With So Many Undergraduates, Why Is Social Mobility Still Declining?

It is great to see so many young people gaining strong GCSE and A Level results, despite the exams being generally accepted as being harder this year. It confused those critics on the right who have constantly argued that simpler questions, course work and grade inflation has reduced their value as exams. 

With results like these, it’s tempting for schools and society as a whole to give themselves a collective pat on the back, smile, and think that all is right with our education system.

Ironically though, the need for good grades come-what-may was less imperative this year than in any previous year, as supply exceeded demand and desperate universities handed out more than 60,000 unconditional offers for university places. This might be a demographic blip, but it might also be the canary that signals a much greater crisis (see page 14).

One measure of how good our education system is how much it contributes to social mobility. Yet, since the expansion of mass Higher Education 10 years ago, social mobility has actually declined. This does not mean that there is a causal link between the two, but it does raise the question of whether it is worth the huge social and personal investment, and whether our education system as a whole is performing as it should.

For the half million or so students heading off to university this year, this all means that, other than the extreme likelihood that they will incur £50-60,000 in debt, their future is very uncertain.

Around 10 per cent of this group will drop out of university – one of the highest rates in Europe – a number which has been alarmingly rising year-on-year for the last three years.

Many of the rest of these students will find that their A-Level courses and school career experience did not prepare them for the world of university, emotionally or intellectually. For the world of work, which is increasingly knowledge- and skills-based, it does not bode well.

Harriet Jones, in an article for the journal Bioscience Education on how well students are prepared for degree level study, reported on research that showed children lacked writing and independent learning skills and the ability to construct an argument using evidence. Students often lacked basic literacy skills and, even for those with with a maths A Level, the ability to solve basic maths problems. She concludes that the emphasis on knowledge rather than skills in recent years has left students unprepared for courses.

She reports one researcher’s finding: “Teachers are aware of the problems faced by students when they move onto university but are restricted by the demands of the curricula.” 

This problem is not unique to the biological sciences, and universities are reporting poor cognitive skills across the board, with most universities, including those in the Russell Group, requiring undergraduates to complete a preparation skills course in the first year.

The appropriateness of what is taught at school is not confined to gaps within subjects, but is also related to whether the subject range is suitable for an economy that is rapidly changing. The last big upward social mobility surge happened through the 70s, 80s and 90s as part of the large growth in professional and managerial jobs. UK schools, with their academic subject bias, were able to respond reasonably well to this sector boom. Professional courses (middle class vocational courses) in Law, Health Services, Media, etc. also boomed at universities during this time.

But this boom ended before the turn of the century, and the sector went into decline after the 2008 crash. It also seems that it will most certainly be decimated by roboticisation in the near future. Yet, subjects which have strong industrial application or have strong economic performance that can withstand some of the more frightening impacts of automation have been downgraded in schools. Design and technology, music, drama and foreign languages have all been badly affected by the EBacc, and in some cases have been withdrawn from the secondary school timetable, especially in the case of Design and Technology.  

At universities, we now have far too many people doing legal, media, forensics and social science courses, while engineering, chemistry, physics and architecture have all declined. The result is that 50 per cent of graduates find it hard to get into graduate jobs, even though most skilled, non-industrial jobs now require a degree at the entry level.

If over 83 per cent of students will never fully repay their loans (which is the latest estimate presented by the Institute of Fiscal Studies), it means they are not breaking through to higher paid jobs. This brings into question whether our schools and universities are making any contribution to social mobility and breaking the grip of the entrenched public school and upper middle class elite. If this is the case, we need a much more thorough review of our educational direction than any of the head-teacher teacher unions or political parties are willing to consider.

Howard Sharron