UK Schools "Most Socially Segregated"

A new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operations and Development (OECD) claims that schools in the UK are among the most segregated in the developed world.

The report: Education at a Glance 2010 (the latest figures available) warns that disadvantaged children are too often concentrated together in schools.This applies both to the children of poorly educated parents and to those of immigrant families. The OECD's Andreas Schleicher says this is the "biggest challenge" for schools.

The Education at a Glance report from the OECD is the leading publication of international education statistics - comparing the performance of education systems among developed countries.

These latest figures, which are from 2010, reveal the UK has unusually high levels of "segregation" in terms of poorer and migrant families being clustered in the same schools, rather than being spread across different schools.

It looks at where the children of "low-educated" mothers are going to school - which in the UK means the children of mothers who did not achieve five good GCSEs - and found that in the UK they were much more likely to be taught in schools with high numbers of disadvantaged children.

Among the children of immigrant families in the UK, 80% were taught in schools with high concentrations of other immigrant or disadvantaged pupils - the highest proportion in the developed world.

The significance of this, according to Mr Schleicher, is that the social background of a school's intake exerts a strong influence on the likely outcomes for pupils.

The report did however show that the UK was proving a success in harnessing education for social mobility - particularly in getting young people into higher education. The chances of poorer children in the UK getting into university are "relatively high", in comparison with other developed countries. It highlights the progress between generations - with 41% of 25 to 34-year-olds in the UK achieving a higher level of education than their parents - above the OECD average.

The international statistics showed that in some countries social mobility could also go in reverse. In the US, almost one in five young adults faced "downward mobility" - such as not going to university when their parents had.

Social Mobility & Ethnicity in the UK

Dr Neil Smith, Research Fellow at the Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine has made a special blog post on the Inequalities blog in which he reviews the evidence, including his own on the links between ethnicity and life chances in the UK and why this matters in the drive to improve social mobility.

He has found:

In March 2012, we heard that over a half of the UK’s Black youths aged between 16 and 24 were unemployed – a finding that is indicative of the persistence of ethnic inequalities in the labour market.

The latest figures highlight the failure of recent attempts at sending equally qualified school leavers into the market to compete at the same levels, regardless of social or ethnic background But one criticism of the crude analysis of the ONS data above is the lack of information surrounding the social and economic backgrounds of the unemployed Black youths. Is it ethnicity that determines the labour market successes, or is it instead education and class background?


You can read the full blog post here: http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/social-mobility-and-ethnicity-in-the-uk/

Women Hold Fewer Than 1/3 Of Top Jobs - BBC Research

Figures compiled by BBC News show that fewer than 1/3 of the UK's most inflential jobs are currently held by women.

Women occupy on average 30.9% of the most senior positions across 11 key sectors analysed by the BBC, including business, politics and policing.The armed forces and judiciary have the fewest women in top posts - 1.3% and 13.2% respectively - while secondary education has the most (36.7%).

Campaign group the Fawcett Society said progress was still too slow.

"Men outnumber women by four to one in Parliament and only a third of local councillors are women," the group's Preethi Sundaram said.

"When we look at the top quarters of power in the political world there are only five women there out of 22… It's quite an appalling fact really."

The European Commission is considering new laws to get more women into the top management jobs. Currently, just one in seven board members at Europe's top firms are women.

You can read more on this story as well as statistics on women in top jobs here: Women hold fewer than one third of top jobs.

Income Inequality & Poverty In The UK "Set To Rise" Claims New Report

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a new report: The impact of employment changes on poverty in 2020.

The report states that projections suggest long-term labour market trends are set to continue. Examining the impact of these changes on income inequality and poverty levels, this study:

• Forecasts a rise in income inequality and poverty levels.
• Cites expected cuts in benefits and tax credits as a major cause of these rises.
• Suggests the impact on the overall level of relative poverty and inequality forecast for 2020/21 made by changes imposed on employment and pay structures will be small.

The full report is available to download here: http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/poverty-inequality-employment-structure