Improving social mobility will mean allowing rich children to move down as well as helping poor ones to move up. Does the government have the stomach for it?

THERE is little doubt about which subject will define Theresa May’s government. But the prime minister has made clear that during whatever time is not gobbled up by Brexit negotiations she wants to turn Britain into “a country that works for everyone”. Such talk is hardly new. In 1990 John Major spoke of his desire to forge “a genuinely classless society”. Every prime minister since has made similar noises. Yet few have placed as much emphasis on social mobility as Mrs May.

This focus is inspired by the fact that, by many measures, Britain is not a socially mobile place (see chart). Many also sense that things have taken a turn for the worse. Like most rich countries, after the second world war Britain saw a big increase in the number of well paid, white-collar jobs. The proportion of people born to parents in professional or managerial jobs tripled between the generation of 1946 and the one born in 1980-84. Poor children won places in the civil service or the City of London, earning far more than their parents. But as the creation of professional jobs slowed, the scope for children to make dramatic leaps up the social pecking-order narrowed. In this sense the Britain of today is a less upwardly-mobile place than that of Mrs May’s youth.

The overall picture is more complicated. Mobility is measured not only in absolute terms—that is, how well people fare compared with their parents—but also in relative terms, meaning how well they do compared with their peers. By this definition, the change has been somewhat less dramatic. Among men born in the poorest income quartile in 1958, 31% remained there as adults. Among the generation born in 1970, the figure crept up to 38%. Academics who study mobility based not on income but on social class—normally defined by occupation type—detect even less change. By their reckoning, mobility has changed little during the past century (although women became a bit more mobile, probably reflecting better access to education and work). Most see little prospect of an increase in mobility in years to come.

But not all are so gloomy. The gap in exam performance between rich and poor children is falling, notes Jo Blanden of Surrey University. In 2005 30% of children eligible for free school meals got five good grades at GCSE, the exams taken at 16, compared with 59% of others. By 2013 that 29 percentage-point gap had shrunk to 16 points. There has been a similar narrowing of the difference in university participation rates and performance in SATs, the exams taken at 11. Since studies suggest that more than half of the link between parental and child income develops as a result of what happens in the classroom, the convergence of rich and poor pupils’ exam results bodes well for social mobility.

What goes up...

Yet the slowing down of the economy from its post-war clip means that the increase in well qualified youngsters has no corresponding increase in good jobs. In the past, there was plenty of room at the top. Now, it is painfully clear that social mobility must mean people going down as well as up.

Well-off parents have many weapons with which to defend their children from this fate. The bluntest is by passing on wealth. Last year the government announced plans to shield inheritances of up to £1m ($1.2m) from tax. And money helps youngsters to maintain an educational edge. In 1996 just 4% of Britain’s workforce had postgraduate qualifications; today 11% do. The relative scarcity of funding for postgraduate study means postgrad qualifications are more open to wealthy students. Moreover, the graduate wage premium is highest for those at the most prestigious universities, where the gap between rich and poor pupils has remained wide.

Access to good jobs is increasingly gained through internships, often unpaid and given out informally. The government has shown limited interest in enforcing the minimum wage in this area (indeed, two years ago Mrs May’s Conservative Party wrote to its MPs with advice on diplomatic ways to advertise unpaid internships). Thus, even among children with identical educational qualifications, the privately schooled are more likely to get the best jobs and to take home fatter pay-cheques, according to a study in 2014 by academics at the UCL Institute of Education and Cambridge University.

Chipping away at these privileges will not be easy. But in an era of limited growth, improving social mobility is as much about dismantling the barriers that keep wealthy children at the top as it is about pulling poor children up from the bottom. Promising to increase social mobility has long been a popular pledge. It may become a more controversial one when voters realise that mobility goes in two directions.