To promote social mobility, we need to measure it. To measure it, we need to define it. We need to identify markers of socio-economic background. To put it crudely, we need to work out what makes someone working, middle or upper class.

Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives. 

Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part of the Office for Students) has used POLAR quintiles as its headline indicator. This is the rate of progression to higher education from within a postcode. Obviously, this doesn’t equate directly to class and, if the mission to eliminate access gaps were ever successful, POLAR would becoming increasingly meaningless as the differences between quintiles tended to zero.

More recently, OfS introduced TUNDRA, another chilly acronym to identify cold spots of progression. UCAS uses its own Indicators of Multiple Deprivation. Of course, ‘progression’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘class’ are very different things and it’s important not to confuse them, even though the barriers to social mobility may intersect across them.

I could go on listing the zoo of other measures out there, adopting different approaches based on occupational prestige, access to resources (like education or housing), absolute and relative poverty measures, subjective social status, and more marketing-style typologies like, for example, Experian’s colourful Mosaic tool.

Simple or accurate

Last week, this issue of defining background came up in relation to a new project I’m involved in to build more equity, diversity and inclusion into engineering. So I went back to the first work I did on it back in 2010 when the coalition government were first trying to build a Social Mobility Toolkit for employers, providing a comparative way of recording SEB so performance and improved could be measured and tracked.

The assembled experts (which generously included me) compared notes, shook heads, and generally agreed that it is genuinely impossible to come up with a means of classifying individuals that is both simple and accurate. 

Even if a simple measure were ever possible, I’m pretty convinced that an accurate one isn’t. And the simpler it is, the less accurate it gets.

People’s complex individual stories will always be diminished by being put in boxes. That said, aggregated data that approximates at scale to patterns and trends is better than the historic, condescending approach of three classifications of class, based on vague notions about jobs, income, region and accent. (Note the image from the iconic Class Sketch which featured in The Frost Report in 1966, which is copyright, but used under Fair Use.)

How to record and tracking social mobility

So, if you’re an employer, say, who is looking to be more intentionally proactive about social mobility, what data should you gather?

I was inspired to write this by the ever-brilliant Laura McInerney’s blog on Substack in which she mentions coming across the attempt by the Solicitors’ Qualifying Exam, which clearly elevates simplicity over sophistication.

The best practice, I think, is the Government Statistical Service’s recommended series of questions which it has devised to try to harmonise standards. The Government also published this useful guidance for employers (in the financial and professional services sectors, but it applies more generally).

In 2022, the Social Mobility Commission in partnership with The Bridge Group also came up with a new toolkit, which is the gold standard for employers wanting to take social mobility seriously. It includes guidance on what data to gather and how. The Sutton Trust has a similar toolkit too.

Who knows best?

All this data is important and clearly defined terminology is critical if you want to build a solid evidence base. However, when it comes to socio-economic background – or class, as some might call it – there is something to be said for abandoning more scientific approaches and embracing self-identification.

If you’re going to ask questions about someone’s background in order to allot them to a class, why not just ask them – as well or instead – to say where they think they should be placed?

What class you are may well be best defined by where you feel your ‘belong’.

For some people that will never change: former politicians, enrobed in ermine in the Lords, often insist they are still working class. Meanwhile, a titled aristocrat, bankrupt and scraping a living, may never lose their sense of self as upper class. 

For other people, class is mutable. Social mobility, of course, suggests that it is something that can move – or, at least, even if ‘class’ is fixed, everything that gives that word any useful meaning can be changed.

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Over the past couple of years, I been doing some consultancy work for IP Inclusive, an initiative to support diversity in the intellectual property (IP) profession. I’ve been impressed by what lovely and dedicated people they are. I’ve also been delighted to be working in collaboration with the knowledgeable and utterly driven Duncan Grant and highly recommended web development team Visix. 

The original job was to create some materials to promote IP careers in schools. I argued that IP Inclusive was a poor brand for this campaign: it looks at the issue from the employers’ perspective, not the students’. I came up with the name ‘Careers in Ideas’ and, once we had produced the resources for schools, the team commissioned us to produce a website for Careers in Ideas.

Our work was instrumental in helping the IP Inclusive team from the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys to win the MemCom Award for Best Equality or Diversity Campaign 2018. 

And now, IP Inclusive has invited us back to revamp their own website which is aimed at campaign supporters and IP professionals, particularly those from communities that are underrepresented in the sector.

The key challenge is a common one for websites: how do we create a site that will need minimum maintenance, but will always look fresh. My design work has focussed on a solution which drives users to the feast of content in interactive ways. The new site won’t be live for a while, but do watch this space to let me know what you think of our solutions.

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