Social mobility is going backwards as children worse off than parents

A study author said: ‘This may be he first generation for a long time whose social prospects are less favourable than those of their parents'

15:46 07 November 2014

A groundbreaking study into social mobility in the UK has found that young people are more likely to slip down the social ladder as they enter adulthood because there is now ‘so little room at the top’ of the best careers.

Downward mobility refers to the situation where people find themselves in a lower social class than the one in which they were born.

Sociologist Dr John Goldthorpe, one of the Oxford University study’s co-authors, said: “The people who benefited from these widening opportunities for upward mobility are the parents now.

“Over the later period, this expansion in top-end jobs has slackened off, so it’s their children who are now facing this much more difficult situation.

“It’s not that the risks of downward mobility have increased; it’s simply that there are more people at risk of being downwardly mobile – because there are more people originating in the professional and managerial classes than there were previously, and those classes are no longer expanding at the same rate.”

The study was published in the British Journal of Sociology and examined over 20,000 Britons born in generation periods from 1946, 1958, 1970 and 1980-84.