Social Mobility Stands Still

A charity's study has found that children born in the 1950s had a better chance of escaping poverty than those born in the 1970s. The research was carried out on behalf of the Sutton Trust by the London School of Economics .

Professor Steve Machin, from LSE, said: "We had a very big expansion of the higher education system in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but contrary to many people's expectations this actually reinforced social immobility." People at the bottom of the "income distribution" were ill-equipped to take advantage of the greater opportunities.

The founder of education policy group, the Sutton Trust, Sir Peter Lampl says Britain has "the lowest social mobility of any country you can measure".

He went on to say that inequality between the rich and poor in Britain was a root cause of the problem.

This study re-confirms an earlier LSE report on social mobility and Peter Lampl echoes the view of Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister who grew up in a single-parent family on a council estate, who said it would be harder today for someone from a similar background to get ahead in society than it was a generation ago.