Child Poverty Set To Rise Says Social Mobility Commission

The UK risks becoming a "permanently divided" society unless "radical new approaches" are taken by the next government, a report suggests.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission also claims the target to reduce child poverty by half by 2020 will not be met.

Chairman Alan Milburn said the three largest Westminster parties were being "less than frank" on the issue.

He said housing costs and youth unemployment needed to be tackled.

Mr Milburn, a former Labour minister, said the current government had "discredited existing child poverty targets and failed to put in place new ones", creating an "unholy mess".

The existing targets were put in place in 2010 by the last Labour government. Currently, a child is classed as being in relative poverty if his or her family income is less than 60% of median earnings.

According to the commission's report "absolute child poverty increased by 300,000 between 2010-11 and 2012-13" and "independent experts expect child poverty to increase significantly over the next few years". It also says that "working poverty after housing costs is rising".

UK Weak In School Fairness Leagues

Photograph by flickingerbrad

The UK is below average in an international comparison of social mobility within school systems according to analysis by the OECD.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) produces rankings of school performance - but it has now published an analysis of fair opportunities for pupils.

It shows that Shanghai in China, South Korea and Finland are among top performers in both results and equity.

The UK is successful in results, but weaker in fairness.

This OECD study compares the reading skills of teenagers against the levels of social equity. You can read more on this story of the BBC News website here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21411251

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/

Is Social Mobility In Britain The Worst In The Western World?

The All Party Group On Social Mobility has published a report which advises that social mobility in Britain is the worst in the Western world and the gap between rich and poor has become ingrained in children as young as three.

It quotes an OECD study showing that the prospects of half of all children born in the UK can be almost entirely linked to the circumstances of their parents – compared to only 15 per cent of those in Denmark. The Group calls for more intervention in the lives of under-threes and advises that the biggest impact on social mobility was the quality of parenting, whether the home environment was educational and whether the parents had good mental health.

The report and a video of a presentation "Seven Truths About Social Mobility" are available to view here: http://www.appg-socialmobility.org/