‘A crucial crossroads – How Britain must think differently about social mobility’

Over the past few decades, social mobility has been one of the rare concepts to command consensus across the political spectrum. Politicians on the centre-left and centre-right alike have invoked it as a moral imperative, a measure of national progress, and a sign of fairness. Yet beneath that apparent unity lies a contested and unresolved set of questions.

Is social mobility about empowering young people to leave their hometowns, travel across the country or continent, and seize opportunities elsewhere? Or is it about ensuring that secure and dignified jobs exist in the places they already call home? Is it about maximising university participation rates, or about strengthening apprenticeship and vocational pathways? Is it about celebrating the exceptional — the child born on a council estate who becomes a Cabinet Minister — or about creating widespread, systemic reforms that allow millions of working-class children to feel incrementally better off than their parents?

The truth is that social mobility must include all of this. As liberals determined to shape a modern Britain, we must resist binary thinking and recognise the essence of social mobility. That is, the removal of barriers to opportunity, wherever they are found and the creation of genuine choice. At its heart, social mobility is not about prescribing a single model of success, but rather enabling people from every background to pursue the lives they wish to lead with dignity and with security.

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Working-class children are not constrained because they chose wrongly; they are constrained because too few real options exist in the first place. Middle-class children routinely stand at an exciting crossroads: they can opt for university, an apprenticeship, entrepreneurship, or a gap year, with a safety net behind them. Many working-class children, by contrast, are funnelled toward one narrow path — or none at all.

Social mobility should not be about enforcing a universal model of success across the country. Instead, it should be about making a plurality of dignified futures available and ensuring that young people are not constrained by geography, class, race or background.

Liberalism, at its best, is about empowering people with meaningful choices. That is why social mobility must be understood not as a one-dimensional ladder, but as an exciting crossroads. Every young person in Britain should be able to stand at that crossroads and see a number of paths ahead of them — and know that whichever they take, dignity, respect, and economic security await them.

Today, that promise is implicit for many middle-class children: if a degree doesn’t work out, there is a fallback; if they stay local, opportunity awaits; if they change paths, support remains. For many working-class children, failure is far more costly, detours are harsher, and routes are fewer. That imbalance is the injustice at the heart of Britain’s current model of social mobility.

The Government’s new ambition for two-thirds of young people to progress to university or a gold-standard apprenticeship is welcome. The ‘or’ is most crucial, as it signals parity of esteem between academic and technical routes and helps move us beyond the narrow focus on university as the sole path to success.

Just as importantly, a place-based industrial strategy — from clean energy and advanced manufacturing to digital industries — means that young people can choose to stay in their communities and still find secure, well-paid work.

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Social mobility is not achieved solely through qualifications and pay packets. It is also about the experiences that expand horizons and build confidence. Too often, middle-class families take for granted the enrichment activities — from music lessons to international travel — that shape young people’s aspirations and sense of possibility. Working-class children are disproportionately excluded from these opportunities.

That is why institutions like the Cadets deserve far more recognition as vehicles of mobility. The evidence shows that the Cadets provide young people with leadership skills, teamwork, resilience, and experiences they might otherwise never access.

A liberal Britain should invest in such institutions and recognise them as engines of mobility alongside schools and workplaces.

At the same time, it is important to note that even when mobility into better roles is achieved, inequalities persist. The Social Mobility Foundation highlights that professionals from working-class backgrounds still earn on average 12% (or £6,287) less per year than colleagues from more privileged backgrounds doing the same jobs.

This ‘class pay gap’ means mobility often delivers less security and recognition than it should. Research by The Sutton Trust shows that those from private schools and elite universities continue to dominate leadership positions in politics, media, law, and business. This means that class-based structural advantages persist even after individuals ‘move up’ the social ladder.

A liberal vision must therefore combine mobility with fair reward and representation. That could mean innovative measures like mandatory socioeconomic background reporting in large firms. What gets measured gets changed — and pay inequity by socio-economic background must no longer be invisible.

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In today’s Britain, the liberal argument for social mobility must be clear: mobility means ensuring that every young person stands at a genuine exciting crossroads, with multiple dignified paths ahead. In an increasingly fractious country, there is no cause more pressing.

This is an extract of an essay from a new book, ‘Liberalism liberated,’ published by Bright Blue.

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