Education and Social Mobility in Scotland in the Twentieth Century Working Paper 3 PATTERNS OF SOCIAL MOBILITY : A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ENGLAND , WALES AND SCOTLAND

We use the life history data in the British Household Panel Study to analyse change over time (birth cohorts) in patterns of social mobility in England, Scotland and Wales, and to compare these three countries. In several respects, our conclusions are similar to those reached by other authors on the basis of wider comparisons. There has been a large growth in non-manual employment since the middle of the twentieth century. This led first to a rise in upward mobility, but, as parents of younger people have now themselves benefited from that, has more recently induced a growth in downward mobility: more people are forced downward from their middle-class origins. As in other places, and other analyses of Britain, these changes have largely not been a growth in what Erikson and Goldthorpe call ‘social fluidity’: it is change induced by the occupational structure, not by the relative chances of ending up in certain destinations having started at specified points. These conclusions apply both to current class (in 1999) and to the class which people entered when they first entered the labour market. We found that education does not explain patterns of mobility at either initial class or current class, and that initial class does not explain patterns of mobility at current class. The conclusions were broadly the same for the three countries, but there was some evidence that in the youngest cohort (people born between 1967 and 1976) experience in Wales was diverging from that in England and Scotland, with rather greater amounts of downward mobility. We draw also two methodological conclusions. The first is that migration within the UK did not seem to make any important difference to our results. That is encouraging for analysis of surveys confined to one of the three countries, because it suggests that losing track of migrants would not distort the results. The second methodological conclusion is that the comparative study of social mobility can find interesting topics to investigate at social levels lower than that of the state, here the comparison of the three countries which make up Britain.