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Social mobility is the wrong goal – what we need is more equality | Letters

Student graduation
‘The remorseless focus on aspiration and bettering oneself results in … large numbers of graduates from working-class backgrounds who are unable to find graduate employment.’ points out Prof Diane Reay. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Time to Change, the latest Social Mobility Commission report, states that radical reform is needed to repair a divided Britain, arguing that decades of policy failures have left the poor behind (Report, 28 June). But increasing social mobility would not repair this divide, it would increase it. Effective social mobility leaves the poor even further behind, as it depletes the working classes of those who are able to achieve educational success against the odds. The remorseless focus on aspiration and bettering oneself results in a phenomenon that the report also highlights: the large numbers of graduates from working-class backgrounds who are unable to find graduate employment.

What we need in an austerity-scarred Britain is not a relentless focus on social mobility but a much stronger emphasis on achieving greater social and economic equality. Individual success is no answer to the wider social problem of growing class inequalities. The focus for too long has been on moving up a small number of educationally successful working classes when we need to concentrate our resources and energy on supporting and valuing the much larger group of those who are “left behind”.
Prof Diane Reay
Faculty of education, University of Cambridge

• The Social Mobility Commission’s report appears to confuse social mobility with a reduction in inequality. Greater social mobility means that people from poorer backgrounds have more chance to access higher education and professional jobs. In the absence of an expansion of those jobs, this will also involve some people from richer backgrounds moving down the economic scale, which is perhaps why social mobility is so hard to achieve.

Social mobility would do little to reduce the appalling gap in incomes between rich and poor; it could just mean that different people are poor. What is more important, and more quickly achievable, is a significant reduction in poverty and inequality. This requires more progressive taxation of incomes and wealth, a higher minimum wage, more social and “affordable” housing, a major housebuilding programme to reduce rents and house prices, and free dental care and prescriptions for most people.
Richard Mountford
Tonbridge, Kent

• Radical reform needed to repair divided Britain? How about a universal basic income?
Chris Hughes
Leicester

• Given that few, if any, middle-class parents are coaching their children to become downwardly mobile, surely it is time to recognise that our economic and social position is determined in the main by luck and privilege rather than “talent” and hard work. Once we work from this basis we will be in a position to turn our attention to the introduction of an egalitarian distribution of income and wealth and universal provision of high-quality social services that reflect the value we attach to the worth and contributions of all citizens. Naturally, we will always need to ensure that individuals are properly trained and able to undertake particular tasks, and that any differences in rewards are both fair and proportionate. As a first step in this process might it be best to wind up the Social Mobility Commission and replace it with an equality commission?
Robert M Page
School of social policy, University of Birmingham

• One basic policy could begin to right the wrongs of the past few decades: the enforcement of a real living wage, giving all working people enough to live on without benefits. Even the New Labour government that ran for 13 years from 1997 did little to change the way things were going in Britain; its Sure Start policy for early years education was about the only meaningful policy enacted, and the Tories have been watering that down.

Your report from the National Centre for Social Research (Tolerance of austerity ‘drying up’, 28 June) shone a little light on supposedly changing public attitudes to austerity. Looking at the survey itself, one part stood out: “61% of people think it is wrong for benefit claimants to use legal loopholes to increase their payments, compared with 48% who think it is wrong to use legal loopholes to pay less tax. The view that it was acceptable to use legal loopholes to pay less tax was most strongly felt among people who were better off.” What more evidence do we need about the need for a government with better ideas and stronger policies to benefit the many, not the few?
David Reed
London

• We should begin by asking every pro-Labour person speaking on/to the media to point out that the rich have been made richer while the poor have been made poorer by Tory measures. I am convinced that the simple message stated and re-stated will resonate to win the next election. It is what so many of us witness around us with food banks and school appeals, and if it is like this in prosperous Malvern then God alone knows what the cuts have brought about in our poorest areas. Let us tell the truth better than the Tories can tell their lies.
Gren Gaskell
Malvern, Worcestershire

• The issue of social mobility must be tackled early on, at school. One of the more worrying highlights of the Social Mobility Commission’s report is the reduction in social and emotional learning during school time over the past 20 years, with “particularly adverse consequences for the poorest kids”.

The importance of supporting disadvantaged pupils to develop skills such as resilience, confidence and motivation should not be underestimated. Through the Prince’s Trust’s Achieve programme, which runs in educational institutions across the UK, we are doing our part to develop a fairer society and a stronger economy. We are ready and able to share our experience and expertise with the government, so that no young person is left behind because of their socioeconomic background.
Richard Chadwick
Director of programmes and development, The Prince’s Trust

• The latest report from the Social Mobility Commission makes grim reading. There is much to be done, most of it requiring a radical approach to social policy. But there is work to to do at an individual level too. Millions of people who live in excluded communities, many of them refugees, lack the basic networks and knowhow to achieve their ambitions. Growing Points is a charity that enables people to do just that – we appoint guardians to provide networks and knowhow, and this has achieved great results over the past three years since our launch by Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility Commission. We have recently supported 20 refugee women in Leeds to achieve nursing roles in the NHS, and our plan is to help 400 a year by 2020 across the UK. This approach to social mobility, person by person, marks a radical shift of social policy by putting the power to change with those who are excluded and ambitious to change; social policy needs to catch up!
Dick Stockford
Chair, Growing Points

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