Society should stop obsessing about “rags to riches” stories of poor students getting into Oxbridge as the yardstick for social mobility, the Government’s social mobility tsar will warn.
Katharine Birbalsingh, the chair of the Social Mobility Commission (SMC), will say on Thursday that the true mark of opportunity is doing better than your parents, meaning that for a child whose parents are unemployed, just getting a job could be a social mobility win.
Ms Birbalsingh, who is the headmistress of Michaela Community School in west London, will use her inaugural speech as SMC chair to “challenge” the idea that social mobility is getting worse.
She will say that according to research carried out by the SMC and due to be published next month, the public perception that social mobility is on the wane is wrong. It has, she will say, been stable for decades, perhaps even seeing a slight improvement.
However, her comments will clash with a recent report from the Sutton Trust charity, which predicted a “step change” 12 per cent decline in UK income mobility, due to learning losses from the Covid pandemic.
