Class Inequalities in Education in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper reanalyses data from four nationally representative sample surveys, conducted in 1949, 1972, 1983 and 1987, to explore trends in class inequalities in education. Log-linear models are used to test whether the relationship between father's class and respondent's education varies significantly by birth cohort. The conclusion is that the various educational reforms that have been attempted over the past 50 years in Britain have had little impact on class inequalities in education. Educational reform has had many objectives-the socialization of the lower classes into civic responsibility, the increase of economic efficiency, the extension of meritoc- racy and the reduction of inequalities between the classes. It is the last of these which has been most amenable to empirical research and which has been a major focus of sociological endeavour. In Britain we now have a series of major national surveys from which we can chart the history of class inequalities in education over the course of the present century, and we can in principle relate any changes in class inequalities to such major educational reforms as the 1907 Free Place Regulations, the 1944 Education Act and the 1965 circular which initiated the replacement of a selective system of schooling with comprehensive schools. Educational researchers had great hopes of the 1944 reforms. Thus David Glass, the senior author of the first national study, was in no doubt that the Act would 'greatly increase the amount of social mobility in Britain' (Glass (1954), p. 22). 'Given the diminishing importance of economic and social background as a determinant of