Analysis

Part of your exam question requires you to analyse the obstacles to upward social mobility in Britain, using the five texts provided in your assignment. In what follows, we will outline how these obstacles are presented in the texts.

All texts in your exam set show or suggest that the main obstacles to upward social mobility are the unfair educational system, the divided labour market, regional inequality, and unaffordable housing prices.

The educational system

The educational system is an obstacle to upward social mobility because children do not receive an equal start in life. If children are on free school meals (FSM) - meaning that they come from a low-income background - they are significantly less likely to achieve good grades at school, as statistics in Text 5 demonstrate.

Furthermore, most of the texts in the assignment show that children who had free school meals or are from a working-class background are less likely to enter a top university or even to pursue higher studies that would help them move upwards on the social scale.

...

Inequality on the labour market

Inequality on the labour market is another important obstacle to social mobility. According to text 5, the percentage of people who are underpaid is quite high in many industries, particularly in cleaning (41.2%), hospitality (32.2%), hairdressing (27. 2%), and childcare (21.2%). These are typically jobs that don’t need qualifications, meaning that they are more likely to be done by people without higher education. This compounds the failings of the education system.

Texts 1 and 4 show how in certain regions of the UK people complain about the difficulty of finding jobs, or of finding well-paying jobs. Regions like West Somerset or South Yorkshire do not offer many skilled employment...

...

Unaffordable housing prices

Unaffordable housing prices represents another challenging obstacle to social mobility. According to Text 5, the number of people aged 20-59 who own a house has been decreasing since 1990. This is particularly true of young people, who are finding it increasingly difficult to get on the housing ladder.

...

Regional economic inequality

Regional economic inequality is an obstacle that makes unfair education, the labour market, and the housing market even more challenging.

As Texts 3 and 4 reveal, there is a ‘new geography of the disadvantage’ that suggests that the region in Britain where one is born might negatively impact one’s chances of climbing the social ladder. Text 3 notes: “…many towns and rural areas - not just in the North - are being left behind affluent London and the South East. In 40 local authority areas, one third of all jobs are paid below the Living Wage.” (ll. 39-41)

The same regional economic inequality is suggested by Texts 1 and 4 which present cases from

...