Paper prepared for the social policy section at the annual meeting
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
Glasgow, 4 September 2001.*
Introduction
The relationship between education and social-class inequality was one of the classic problems addressed by sociology, and, in the UK, formed the basis of one the most vibrant branches of the discipline from the 1940s until the 1970s. Much of this academic work is summed up in the three volumes that were co-edited by the leading English educational sociologist of the last half century, A. H. Halsey (Halsey et al, 1997, 1961; Karabel and Halsey, 1978). At that time, the sociologists were closely connected to policy makers, mainly in the Labour party, and they were highly influential on such reforming social democrats as Tony Crosland (Kogan, 1971). Indeed, the series of studies in the 1950s into the role of selective secondary schools in exacerbating social inequalities is a particularly clear instance of the capacity of academic research to help bring about a change in political climate (Gray et al, 1983; Halsey et al, 1980; McPherson and Raab, 1988): they attached the respectability of social science to the case for comprehensive secondary schooling, and so fitted well with the modernising rhetoric of the Wilson government which eventually abolished most selection.
Both political and academic fashion changed in the 1980s, most obviously because New Right ideology regarded social inequality as a not particularly important consequence of the markets that would, in the long run, equalise individual opportunity. Academic studies of inequality turned increasingly to gender and race or ethnicity (Halsey et al, 1997; Moore, 1996), although in Scotland an interest in social class persisted (McPherson and Willms, 1987; Willms, 1986). But the topic has returned to both political and academic debate since 1997, because the various Labour or Labour-led governments in the UK now regard social inequalities in access to education as an affront to principles of social justice, and as an inefficient waste of talent. The Scottish First Minister, Henry McLeish, when he was Minister of Enterprise and Lifelong Learning in 1999, said that
I want to see an inclusive Scotland, in which all members of our society ... can secure access to education suitable to their needs and aspirations. ... [For some], there may be significant barriers to access, such as social circumstances.
(McLeish, 1999)
The Scottish Inclusion Partnership, likewise, noted in March 2001 that
removing barriers, real or perceived, to higher and further education for students of all backgrounds is a key element of social justice.
(Scottish Social Inclusion Network, 2001)
And the Labour Party's English education manifesto for the June 2001 general election noted
the starkly differential rates of progression to higher education between social groups. ... Whereas nearly three-quarters of the children of professional parents now go on to university, barely one in six children of parents of manual occupations do so.
(Labour Party, 2001, p. 25)
Widening access to higher education is now the policy of all three of the higher education funding councils in Britain. For example, that is the first aim of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council's plan for 1999-2002, and they justify this on two grounds:
the twin purposes of widening access are to combat social exclusion and to create the highly educated workforce that will support the development of the knowledge-driven economy in Scotland.
(SHEFC, no date, p. 5)
This concern with the claimed economic inefficiency of social exclusion is reflected in numerous ministerial speeches and government policy documents in all parts of Britain. The Scottish Social Inclusion Partnership, for example, adds to its concerns about social justice that widening access
is essential for the development of the skilled population Scotland needs if we are to compete globally.
(Scottish Social Inclusion Network, 2001)
There is nothing new about linking social justice principles with an economic rationale. As Raymond Williams argued in relation to educational policy in Britain throughout the twentieth century, educational radicals were only ever able to have an impact on policy if they could persuade opinion more widely that educational democratisation would be economically efficient, and so would, in effect, pay for itself (Williams, 1961). That did not mean that their radicalism was diluted, and again today we can find justifications of widening access to education that are couched in terms of providing equal access to full citizenship (LTS, 2000; QCA, 1998).
This paper is in two broad sections. The first section looks in more detail at why educational inequality matters. The longer second section discusses what happened to educational inequalities in Britain in the twentieth century, looking separately at class, gender and ethnicity; particularly valuable in this regard is a recent paper by Heath (2000). The long historical context, and the comparison of these three dimensions of inequality, allow some conclusions to be drawn about the sources of inequality and of reductions of inequality, and about the kinds of politically inspired reforms that might have an impact on inequality.
Why Inequality Matters
There are two broad kinds of reason why inequalities in access to education matter:
The first is that education is in at least some respects an absolute good, and denying some individuals access to it is to deprive them of some key elements in what ought to be their civil rights and their cultural heritage. In this respect, educational inequalities differ from some other areas of debate about inequality. Being able to read and write are of intrinsic cultural and psychological value to a person regardless of how many other people also have this capacity. Of course, there will also be a positional good associated with reading and writing as well - being barely literate is a lot less stigmatising in a society where most people are illiterate than in a highly literate culture - but unlike many aspects of material wealth the positional advantage associated with education is never more than part of the problem of inequality. In that sense, raising the absolute level of education in a society is, in part, a contribution to reducing inequality. Achieving and maintaining universal literacy is and remains an important aspect of social emancipation even if there are unchanging or even growing inequalities in access to levels of education beyond that basic one.
Nevertheless, despite that, there are also some very important positional aspects of education - the second broad reason why inequalities matter. Education - as we will see - allows individuals to achieve better jobs, more income, higher status, and access to more education itself. So inequalities in access to education are of continuing concern even if the basic level of education in a society is rising.
The fundamental question which research has to ask is then whether policies for raising the average level of education are in conflict with policies for equalising the distribution of education.
The aspiration to broaden access to the cultural heritage lay behind most of the major education reforms in Britain in the twentieth century. One particular clear instance of this is in connection with what is taught. The idea of something approaching a common curriculum was debated by radicals such as R. H. Tawney and William Boyd as far back as the 1920s, as part of their campaign for 'secondary education for all' (McPherson, 1993; Simon, 1974; Paterson, 1996). It became part of the critique of the selective secondary system that was the official response to the pressure that resulted from that campaign: the main problem of the divided secondary system, it was alleged, was that the curriculum in the non-academic schools was generally inadequate, providing for only the most basic and unchallenging knowledge, and was no real preparation for life as a citizen in a democracy (Gray et al, 1983; Simon, 1991). Although a common curriculum was eventually introduced under a Conservative government in the 1980s, there continued to be advocates of it who drew on the earlier radical motivation - notably Lawton (1989). And then the evidence could be gathered that broadening the curriculum compulsorily for most school students really did broaden access to learning that went beyond the rather basic skills which the old junior secondary and secondary modern schools were offering in the 1950s. Research on this has been most thorough in Scotland, where Gamoran (1996a,b) has shown that the common curriculum at ages 14-16 that was developed in the 1980s reduced social class differences in access to a reasonably broad range of knowledge. For example, he found that, in the early 1980s, only some 20% of the most socially deprived students were studying mathematics at these ages, in contrast to 86% of the most socially advantaged students. By the early 1990s, the advantaged proportion had risen to 97%, but the disadvantaged proportion had risen much more sharply, to 68%, and so the inequality in this respect had declined from about 66 percentage points to about 29. Croxford (1994), likewise, found that the introduction of this common curriculum had reduced gender differences, notably in relation to science.
That a common school curriculum really does persist as a cultural benefit in adult life has then been shown recently by Murphy et al (2001), studying the effect of compulsory science in early secondary school. They found that young adults who had experienced compulsory science were more scientifically literate than those who had not, exactly as the proponents of a common curriculum had always advocated.
A similar set of cultural concerns arises in the current debate about levels of literacy skills among adults. Much political argument has been provoked by the results of an international study of literacy levels conducted in the mid-1990s, in which around a quarter of people in Britain had skill levels that were at a level that would now be expected of a pupil leaving primary school (Carey et al, 1997). The controversy has been about how this is to be interpreted. It is pointed out that the proportion of people who are truly illiterate is far lower than this, probably well under 5% (Kingston, 2001; Miller, 2001). The same international study also found that most of those people who had the lowest levels of literacy and numeracy were reasonably happy with these levels for daily life: 28% of them were 'very satisfied' with their skills, and 45% were 'somewhat satisfied' (Carey et al, 1997, p. 61). Some 82% of them never had to have help with reading newspapers, 87% needed no help with reading instructions on a medicine bottle, and 74% were able to do the basic arithmetical calculations that are needed in everyday life (Carey et al, 1997, p. 62). These are real cultural accomplishments, and indicate a society that has a more widespread access to some of the basic aspects of citizenship than one in which large proportions of people were truly illiterate. Nevertheless, despite these points about the absolute cultural and personal value of even quite low levels of educational attainment, the relative advantage conferred by attainment that is high in relative terms remains inescapable. The most literate were far more satisfied with their skills than the least literate: 77% were very satisfied, in contrast to 28%, and only 2% were somewhat or very dissatisfied, in contrast to 24%. Even in the group with skills that were moderate - approximately the next 30% of the population - 98% needed no help with reading newspapers, and 92% needed no help with basic mathematics.
The essential point here is that even though the average level of education may be rising, educational credentials above the average continue to buy relative social advantage, and that this happens at higher and higher levels as the average level of education rises (Collins, 1979; Halsey, Heath and Ridge, 1980). Blundell et al (2000) used the National Child Development Study to estimate the net benefit which a person could expect from gaining an undergraduate degree compared to not doing so. This survey has been following a group of people born in a single week in 1958, and so is the best source in Britain for examining the long-term consequences of events in childhood and early adulthood. For the purpose of estimating the economic benefits to a person of gaining a degree, the survey is particularly useful because it allows innate ability and other factors to be discounted: the important comparison is between people who gained a degree and those who had the school qualifications and the ability to gain a degree, but who chose not to. The results are stark: as a direct result of gaining a degree, women had earned some 37% more by age 33 than they would otherwise have done, and men had earned some 17% more. Similar results are reached by Bell (1999) using the Labour Force Survey: men in both Scotland and the rest of the UK had a 14% earnings return to gaining a degree; women in Scotland had a return of 29%, while those in the rest of the UK had a return of 22%.
Hobcraft (2000) also used the National Child Development Study to document in detail the multiplicity of ways in which unequal access to education contributes to social inequality in Britain. Thus, at age 33, people with low levels of passes in public examinations from school, compared to those with better passes, were more likely to have low-skilled or unskilled jobs, to have been in jobs which paid low wages, to have been unemployed, to have had to depend on state benefits, to have smoked cigarettes, to have suffered from various forms of psychological malaise, and - if female - to have been a lone parent. These effects associated with their own education were generally stronger than any direct effects of suffering from poverty in childhood, although poverty increased the likelihood of gaining few examination passes in the first place (as we will discuss in more detail in the next section).
People with larger amounts of education are also, in practice, more likely than those with little education to be fully engaged with society - to possess what many writers have called social capital (Baron et al, 2000). For example, in the 2000 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, 34% of people with university degrees were members of national or international organisations such as the National Trust or CND, in contrast to an average of 15% and to just 6% of those with no educational qualifications at all. Likewise, 66% of people with degrees regarded most other people as trustworthy. The average was 46%, and the proportion among those with no qualifications was 36%.
So inequalities in access to education matter because education is itself a source of social inequalities. Education may emancipate, and it may lead to a wider sharing in citizenship and culture. That is why raising the average level of education is intrinsically good. But it also confers positional advantage, and partially excludes from society people who do not have that benefit.
How and Why Have Educational Inequalities Changed?
Social reformers have therefore had good reason to take educational inequalities seriously: education does seem to confer significant benefit, and widening access to it does seem to be a necessary part of extending citizenship. But what success have reformers had over the last half century or so, and what does the experience of previous attempts at widening access have to tell us about current concerns with educational inequalities?
The most thorough treatment of these questions has been carried out by A. H. Halsey, Anthony Heath and colleagues for England and Wales and for Britain as a whole, and by Andrew McPherson and colleagues for Scotland (Gray et al, 1983; Halsey et al, 1980; Heath, 1990, 2000; Heath and Clifford, 1990). The most up-to-date treatment of the question for the whole of Britain is by Heath (2000), using data from the British Household Panel Study and from the Labour Force Study to record educational attainment according to the decade in which sample members were born. We use these and other sources to discuss inequalities with respect to class, gender and ethnicity.
Using a cross-sectional survey to study social change is the only option we have in the absence of regularly repeated surveys over a long period of time. The main threats to validity are selective mortality and selective migration, especially with respect to social class. Mortality is likely to bias our results in a conservative direction, in the sense of making it more difficult to detect any narrowing of educational inequalities. This is because the death rate by the time of the survey will have been greater among poorly educated working class people than among other groups, and this will have been most notably the case for people born early in the twentieth century. That will tend to lead to an overestimate of the educational levels of working class people in older cohorts, and so to an underestimate of the extent of class inequality in older cohorts. Thus, if we do find evidence of a narrowing of inequalities, then we will probably have underestimated its extent.
Concerning immigration, we follow Heath (2000) by including people who were born outside the UK. In fact, almost identical patterns of result were obtained when the data from the 1991 wave of the British Household Panel Study were re-analysed using only people who were born in the UK, or only those who were born in Britain. Selective emigration is a more intractable problem, since no study has followed up whole cohorts of emigrants throughout their whole emigrant career. Nevertheless, the likely biases would probably - as with selective mortality - work in a conservative direction. Successful emigration depends on people having networks in the destination country into which they could fit. One means of access to these is the possession of educational credentials, and so, in the normal course of events, well-educated people would be more likely to emigrate than less-well-educated (Elliot, 1997). That in itself would not bias our analysis, if, for example, class of origin had no effect on the propensity to emigrate other than through its effect on the acquiring of credentials. But, insofar as this is not the case, it seems likely that, at a given level of educational attainment, people from middle-class origins would be, on the whole, more likely to have had access to networks in the destination country than people from working-class origins: this was found, for example, in Walker's study of Scottish chartered accountants in the late nineneenth and early twentieth centuries (Walker, 1986). That would mean that emigration would probably have creamed off some of the better educated people of middle-class origins from earlier cohorts, and so would tend to lead us to underestimate the educational inequalities in these cohorts, and so also to underestimate any reduction in inequality by the end of the century.
Social class
On the whole, there seems to have been a slow decline in educational inequalities related to social class in the twentieth century, as can be seen from Tables 1a, 1b, 2a and 2b, quoted from Heath (2000). These record, for men and for women, the proportion passing at least one O level, O grade or equivalent, and at least one A level, Higher grade or equivalent, by the broad social class of their family as children (as measured by their father's occupation), and according to the period in which they were born. In reading these and similar later tables, the possibility of sampling fluctuations should be born in mind, and so relatively small changes from cohort to cohort are of less interest than the broad trend.
Tables 1a and 1b show that there has been a rise over time in the proportion gaining an O level pass or equivalent among both men and women, but the rise has been sharper for people from working-class origins than for people from professional ('salariat') origins. Thus, for men born in the first two decades of the century - and who would have attended secondary school in the 1930s - 59% of those with salariat fathers gained a pass of this type, compared to only 11% of those with working-class fathers. For the youngest cohort - born in the 1960s, and attending secondary school in the 1980s - the proportions were 90% and 64%, a rise of one half for the salariat but six-fold for the working class. The odds ratio comparing the salariat and the working class fell from 11.6 to 5.1. The changes in relation to social class are similar for women, although for all classes the female rates were lower at the beginning of the century than the male ones. (We return to gender inequalities later.)
Table 1a
Proportion of men from different class origins obtaining
at least O level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
social class origin*
1900-19
1920-29
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
1960-69
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
salariat
59
42
70
57
76
60
87
124
83
197
90
254
intermediate
29
117
35
167
44
188
63
245
76
271
70
270
working
11
139
18
258
29
252
47
354
60
321
64
308
all
25
298
30
482
41
500
59
723
71
789
74
832
* Class measured by Goldthorpe class scheme.
Source: British Household Panel Study 1991, following Heath (2000).
Table 1b
Proportion of women from different class origins obtaining
at least O level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
social class origin*
1900-19
1920-29
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
1960-69
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
salariat
40
65
42
82
57
75
79
167
77
225
91
276
intermediate
18
156
22
200
33
190
53
280
60
273
73
319
working
8
255
16
289
23
281
36
382
43
358
61
343
all
16
476
22
571
31
546
51
829
57
856
73
938
* Class measured by Goldthorpe class scheme.
Source: British Household Panel Study 1991, following Heath (2000).
A similar pattern, but at a lower level, can be seen for passing at least one A level, Higher grade, or equivalent. Tables 2a and 2b also are adapted from Heath (2000). For women, the salariat proportion rose from 25% to 59%, a bit more than double. The working class proportion, in contrast, rose from 3% to 22%, a seven-fold increase. The salariat-working-class odds ratio fell from 10.8 to 5.1. The pattern for men was, again, broadly in line, although starting from a higher base.
Table 2a
Proportion of men from different class origins obtaining
at least A level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
social class origin*
1900-19
1920-29
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
1960-69
salariat
45
33
48
62
66
67
intermediate
12
18
25
38
49
39
working
5
9
13
24
37
32
all
13
15
22
35
49
45
For sample sizes, see Table 1a.
* Class measured by Goldthorpe class scheme.
Source: British Household Panel Study 1991, following Heath (2000).
Table 2b
Proportion of women from different class origins obtaining
at least A level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
social class origin*
1900-19
1920-29
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
1960-69
salariat
25
20
36
45
48
59
intermediate
7
10
10
20
25
34
working
3
5
11
12
14
22
all
7
9
14
21
26
37
For sample sizes, see Table 1b.
* Class measured by Goldthorpe class scheme.
Source: British Household Panel Study 1991, following Heath (2000).
Thus a century of substantial reform in the character of secondary education may indeed have widened access at least to the most measurable outcomes of schooling. The oldest cohort here would have attended secondary school when a proper secondary system was at best barely in place. In the mid-1930s, only Scotland had more or less a full secondary structure, and that had only just been achieved. For the cohorts born in the 1930s or 1940s a full secondary system had been set up, a radical change in contrast to just a few decades earlier (Simon, 1990). But it remained a highly divided one, children being allocated to academic or non-academic schools according to their measured ability at the end of primary school. The people born in the 1950s or later would mostly have attended a comprehensive secondary system, which had been officially encouraged by the Labour government from 1965 onwards partly as an attempt to mitigate social class inequalities in access to the kinds of credentials that are recorded in these tables.
And yet inspection of the intermediate cohorts in Tables 1 and 2 does not suggest that these two major reforms affected the overall trend very much. The more plausible interpretation is that the century was one of steady expansion of secondary schooling, and that expansion itself brought in wider and wider groups of students. Comprehensive schooling may have helped the expansion: thus the biggest overall rise in attainment of O levels or equivalent was between the 1930s cohort (who mostly went to secondary school in the 1950s) and the 1940s cohort (who mostly went during the first phase of the introduction of comprehensive schooling). There is evidence from research in Scotland that the first and most important effect of comprehensive schooling was simply to increase the access which students had to any kind of meaningful certification (Gray et al, 1983).
In this view, then, social class inequalities have narrowed largely because the attainment of people from the salariat has been reaching a high plateau, allowing the others to catch up. Comprehensive secondary schooling may have helped in this respect, but mainly by encouraging an existing trend. Further data from Scotland can confirm this interpretation. Comprehensive schooling was introduced more swiftly in Scotland than in England, and with less controversy (McPherson and Willms, 1987). By the late 1970s, in consequence, the public sector of secondary schooling in Scotland was wholly non-selective, and the private sector remained small at around 5%. Tables 3a and 3b - following Heath (1990) - use data from the Scottish School Leavers Survey to show the proportion of school leavers passing at least one O grade, from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s. As Heath comments, the absolute difference between the classes declined, especially for girls. But the odds ratios probably did not change (once sampling error is taken into account): they remained at around 6 to 1. McPherson and Willms (1987), analysing the same data in more detail, reach the same conclusion about the absolute differences.
Table 3a
Proportion of male school leavers from different class origins obtaining
at least an O grade pass
percentage
in cell
year of leaving school
social class origin*
1976
1980
1984
%
N
%
N
%
N
upper middle
84
410
87
676
89
798
lower middle
76
154
75
207
78
203
working
48
1134
51
1421
58
1472
all
58
1698
62
2304
69
2473
* Class measured by Registrar General scheme:
'upper middle' is I and II;
'lower middle' is IIInm;
'working class' is IIIm, IV and V.
Source: Scottish School Leavers' Surveys
of 1977, 1981 and 1985, following Heath (1990).
Table 3b
Proportion of female school leavers from different class origins obtaining
at least an O grade pass
percentage
in cell
year of leaving school
social class origin*
1976
1980
1984
%
N
%
N
%
N
upper middle
86
433
89
707
89
737
lower middle
76
172
84
213
89
231
working
48
1164
53
1547
66
1526
all
58
1769
65
2467
75
2494
* Class measured by Registrar General scheme:
'upper middle' is I and II;
'lower middle' is IIInm;
'working class' is IIIm, IV and V.
Source: Scottish School Leavers' Surveys
of 1977, 1981 and 1985, following Heath (1990).
This conclusion - that educational reform has tended to equalise social class differences through encouraging overall expansion - can be tested in more detail for more recent years by a further comparison of attainment at around age 16 in Scotland and in England and Wales. A recent paper by Demack et al (2000), using data from the Youth Cohort Study, reported a slight widening of the social class gap in maintained schools in England and Wales between 1988 and 1995, and they attributed this to regressive government policies. The relevant data from their paper are in Table 4, which reports the proportion of young people being awarded at least five GCSEs at levels A-C. The gap between children of professional fathers and children of unskilled manual fathers widened slightly from 50 percentage points in 1988 to 56 points in 1995 (although the odds ratio fell slightly, from 15.9 to 12.6).
Table 4
Proportion of young people in maintained schools in England and Wales passing
at least 5 GCSEs at A-C, 1988 and 1995
percentage
in cell
year
social class*
1988
1995
%
N
%
N
professional
58
628
77
850
managerial
40
3530
59
4306
skilled non-manual
26
2489
43
2759
skilled manual
17
3122
30
2710
partly skilled
13
1198
24
1277
unskilled
8
282
21
323
*Class measured by Registrar General scheme.
Source: Demack et al (2000, Table AII), using Youth Cohort Survey.
Analogous Scottish data (again the Scottish School Leavers Survey) for the same age group between 1980 and 1997 casts some light on this finding. Table 5 shows the proportion of school leavers from public-sector schools who were awarded at least five Ordinary or Standard Grades at levels A-C or 1-3, roughly equivalent to the measure used by Demack et al. The years shown are 1980, 1988, 1995 and 1997. (Repeating the analysis including independent schools reached the same conclusions.) The professional class was already in 1980 at a high level of attainment, and so most of the change over the next decade and a half reduced that class's relative advantage. Thus the gap between it and the unskilled class was 60 points in 1980, 55 in 1988, 51 in 1995 and 41 in 1997; the odds ratios were 18.1, 12.1, 11.0 and 7.2. But the gap between the unskilled class and some of the intermediate classes widened as these intermediate groups caught up with the professional class, and then narrowed again as they, too, reached the high levels that had already been attained by the professionals, and as the unskilled class began to catch up as well. Thus, compared to the skilled non-manual class, the unskilled class was 27 points behind in 1980, 25 in 1988, 37 in 1995, and 25 in 1997; the odds ratios were 7.4, 3.7, 4.8, and 2.8. Likewise, compared to the skilled manual class, the unskilled class was 8 points behind in 1980, 10 in 1988, 15 in 1995, and 8 in 1997; the odds ratios were 1.6, 1.7, 1.9 and 1.4.
Table 5
Proportion of young people in public sector schools in Scotland passing at least
5 Ordinary or Standard Grades at A-C or 1-3 in school fourth year, 1980-1997
percentage
in cell
year
social class*
1980
1988
1995
1997
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
professional
73
218
74
211
85
267
85
504
managerial
54
981
58
1080
75
892
77
1682
skilled non-manual
40
405
44
345
71
323
69
555
skilled manual
21
1959
29
1386
49
1139
52
1975
partly skilled
17
767
27
543
41
451
47
691
unskilled
13
216
19
120
34
128
44
198
* Class measured by Registrar General scheme.
Source: Scottish School Leavers' Survey.
Nor could we conclude from the Scottish School Leavers Survey that the comprehensive schooling system was becoming steadily more socially segregated during the 1980s and 1990s. Such a trend has been widely predicted as an inevitable outcome of the parental choice of secondary school for their children that was introduced by the Conservative government in 1981 in Scotland and in 1988 in England and Wales: typical predictions of this type are made by Gewirtz et al (1995). Empirical measurement of actual segregation - such as that by Gorard and Fitz (1998) for South Wales - has tended to suggest that the actual effect of quasi-markets is more ambiguous. Probably the most methodologically rigorous way of measuring segregation is as the proportion of all social class variation that is at the school level, calculated by means of a multilevel statistical model (Willms and Paterson, 1995). Here we take two measures of that composition: the proportion of pupils whose father was in a professional occupation (Registrar General class I), and the proportion of pupils whose father was in a semi-skilled or unskilled manual occupation (classes IV and V). For class I, the segregation measured and calculated in this way was 13% in 1980, 8% in 1988, 7% in 1995 and 6% in 1997. That suggests a slow downward trend in segregation. For classes IV and V, the segregation fluctuated rather more: in 1980 it was 5%, in 1988 it was 7%, in 1995 it was 1% and in 1997 it was 3%. Nevertheless that, too, suggests that the segregation in the 1990s was rather lower than in the 1980s. There were similar trends in segregation where parental choice was most feasible - the four large cities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow - although at a higher overall level of segregation: for example, the segregation index of class I was 24% in 1980, 14% in 1988, and 11% in 1995 and 1997. This suggests that the main source of segregation among schools remains residential segregation, and that - as Gorard and Fitz (1998) speculate - the parental choice policy may have somewhat mitigated its effect.
So there is no evidence of steadily widening inequality. To look only at the middle pair of years and at the intermediate and lower classes in Table 5 would lead us to conclude with Demack et al (2000) that inequalities were rising. In fact, when we can also see the 1980 and 1997 time points, and when we also take into account that the professional class in Scotland had already reached a high level of attainment in 1980 that was not reached until 1995 by their counterparts in England and Wales, a more reasonable interpretation is that the intermediate groups in Scotland were catching up with the leading group more rapidly than the most disadvantaged class, but that once this catch-up had been accomplished, the bottom classes began to be brought in as well. No significant relevant policies changed in Scotland between 1995 and 1997, or even during the whole period when these young people were in secondary school (from 1991 onwards). Thus the most plausible explanation of the narrowing of the social class gap by 1997 is simply that this is what happens with overall expansion. In England and Wales, we might expect the same process to be in place over the decade from 1995, since the column for 1995 in Table 4 (England and Wales) is very similar to the column for 1988 in Table 5 (Scotland). Gorard and Fitz (1998) offer a similar interpretation of the absence of systematic widening of segregation following the introduction of parental choice. They suggest that there may be some initial widening, because the middle class at first has more access than the working class to the knowledge and networks that make effective choice possible. But working class parents then catch up, mitigating or even reversing the segregating effects of choice.
Yet another test of the same conclusion - equalisation through expansion - can be found in the current expansion of higher education. It started in the late 1980s, under a government with no particular interest in reducing social inequalities in access to higher education. Table 6 is from the research which Robertson and Hillman (1997) carried out for the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education that reported in 1997; they in turn used the analysis of the Oxford Mobility Study reported by Halsey et al (1980). It shows the rate of entry to higher education from 1940 to 1995 by young people in England and Wales, for a broad middle class group and a broad working class group, and also the overall rate of entry to higher education. The odds ratio of middle class to working class was around 6 to 1 in 1940. The middle class benefited most from the initial post-war expansion, so that the ratio reached 9.8 in 1960. The expansion following the Robbins report in 1963 then started to benefit the working class, so that the ratio fell to 7.1 by 1980. But the most rapid change in the ratio during the entire half century was under the Conservative government after that: it fell to 4.6 in 1995. The trend for Scotland illustrated in Table 7 was similar, but from the 1960s onwards it was at a lower level of inequality (Gray, McPherson and Raffe, 1983, pp. 204-5; Tinklin, 2000, p. 369; Tinklin and Raffe, 2000, pp. 18-19); this is again based on the Scottish School Leavers Survey. Because policies on encouraging wider access were not significantly different between Scotland and the rest of the UK, the reason for the narrower class differences in Scotland is probably simply that overall participation was higher.
Table 6
Proportion of year group in England and Wales entering higher education
by age 21*
percentage in cell
year
social class origin**
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1985
1990
1995
middle
8.4
18.5
26.7
32.4
33.1
35.2
36.7
45.0
working
1.5
2.7
3.6
5.1
6.5
8.3
10.3
15.1
all
1.8
3.4
5.4
8.4
12.4
13.7
19.3
32.0
middle class/working class odds ratio
6.0
8.2
9.8
8.9
7.1
6.0
5.0
4.6
* Age participation index.
** Class measured by Registrar General scheme:
middle class is I, II, IIInm; working class is IIIm, IV, V.
Source: Robertson and Hillman (1997).
Table 7
Proportion of year group in Scotland entering higher education from school*
percentage in cell
year
social class origin**
1953-4
1962-3
1980
1984
1988
1993
middle
12
16
33
34
39
51
working
2
3
8
10
11
22
all*
4
6
18
19
21
39
middle class/working class odds ratio
6.7
6.2
5.8
4.8
4.9
3.4
* The overall age participation index is for entry up to age 21.
** Class measured by Registrar General scheme:
middle class is I, II, IIInm; working class is IIIm, IV, V.
Source: Gray, McPherson and Raffe (1983, pp. 204-5),
Tinklin and Raffe (2000, pp. 18-19), SED (1988), SOED (1992), SOEID (1998).
Part of the reason for the decline of inequalities in access to higher education may have been analogous to the introduction of comprehensive secondary schooling, because the Conservatives abolished the formal distinction between universities and polytechnics or colleges in 1993. But this change did not end selection between different kinds of higher education institution, and so was not deliberately an egalitarian reform in the way that the introduction of comprehensive schooling was. It may have encouraged expansion by reducing the public costs of expanding the institutions that were previously universities, which had always been more generously funded than the polytechnics and colleges.
So, at several points during the last half century, there has been some narrowing of social class differences in access to those stages of education that are most rapidly expanding at that time. Moreover, even when the relativities have been constant - such as for entry to higher education between the 1960s and the 1980s - it could be argued that some democratisation of access was taking place because the relative sizes of the social classes were changing substantially (Gallie, 2000). The professions made up around 4-5% of the workforce until the 1940s, but had grown to around 20% by the 1990s. Correspondingly, manual workers' share of employment fell from around three quarters in the first few decades of the century to under 40% in the 1990s; the biggest proportionate fall was for skilled manual workers, from around a third to about 14%. These changes on their own would be expected to widen social class differences in the educational attainment of young people, if the remaining smaller working class was less educationally ambitious than the much larger working class of the early decades of the century. So maintaining constant class differences is a shift in an egalitarian direction in an era of overall expansion, because it represents increasingly wider access to the absolute benefits which education confers. But this would still be a consequence of overall expansion, not of deliberately egalitarian measures.
Gender
If overall expansion is the main explanation of the slowly falling differences in respect of social class, that is likely also to have contributed to the much more striking changes in differences associated with gender. But these changes are so large that some other factor is likely to be at work as well.
A useful summary is again provided by Heath (2000), shown in Table 8. For the oldest cohort (born in the first two decades of the twentieth century), there was a ten-point gap between men and women in the proportion passing at least one O level or equivalent. This had vanished by the 1960s cohort. A pattern like this can be replicated across many educational measures. Women made up just over a third of full-time undergraduates in 1960, around 40% in the 1970s and 1980s, nearly one half in the 1990s, and 54% now (DES, 1972, Table 32; DES, 1983, Table 23; DfE, 1992, Table 25; HESA, 2001, Table 5). During most of these four decades, there were no official programmes to encourage women to enter higher education, and indeed most of the rise in female participation has been a consequence of the rise in female students' attainment at school (Tinklin and Raffe, 2000; Paterson, 1992). But that, too, was not mainly the result of explicit programmes of encouraging more equality: it had more to do with a general revolution in girls' and women's aspirations (Arnot et al, 1996; Turner et al, 1995). Individual programmes undoubtedly may have helped some young women, and may have encouraged them to take courses they may not otherwise have taken. But the main reason for the apparent ending of gender differences in access to education up to undergraduate level is almost certainly autonomous social change. The deep changes in gender roles encouraged young women to aspire to higher education, and the overall expansions of secondary and higher education enabled them to do so.
Table 8
Proportion of men and women obtaining
at least O level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
1900-19
1920-29
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
1960-69
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
N
men
24
350
30
553
39
570
57
802
69
875
72
915
women
14
565
21
672
31
635
50
935
57
948
71
1078
all
18
915
25
1225
35
1205
53
1737
63
1823
72
1993
Source: Heath (2000), using British Household Panel Study 1991.
Ethnicity
Probably much the same explains the almost equally striking change in the educational chances of people from non-European ethnic backgrounds. Tables 9a, 9b, 10a and 10b come again from Heath (2000). The first pair (separately for men and women) contrasts the attainment at O level and equivalent of white people who were born in Britain with black and Asian people who were born in the Caribbean, India or Pakistan. There was no improvement in the relative chances of these groups of black and Asian people. Indeed, because the white group had steadily rising rates of passing these examinations, whereas the black and Asian groups generally did not, their relative position actually got worse. But for the children of these immigrants to Britain, the position is very sharply different, as a comparison of Tables 10a and 10b with Tables 9a and 9b shows. Young people of Indian families, indeed, may have overtaken younger whites in their rate of passing O levels or equivalent. Black Caribbean young people have much the same rate as whites. The disadvantage of young Pakistanis - just under 10% for men, and around 15% for women - compares with 50% or 60% for similarly aged men and women who migrated to Britain from Pakistan (as shown in Tables 9a and 9b). Heath (2000, pp. 326-7) shows also that similar reductions in ethnic inequality were found in respect of attainment at A level or equivalent.
Table 9a
Proportion of first-generation men from different ethnic origins obtaining
at least O level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
ethnic origin
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
1960-69
White British-born
56
65
72
74
Black Caribbean
31
39
-
-
Indian
36
41
29
31
Pakistani
13
21
24
22
Source: Heath (2000), using Labour Force Survey 1992-97.
Percentages are not reported where the sample size is less than 100.
Table 9b
Proportion of first-generation women from different ethnic origins obtaining
at least O level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
ethnic origin
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
1960-69
White British-born
34
45
59
71
Black Caribbean
30
34
-
-
Indian
13
19
23
21
Pakistani
5
9
8
7
Source: Heath (2000), using Labour Force Survey 1992-97.
Percentages are not reported where the sample size is less than 100.
Table 10a
Proportion of second-generation men from different ethnic origins obtaining
at least O level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
ethnic origin
1960-69
1970-79
White British-born
74
73
Black Caribbean
67
67
Indian
83
79
Pakistani
67
Source: Heath (2000), using Labour Force Survey 1992-97.
Table 10b
Proportion of second-generation women from different ethnic origins obtaining
at least O level or equivalent
percentage in cell
birth cohort
ethnic origin
1960-69
1970-79
White British-born
71
75
Black Caribbean
75
73
Indian
73
79
Pakistani
60
59
Source: Heath (2000), using Labour Force Survey 1992-97.
As with gender, a small part of the more recent changes may have had something to do with explicitly egalitarian programmes, but the contrast between the British-born and Pakistani-born or Indian-born cohort from the 1970s suggests that the main explanation must lie elsewhere. Almost certainly it is again because of autonomous social change: the rising aspirations of second-generation young black and Asian people, and probably also a strong cultural faith in education as a means of escaping invidious discrimination - what Modood (1997, p. 77) calls 'the motivational drive for self-improvement that migrants typically have for themselves and their children'. Asian people, in particular, have rates of entry to higher education that are markedly higher than those of white people, and they are concentrated in the most vocationally relevant faculties, such as science, engineering and medicine (Modood, 1997, pp. 79-80; ONS, 1996, Table 3.7; Raab, 1998, Table 5). As with women, the overall expansion of education then has allowed young black and Asian people to realise some of their aspirations.
Has the positional advantage of education changed?
With all this changing distribution of educational opportunity, there might be reasons to suspect that the positional advantage of a given amount of education could have changed. This is certainly what would be expected by the theory of credential inflation (Collins, 1979). According to this theory, jobs that used to require just a school-leaving certificate would now require a degree. Undoubtedly something of this sort has happened over a long period of time, insofar as certain professions - such as accountancy and law - now recruit only graduates whereas there used to be other entry routes. But changes of that sort do not really show that the advantage of having a school-leaving certificate has diminished, merely that a particular way of using it is no longer available. It now has to be used to gain access to higher education, whereas previously it could be used directly in the labour market. There is in fact little firm evidence that the advantage of a given amount of education has diminished. For example, the credential-inflation argument might lead us to expect that students would require ever higher levels of performance in their school-leaving examinations in order to get into higher education. But that seems not to be the case. Tinklin and Raffe (2000, p. 17) show that, for school leavers in Scotland in the early 1990s, the proportion entering higher education among those with modest numbers of passes in their Higher grade examinations actually increased more rapidly than the proportion among those with many passes. For those with 1 or 2 Highers, the proportion rose from around 10% in the 1980s to around 30% in 1993. For those with 3 or 4 Highers, the proportion rose from around 60% to around 70%, and for those with 5 or more Highers the proportion remained at around 90%.
The same was true for the rise in staying-on rates in full-time education after age 16 that happened in the latter part of the 1980s (Paterson and Raffe, 1995). In Scotland, the rate of staying on rose most rapidly among people with the poorest attainment at age 16 (in Standard Grade or Ordinary Grade examinations): for those with no passes at all, it rose from 15% in 1985 to 31% in 1991; for those with 3 or 4 passes, it rose from 57% to 71%; and for those with 7 or more passes, it rose from 95% to 98%. So for the advantage which a given level of education confers within the education system itself, the inflation metaphor does not really work, probably because the overall expansion is continuing. Inflation happens only if there is both an increase in purchasing power and a restriction in supply, and for the last thirty years there has been no lasting real restriction in supply at all.
Of course, it could be that overall figures for entry to any kind of higher education are concealing fiercer competition for places in universities with the highest social prestige, and that any apparent narrowing of social inequalities in access might have been due only to working-class students' entering the newer universities that possibly have lower prestige. But the evidence does not support this claim. In Scotland, the School Leavers Survey allows us to compare social class differences in entry to 'old' universities with those for higher education as a whole. Among school leavers whose father was in a manual occupation, the proportion entering an old university tripled between 1978 and 1996, from 4% to 11%. Among leavers whose father was in a non-manual occupation, the rise was from 22% to 35%. These represent odds ratio of around 7 to 1 in the late 1970s, and about 4 to 1 in the mid-1990s. This is broadly in line with the overall trend noted earlier in Table 7, although the inequality in entry to the old universities is greater at each time point. So there is no evidence that the apparent widening of access is illusory on account of credential inflation - no evidence that the old universities are siphoning off disproportionate numbers of middle class entrants.
None of this tells us about the employment opportunities which particular levels of education confer. In his analysis of the returns to higher education using the Labour Force Survey, Bell (1999) makes the point that the similarity of his conclusions to those reached by Blundell et al (2000) using the National Child Development Survey is perhaps surprising, considering that the NCDS graduates would have gained their qualifications mainly in the 1980s, whereas the LFS graduates would have done so over a much longer period of time. One way of interpreting the similar conclusions, however, would be as confirmation that there has not been any large changes in the relative earnings advantage of gaining a degree. Indeed, Machin (2002) shows, for the UK and the USA, that, for individuals, the economic returns to education have in fact increased since 1990.
Universalism, Meritocracy and Social Change
The conclusions from all this are therefore both rather encouraging and very perplexing for policy makers. Where there have been clear and large falls in inequality in access to education, they have probably not been mainly because of official egalitarian programmes. Women started to catch up with men, and more recently black and Asian people who were born in Britain started to catch up with whites, despite a general lack of official interest. The revolution in gender roles in the last four decades encouraged young women to raise their aspirations. The partial cultural assimilation of British-born blacks and Asians encouraged them similarly. But often that was in the face of an indifferent or even hostile political establishment, especially during the period of Conservative rule in the 1980s and 1990s. That was because the main thing which these rising aspirations required to achieve greater equality was overall expansion.
The expansion itself happened partly because all UK governments between the 1960s and the present have accepted the argument that more education is likely to lead to a more effective economic performance (Ashton and Green, 1996). In that same period, governments have also been under pressure from rising aspirations, of which those by women and black and Asian people are important instances. One reason why educational aspirations have been rising more generally is because young people inherit a liking for education from their parents: because of the first wave of significant expansion in the 1960s, more of the parents of 1980s or 1990s young people had educational capital to hand on to their children, and so more of these children expected more from education (Burnhill et al, 1990). Ultimately, that is probably the reason why social class inequalities have been declining steadily too. But in the 1980s and 1990s, that could not have been due to government programmes to widen access, because there were hardly any, and certainly nothing of the same reforming ambition as the introduction of comprehensive secondary education in the 1960s. Yet even in the 1960s the main effect of that reform was probably not directly on reducing inequality but simply in raising overall participation. In due course, that then narrowed the social class gaps because working class people wanted to share in the overall expansion.
It may be that all these processes are best described as 'maximally maintained inequality' (Raftery and Hout, 1993; Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993). It could be that this tendency of education systems in capitalist economies makes for rather depressing reading for those who advocate cleverly targeted egalitarian measures. But the more hopeful and more historically realistic response of policy makers would be to attempt to change what is 'maximal'. By overall expansion, the most advantaged groups reach a plateau of participation or of attainment, and the disadvantaged groups then begin to catch up provided that their own aspirations are rising. Because education is in part an absolute good, that process towards equality is a real gain for social citizenship.
So the policy lesson of the last half century is, on the whole, that if governments make more education available, in due course inequalities will fall. That will happen ultimately because the whole education system operates by an ideology of merit-selection, so that the rules are fairly clear and allow people to build up their credentials incrementally. Merit-selection has never been a clear enough ideology to allow true equality of opportunity to be defined, far less measured (Goldthorpe, 1996). 'Merit' cannot be measured other than by educational outcomes, and so cannot, without circularity, be used to measure inequality of access to education. But as a principle it has probably operated in an egalitarian direction, insofar as it has encouraged more and more people - especially young people - to seek the credentials that would enable them to pass on to further stages of education or into the labour market. Whether this growth in formal assessment has been educationally desirable is another debate, but, on the whole, it has been an equalising force.
This ideological level is probably where there is scope for policy intervention. The intoduction of comprehensive education proclaimed that merit-selection was being taken seriously by policy-makers. That then encouraged working class people and girls to raise their aspirations. The significance of the Scottish distinctiveness may be that the thoroughness of merit-selection was even less doubted there, partly because there was a putative national tradition of equality of opportunity, and partly because the political context in the 1980s seemed to pose a hierarchical Conservative government against a country where credentials were increasingly seen as a means of individual and social progress. The same may well be happening now in relation to higher education. Applications to places at higher education institutions rose sharply after the Scottish Parliament had voted to end tuition fees - up by 3.8% between 2000 and 2001 from people resident in Scotland to institutions in Scotland, compared to falls or to rises of no more than about 1% for people resident elsewhere in the UK to institutions there (UCAS, 2001). In due course - if the argument we have advanced is correct - a continuing rise of this kind would be likely to lead to some reduction in the inequalities in access. But it is unlikely that the main effect of abolishing fees was directly egalitarian: they had always been means-tested, and the change in applications happened before the new system of means-tested bursaries was put in place. More likely is that the abolition of fees announced a principle of open access which then had a small but significant impact on people's propensity to try to make use of it.
The main policy prerequisite of gradually eroding inequalities is therefore not targeted action, either of the highly specific kind represented in the various access schemes of the higher education funding councils, or in the more general kind embodied in the introduction of comprehensive secondary schools. These may help some individuals, may stimulate disadvantaged groups to raise their aspirations, and - above all - may encourage an existing trend towards overall expansion. But the necessary requirement for significantly reducing inequality over the last half century has simply been overall expansion. So we can now answer the question we asked at the beginning. Raising the average level of education is not only not in conflict with equalising the distribution of education; it may actually be the best way of achieving it. Education is perhaps the clearest example we have that the most effective way of widening access to social citizenship is universalism.
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* I am grateful to Anthony Heath (Nuffield College, Oxford) for permission to use some of the tables from his 2000 paper, and to Robin Rice (Data Library, Edinburgh University) and the Data Archive at Essex University for help with gaining access to the British Household Panel Study. My interpretation of these data are entirely my own responsibility.
(Published Online: 27 June 2002)
This page was published on 14 November 2008