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.

The post Measuring class appeared first on Johnny Rich.

This week, the Higher Education Policy Institute published a report highlighting the underprovision of specialist careers support for international students. It highlights an important gap in provision, but part of the research involved a survey of international students, few of whom credited their university careers service with having helped them.

With just cause, Mike Grey of Gradconsult took issue with this on Twitter and I recommend his thread below that got me thinking more widely about the credit that careers advisers get – or fail to get – for their work not only in universities, but in schools, colleges and local services.

We’ve all heard – or told – tales about how some careers advisor “told me to be a [insert laughably inappropriate career]”, but people who are helped by careers advice tend never to mention it. Why? Can it be true that careers advice is so wide of the mark? Of course not.

There are multiple cognitive biases here.

For starters, as Mike’s thread shows, there’s a tendency to credit the outcome of a chain of events to the last link, even when the first link is usually more important.

Also, for the sake of our sense of self, we take more personal credit for the choices we make that we consider to have had good outcomes, and we outsource our agency to others when we aren’t so happy about how it turned out.

It’s therefore easy to retrospectively underplay the influence of careers advisers, as Mike describes, even when they have been instrumental in the process.

This effect is exaggerated by the fact that the idea that careers advisers tell anyone what to be is desperately outdated (if indeed it was ever true). Advisers help people explore what they have to offer and want they might want to do in life. They help map pathways that open up opportunities (or that stop them from closing). They help connect people with opportunities that they show an interest in.

What they do not do is puppetry.

The agency – the choice and control – always stays with the ‘client’.

Ensuring that the client feels ownership of their choices and that they came from themselves is an important part of the careers adviser doing their job well. However, in the process, it also means their good work is likely to go unrecognised.

So why the stories about advisers telling people to be secretaries, vicars or podiatrists? My theory is that it may be down to one of four reasons, some cobination of them or even all four together:

1. The memory may not actually be a faithful record of what happened, but rather during the (often frequent) retelling, the myth has taken over the true events.
2. These were mere suggestions on the part of the careers adviser in response to actual interests that the client did mention.
3. Rather than even suggestions, they were part of a wider conversation about avenues that could be explored.
4. The adviser may have been deliberately exploring unlikely options in order to help the client stretch their horizons, consider new possibilities or mark out areas that were of no interest.

Modern careers advice is driven by well established and well evidenced theoretical approaches. It is delivered by excellent practitioners using sophisticated digital tools. The professionals who deliver careers guidance help people to make their lives just as doctors help to save them.

If we want better careers advice, we should back it more and rely on the expertise of professional practitioners. Relatively meagre public investment in careers education, information, advice and guidance will yield huge returns in helping match employers with employees who will be more productive and fulfilled, and it will lower society’s waste of our shared human capital.

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