When and Why do Initially High Attaining Poor Children Fall Behind?

Claire Crawford, Lindsey Macmillan and Anna Vignoles

Published 28 July 2015

The role of education as a potential driver of social mobility has been well established in both the theoretical (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Becker and Tomes, 1986) and empirical literature (Atkinson, 1980; Atkinson and Jenkins, 1984; Breen and Goldthorpe, 2001; Breen and Jonsson, 2007; Blanden et. al, 2007) across disciplines over the past fifty years. Many view reducing educational inequality as a key policy lever for improving levels of social mobility. This is certainly true in the UK, where the Government now actively tracks levels of educational inequality across the life course as a proxy for longer term trends in social mobility (Cabinet Office, 2011).