that kind of
research is that people put weight on some examples that they do not bear out-I
have cited one such example with which Dr. Blanden agreed-and that, because you
cannot know certain things, you have to extrapolate using the best evidence
that you can in the circumstances. I
called it guessing, and I might have been exaggerating, but I did that for
effect.
You
cited some other work about the impact of Head Start and early years work. Some of the work that you cited was
presumably based on a quite controlled experiment with many fewer people than
the big panels that you used-the High/Scope Perry research for example. In such experiments, the same individuals,
not one panel in 1958 and another in 1970, are tracked over time and the
differences between the different groups are analysed. Is that a better way of studying these issues?
<Professor
Machin:> There are two points that I should like to
make in response to that. First,
returning to your point about dialogue between policy makers and researchers,
there is a potential conflict of interest, because policy makers have different
questions from academic researchers.
Sometimes they coincide, and sometimes they do not. That is why people might have different
incentives for interpreting results in different ways. Closer consultation on that is a good thing
in order to minimise that conflict of interest.
On
the second point about experimental versus non-experimental data, that is
something that we face a lot in the social sciences. We do not often have experiments that we can run in the same way
as those in the medical sciences.
However, we try to approximate them to the best of our ability, using
non-experimental data to evaluate particular questions of interest. There are no experiments out there on social
mobility. We cannot randomise somebody
into a particular family as they are growing up and compare them to a family in
which someone is not randomised into a higher or lower-income or higher or
lower social-class family. So we must
do what we can with non-experimental data.
There
are many studies out there comparing experimental outcomes with
non-experimental outcomes in particular areas to see whether that matters and
how you might develop methodologies to get closer to the experimental kind of
studies. I would argue that we should
still look at aspects of social mobility, whether income mobility or
social-class mobility, even in the absence of experimental data. We should be doing that and trying to do the
best job that we can with non-experimental data.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I
think that you put your finger on a very serious matter-communication between
politicians and social scientists. I
would hope that thought could be given to that. However, on a more positive note, it is natural that politicians
should, from time to time, try to make a political point from a piece of
research that appears. That is their
job. It is important, however, that
they do not necessarily always believe their own propaganda. They should be ready to talk to researchers
about this in a different mode. I think
that a fair bit of that does, in fact, go on.
I have discussed our research with Ed Miliband and other people in the
Government, but I have also had several long conversations with David Willetts
about it. At that level, communication
is better.
Q77 <Chairman:>
To build on Fiona's point, is not there a problem in the way that your research
has been picked up? As I have said, I
admire the work of the Sutton Trust, particularly the work that it has done on
the concentration of independently educated people in the BBC, major corporations,
journalism and in almost every walk of life.
That complements the work that you have done on social mobility, which
is very thought-provoking and important for politicians to know about. We will pick up on the bits we like: if I
raised the concentration of independently educated people at the BBC, I would
immediately be hounded by the press unless I pointed to that piece of Sutton
Trust work.
There
are interesting points for us because we spend our time in this Committee
trying to scrutinise the work of Government and whether the spending of
taxpayers' money is good value. One of
the things that we have asked over a number of years is whether something is
evidence-based policy. For that, we
very much rely on you people.
Coming
out of your work on social mobility, there is one strand that says, "Oh, all
that Sure Start stuff, free nursery care and all that has all been a failure
and has not worked", as Fiona would say.
Some policy makers have then said, "Well, it's not worth doing anything
because you cannot make any difference through educational policy to social
mobility." Others, such as the Sutton
Trust, have said, "You have got to renew and be more vigorous in the way that
you give more kids the opportunity for a broader and better education." Therefore, the policy implications of your
work are quite diverse, are they not?
<Professor
Machin:> Yes.
As academic researchers, I think that we can take two positions on that,
one of which is fairly productive and one of which is less so. We could say that we have done the research
and whoever wants to use it can. On the
other hand, we could engage in dialogue with people who are interested in it
and perhaps go into much more detail on that in the way that we are doing in
this Committee, which I think is very useful, so that we can actually come to a
closer agreement on what the research findings mean and what their relevance is
for policy.
Many
people take that first view: the research is done in an academic ivory tower
and then if anyone wants to pick up on it, that is fine, but it has been done
and published in a leading academic journal and is over and done with. I would prefer to think of the second
position as being much more useful with regard to the impact that academic
research can have in the policy arena.
Q78 <Chairman:>
I think that most people in this Committee think that your research has been
very useful. Given you responses today,
I would like to mention the importance of setting research in context. I know that I was nasty about some Nordic
countries, but I have a thing about Finland.
However, we were comparing the UK, like with like, with big, mature,
industrial democracies. I got the
feeling that, in one of your answers, there were slight throw away: you said
France is different.
My
intuition about the history of France is that it becomes a free-market,
industrial, mature democracy much later than the UK, and the UK comes much
later than the United States. If you
are going to put your research into context, is there a sense that some of
those societies mature in a different way?
In a sense, the context is lost when you look only at that snapshot
piece of research.
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> I have done quite a lot of comparative work
with various colleagues on social mobility and think that you are absolutely
right. Different countries follow
different historical trajectories of development and have very different
institutional forms. France is an interesting
case in that regard, because it used to have a fairly rigid society, in terms
of both class differences in education and social mobility. As I mentioned, it is one of the societies
that has most clearly become more fluid, having starting off from a low base. One possible explanation that my French
colleagues are working on is that that comes from the decline of the
agricultural sector, which was particularly rigid and continued to be quite a
sizeable sector in France until much later than it did in this country. It may well be that that is the source. Also, France has a highly centralised
education system. When French
Governments want to change educational policy, say in the interests of reducing
class differentials, they have more powerful levers than exist in this country.
<Chairman:> Graham, as
usual, wants the last word.
Q79 <Mr.
Stuart:> You have looked at the combination of class mobility and
income mobility. If you look at it in
terms of educational outcomes at certain key stages, how strong is the link
between educational outcome and changes in either class or income mobility over
time?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> In my experience there is not a perfect but a
clear association. Those countries that
have been most successful in reducing class differences in educational
attainment most often show an increase in fluidity.
Q80 <Mr.
Stuart:> When we had our great time of change in the post-war world,
was there a transformation in educational attainment among lower social
classes?
<Dr.
Goldthorpe:> No.
In Britain, the evidence on the relationship between class and
educational attainment is remarkably constant.
Of course, more children from all class backgrounds have gone on to
higher secondary and tertiary education, but the differentials have remained
remarkably constant. We do not find any
widening in class differentials in the way that Stephen and Jo do in relation
to family income. We find just a
constancy and that is rather disturbing.
<Professor
Machin:> We do find evidence that the relationship
between educational attainment and family income has strengthened in terms of attainment
at higher education and family income and in terms of early age test scores and
family income. One of the nice things
about the cohort data is that the children were tested in maths and reading as
they were growing up. We find a
stronger relationship for the second cohort than the first.
Q81 <Mr.
Stuart:> So a system of early intervention to help lift up those who
are falling behind, however it is done, will be effective.
<Professor
Machin:> Yes.
If you look at the latest cohort study, the MCS and the relationship
between age five test scores and family income, there is a very strong gradient
between the two. That was in 2005.
<Chairman:> A last word
from Jo Blanden.
<Dr.
Blanden:> It is not a very good last word.
<Chairman:> That is all
right.
<Dr.
Blanden:> One thing that I have noticed from looking at
a lot of the sociological work in the run-up to this is something that appears
in John's work-I think he would agree-in that the relationship between
educational background and social class seems to be falling. However, we do not find that there is any
fall in the relationship between education and earnings at all. That might be another component of why we
find this slightly differing picture.
That was a bad last word.
<Chairman:> No, it was
not. This has been more of a seminar than a regular question and answer
session. You have educated us
wonderfully. We have enjoyed the
experience and will use your words today as we look further at social
mobility. We would be grateful if we
could keep in touch with you. Thank you
very much for your time.