Nick Clegg made a keynote speech today in which he said he wants the coalition to be judged not only on deficit reduction, but on how much impact it makes on social mobility. "In five years time we also want to be able to look back and say that the children born in 2015 are less constrained by the circumstances of their birth," he said.
Good luck with that, Deputy Prime Minister. Increasing equality of opportunity has been a common aim of the last three Prime Ministers and, to a greater or lesser degree, they've all failed. Measuring social mobility is a notoriously tricky subject about which no two sociologists agree – David Goodhart wrote an excellent summary of the complexities around the subject for Prospect a couple of years ago. But almost no one thinks it has actually increased in the past 25 years. (To read more, click here.)
