But John Goldthorpe* of Oxford University disputes this.

This view stemmed from a 2001 Discussion Paper which looked at social mobility in terms of earnings. This suggested social mobility had fallen between the late 50s and 1970. The results were disseminated in several reports “rather less qualified than the original”. These were seized upon by Labour politicians who argued the decline coincided with the 1979 Tory victory and by Conservatives who said it followed the decline of grammar schools. At the same time the media ignored new research and held to the “line” that social mobility had stalled.

But the original paper actually provided “a very limited basis for claims about mobility trends.” The authors recognized its limitations – missing data and the concentration on a subsection of the population born only twelve years apart – and warned against their findings being over-interpreted.

Too late – the over-interpretation has been repeated so often it is now the “consensus view”: social mobility had declined at the end of the 20th century in relation to the “Golden Age of mobility” in the decades after WW2.

But there’s an alternative view based on class mobility not income. In the recent past mobility rates have leveled out for men (but not women) and have not “ground to a halt”. And the reason for this leveling out is not education policy but a halt in the expansion of professional and managerial jobs which had burgeoned in the “Golden Age”.

Nevertheless, the view prevailed that education would increase social mobility and there’d be no limit on employment possibilities for the qualified. But the opposite has occurred – “over-qualification” is an increasing feature of advanced societies including the UK.

Goldthorpe argues that it is not through education that social mobility will increase but by economic policies: investing in advanced technology, the “knowledge economy” and in “public and social services”.

Viewing education as the main way in which disadvantaged pupils can become socially mobile is flawed, Goldthorpe argues. As education standards improve, the more advantaged parents will use their wealth to maintain their “children’s competitive edge”. At the same time, lack of educational success is less of a handicap for advantaged children because they can access support networks unavailable to disadvantaged children who don’t succeed.

Attempts to increase “equality of opportunity” are unlikely to be effective unless “class-linked inequalities of condition” are significantly reduced, Goldthorpe argues. Social mobility is more marked in Scandinavian countries. This was not achieved solely through education but by reducing income differences through taxation and welfare policies combined with “strong trade unionism and employment protection”.

CONCLUSION: The effect of education on social mobility appears limited. Education, therefore, should be pursued for its own sake – “to allow all young people to realize their full academic and wider human potentialities”.

If governments are serious about creating a more mobile society then politicians need to move from “the relative comfort zone of educational policy and accept that measures will be required, of a kind sure to be strongly contested, that seek to reduce inequalities of condition, of which those associated with social class would appear the most fundamental”.

Thanks to Marco Bligh for drawing my attention to this paper.

*John H Goldthorpe is a Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Social Policy and Nuffield College, University of Oxford

The report recommended random ballots or banding across all abilities to address this issue.

But the press release added a further recommendation which wasn’t in the full report.

“At the same time, independent day schools should be opened up by a state funded system of open access, and grammar schools by a combination of outreach and fairer admissions.”

But independent schools would be unlikely to accept pupils, disadvantaged or otherwise, who were average or below-average ability. Grammar schools certainly wouldn’t.

This suggestion assumes private schools are always better than state ones. But this isn’t so. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that although UK private schools outperformed state schools in PISA tests the situation was reversed when socio-economic background was taken into account. UK state schools outperformed private ones. And the Institute of Fiscal Studies found a school’s results depend on the quality of intake.

The report’s foreword, written by Sir Peter Lampl, the Trust’s chairman, describes private schools, 7% of English schools, as “world-class”. But this isn’t so if Ofsted* is to be believed. Ofsted directly inspects nearly half of England’s independent schools. In 2010/11 it found teaching in private schools was not good in one-third and outstanding in only 7%. 4% of them were inadequate. Teaching was “often well planned but seldom inspiring”. At the same time Ofsted found 20% of English state schools were outstanding, 50% were good and 2% inadequate at their last inspection.

It’s not possible, therefore, to describe all of England’s independent schools as “world-class”.

But what of the rest – the ones that Ofsted doesn’t inspect directly? According to the Daily Telegraph “top 100″ tables 2012, there was only one independent school in the top ten – in 10th position. All the 100 schools had 100% of pupils gaining 5 GCSEs A*-C including maths and English so the Telegraph ranked them according to GCSE point-score. St Paul’s, George Osborne’s old school, was 17th; Westminster, often named in Government dispatches, was 33rd and Eton, where the Prime Minister was educated, was 41st.

There would be few disadvantaged pupils in the Telegraph’s “top 100″. And they select according to the ability. So, unlike schools in most top-performing school systems, these schools segregate by ability and by social background.

That said, there are some fully comprehensive schools with a high proportion of FSM pupils in the Sutton Trust’s “top 500”: one LA maintained school, one voluntary-aided faith school and one converter academy. Although one of these relied heavily on equivalent examinations (pupils were entered for an average of 11.1 exams but only 5.7 were GCSEs), there were similarities in each school’s approach. They emphasized high standards and offered “personalised” support.

Perhaps this is what the Sutton Trust should be advocating: more targeted teaching, more formative assessment and a commitment to fully comprehensive schools in addition to fair banding and random ballots. After all, it was the Sutton Trust that found comprehensive school pupils outperformed their equally qualified peers from independent and grammar schools at university. And research published in 2011 concluded “Overall, our findings suggest that comprehensive schools were as good for mobility as the selective schools they replaced.”

It’s not clear, therefore, why a Sutton Trust afterthought thinks a few more disadvantaged, bright children entering independent and grammar schools would do anything to make the English school system less segregated.

*  Ofsted Annual Report 2010/11 downloadable here.

The report looks at the 500 top performing state schools (excluding grammars) following on from similar reports in 2005 and 2006 looking at ‘high attaining schools that were more socially exclusive than the national average and other schools in their areas.’

The Trust has decided to revisit the issue for two reasons. Over the last three years, the ‘new schools revolution’, explicitly directed at improving the chances of poorer children, might have been expected to ease this problem. At the same time, other reports, principally from the OECD, has found that the UK continues to have one of the most socially segregated education systems in the world.

This time, then, the Trust has widened its remit: to look at 500, not 200, schools: and it has included the new Ebacc measure ( 5 A-C’s in a prescribed/proscribed group of subjects) to assess the social selectivity of local schools.

The Trust’s key findings won’t come as an enormous surprise to anyone used to the English schools scene:

*95% of the top 500 comprehensives take fewer pupils on free school meals than the total proportion in their local areas, including almost two thirds (64%) which are unrepresentative of their local authority area with gaps of five or more percentage points.

*Schools controlling their own admissions policies are over-represented in the top 500. 75% of the top 500 comprehensives are their own admissions authorities, compared to 61% of the same types of school nationally. Voluntary-aided schools ( the vast majority of them faith schools) making up 24% of the top 500, and converter academies, making up 37%, are the most over-represented.

*The average FSM rate at the top 500 schools when ranked by the EBacc measure is even more socially exclusive than the top 500 ranked by the 5A*-C including English and mathematics.

So no real change from 2005/6, but instead an intensification in the kind of practices that allow some schools to ‘flourish’ while others ‘struggle’.

A few thoughts:

*The Trust report helpfully highlights the example of three schools in the top 500 that buck the trend; these have impressive results and high numbers of children on FSMs. One can draw hope from the extraordinary achievements of schools like these. Judging from their individual Ofsted reports, each has an exciting, varied curriculum: an unswerving commitment to every child, whatever their attainment on entry or presumed ability: good – but not military style – discipline. Children who are falling behind in core subjects are often taught in small groups until they catch up, and can rejoin the mainstream curriculum; there is due emphasis on creative subjects and on oral, performing, participatory and leadership skills.

* Is the answer to unfair admissions policies really random allocation or anonymous balloting? Is this not merely emphasising the idea of school access as a form of desperate competition, as the excellent Dr Helen Jarvis, reader in social geography at Newcastle University, argued on the Today programme this morning. “I am very sceptical that balance will help address these deep-seated inequalities – this is working with grain of flawed system not challenging it. It’s not going to be addressed just through allocation policies.” And what of the children left behind in the so called ‘ not so good’ schools?

Surely the answer lies in removing schools’ rights to doctor their own admissions in the first place? If all schools were required, not just in law, but in practice, to have genuinely fair and balanced admissions policies, and this were coupled with the kind of pedagogical advances that we are now seeing in so many areas, our school system would take a major leap forward in terms of class- based fairness.

* A final word about public/political language. These 500 schools are clearly ‘selective’ in many ways. But why call them ‘selective comprehensives’? Why not call them ‘selective faith schools’ or ‘selective academies’ or ‘selective CTCs’? That would be nearer the truth, judging by the detail of the report itself.

Following on from this, why do media/political leaders and commentators so rarely emphasise the far more selective elements of grammar or private schools in our public discussion? Too often, these schools are lauded for their ‘independence’, not for their transparent selection on grounds of social class or academic potential or both ( given the complex interrelation between the two.)

It is this pyramid of selectivity, starting with the private schools, some charging an eye watering £30,000 a year, that creates our disgracefully segregated educational system. Those in power do not like to dwell on it, for a number of reasons. Instead, they prefer endlessly to dissect the ‘social selectivity’ of ‘comprehensives’ – a form of easy political meat.

In this respect, the Sutton Trust report does not help advance the argument.

Try this one : Gove warns over children growing up in ‘chaotic homes’.

It starts off relatively promising, Michael Gove responding to a question from a Labour MP, highlighting the issues of some children coming to school in reception, already way behind their peers, due to the deprivation that thiey’ve already endured in their communities and families.

I know from experience that there are indeed families that are chaotic, that do have massive input from mutliple agencies trying to help them, and that it’s very difficult to challenge the self-fulfilling prophecy that children from those backgrounds will go on to fail in school and in society. Yet challenge it we must – and Michael Gove agrees.

How will he meet that challenge though ? – well for Mr Gove it appears that their are a few things we can do. First we must stigmatise the primary schools that cater for those children :

“there are many secondary schools doing a good job which are inherently impeded by the quality of the education offered in primary schools”

Really ? Strange, I’d never noticed that myself. As a matter of fact, if pushed, I’d have to say that I generally find the quality of primary education to be better than that generally in secondary schools. Just my subjective opinion of course – but maybe that’s OK, because there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Mr Gove is providing to back up his claims. It seems to be his own subjective opnion.

Next let’s stigmatise the children themselves for having the audacity to come from a less privileged background than his own :

” there are significant numbers of children who, because of their home environment arrive at school simply incapable of learning.”

Did you catch that ? – “incapable of learning” ?

. Well if Mr Gove had any knowledge of the history of the education of children with special educational needs in the UK he would know that the idea that any child is incapable of learning, is very muich discredited, and in fact not recognised in law – The 1970, 1981 and 1996 Education Acts making this clear. Quite how he would expect any teacher to demonstrate that a child incapable of learning was making progress in the classroom is also something of a mystery.

But hey ho – he’s the Secretary of State, so what do I know ?

But finally let’s get down to brass tacks – because as he points out “there are a group of children for whom the state has to intervene because they will grow up in circumstances so chaotic that it’s not just a case that they are neglected, it is the case that they are actively harmed by the failure to be in a nurturing environment where their brain can develop and where they can learn the sorts of habits which allow them to not just succeed academically at school but are effectively socialised.”

Quite right – and he’s right to point it out – so what’s the biggest weapon in our armoury on the way to achieving that ?

“We need to move even faster, extending the frontiers of opportunity, providing more excellent school places for more children than ever before.

I am determined that we concentrate our efforts particularly on the children in greatest need – those in the weakest schools – overwhelmingly in the most disadvantaged areas.”

Mr Gove said there were hundreds of under-performing primary schools and said he would be writing to MPs asking them to support his plans to turn poor primaries into academies.”

Yes that’s right, he’s going to solve all the problems of chaotic families by turning all the primary schools into academies.

Or maybe he could get Harry Potter in to cast a spell and sort things out for him.

Or maybe he should realise that just as there are no such things as magic spells, Academies are also NOT magic solutions.

The objectors, comprising Oxbridge academics, historians and educationalists said the BBC had a “statutory obligation” to present both points-of-view about selection particularly now that selective education is “back on the political agenda.”

The documentary, according to the academics, painted a rosy picture of grammar schools. It used “emotive and value-laden language… accompanied by romantic piano music” to elicit a positive response. It was “largely uncritical, factually careless and reliant upon unrepresentative personal testimony” which presented grammar schools as, according to the programme’s script, a “dream – the dream of giving the very best education to Britain’s brightest children.” This dream, according to the programme makers, was “swept away” in the 60s and 70s.

One of the objectors to the programme, Professor Richard Pring, Lead Director of the Nuffield Review of 14-19 education and director of education at Oxford from 1989-2003, told TES that the programme ignored research showing that selection at age 11 couldn’t be justified. This view is supported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which found that high-performing schools systems tend to be those that don’t segregate pupils according to ability or geographically.

Michael Pyke, of the Campaign for State Education (CASE), told TES that he would like to see the BBC giving a “more balanced view of education”.

The Government constantly attacks state schools for not sending enough pupils to “top” universities. But one of Gove’s sources thinks that concentrating on access is a toxic irritation fouling talk about what s/he describes in impeccable professional language as “too many rubbish schools”.

“Rubbish schools” is an imprecise description. If it means schools judged inadequate, then this applies to 2% of English schools at their last Ofsted inspection. If it means schools judged satisfactory, then the figure rises to 30%. Under the new inspection regime, the satisfactory judgement has been replaced by “requires improvement”. But this description can’t be applied retrospectively to schools judged satisfactory in the past as schools may have improved since their last inspection. And “requires improvement” does not necessarily mean that a school is “rubbish”.

This indiscreet comment by Gove’s intimate informant was in response to questions by TES about the growing dissent surrounding Gove’s exam reform agenda. This is opposed by universities, heads of Ofqual past and present, two of England’s exam boards, the Tory chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, teaching unions, academic experts and two recently-departed Department for Education (DfE) senior officials. One of these, Jon Coles, was DfE director general for education standards until early 2012. Coles, now chief executive of academy and independent school chain, United Learning, has called for a complete overhaul of the exam system with exams at 16 being replaced by graduation at 18. He told TES that the exam system was an education “tectonic plate” which, if moved around too rapidly would cause upheaval. “You risk having serious, serious problems,” he said.

A DfE spokesperson stoutly defended the proposed EBCs (English Baccalaureate Certificates). S/he told TES, “The new EBC will be robust, rigorous and relevant, to match the best education systems in the world.”

But the replacement for GCSEs, dubbed Gove Levels, does not match the graduation systems in most of the rest of the world (see faqs above). They are unimaginative, backward-looking and out-of-touch.

When proposals for an Advanced Baccalaureate (ABac) were leaked, another “source close to Michael Gove” tried to rebut criticisms by saying “ABac discussions are just on the drawing board. No decisions have been made. They would only be a league table thing.”

So a seismic shift in exams at 18+ is not being introduced to bring England in line with most of the rest of the world but in order to produce extra data for the “league table thing”. The extra work which will be required for graduation – an extended essay, voluntary activities – are not being introduced because they are worthy activities in their own right (and a feature of the exam systems in other countries). They are being proposed because they will contribute to the “league table thing”.

Last year the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1) warned that the excessive emphasis of exam grades in England risked having negative consequences on education. Now it appears that major changes to the exam system (EBacc, EBCs, ABac) are being introduced to satisfy the “league table thing”.

But the “league table thing” is not education.

(1) OECD Economic Survey UK 2011, not freely available on the internet but details of how to obtain a copy are here.

I’ve also tried to point out to Ricky on this site that where there is not a university nearby it’s not reasonable to expect the same level of university entrance as if there are several – a point Jo makes and explores in the questions.

The whole debate is worth listening to. It explores the subject from many perspectives and important points appear at unexpected times. Some were disappointed that Michael Gove dropped out but in the end the effect of that was that the whole session could focus on the subject in hand rather than having to pay attention to the elephant in the room of of his ignorance and distracting and disturbing rhetoric regarding the actually implications of his own policies.

And Nick Clegg keeps on making angry sounding noises about restricted access of the poor to Oxbridge colleges, causing one Oxford don to call him a communist! The whole spectacle is ludicruous, and the concentration on Oxbridge itself a perfect example of how narrow and elite the entire debate has become; for the Coalition front bench, at least, it is clear that no other universities have any true value.

So it is refreshing to read two liberal journalists – Suzanne Moore and Zoe Williams – in today’s Guardian question the terms of the entire debate. Moore makes the important point that she and many of her friends became socially mobile thanks not to a private school or a ‘bleedin’ grammar’ but I presume, to a comprehensive education and then further education – a sector that is now being slashed. The fact that many talented and significant figures, like Moore, clearly benefitted from, and prospered as a result of, a non selective education is rarely trumpeted by politicians of any party.

Williams makes the point that the privileged advocate social mobility until the point that the privileged might lose out; after all you can’t increase the numbers of poor children to a top university without restricting the numbers of wealthier children who gain entrance at the same time.

Just as importantly, none of this is going to make fundamental change without tackling the broader problem of income inequality. As Williams says,’Moreover, even if social mobility was achieved, what is so great about a society in which the outliers of each class can move relatively freely up and down the hierarchy? What’s so great about being able to escape the gutter, when the bulk of people are still in it?’

Without that broader project of income and educational equality, social mobility simply becomes a matter of lucky escape from the growing desperation of – and prescribed educational mediocrity – for the masses. Not a worthy project, on either count.