News

A new report based on research led by Nuffield’s Centre for Social uncovers a wide social divide between children from families with high and low socio-economic status (SES) in building the childhood foundations for mobility in later life. The Centre for Social Investigation was commissioned by the government’s Child Poverty and Social Mobility Commission (now the Social Mobility Commission) to undertake research on the origins of children’s social mobility and explore how this has changed over the past 60 years. While the report finds some improvements in the early life chances of the United Kingdom’s least advantaged children there are many areas, which are vital to child development and attainment at school, where gaps are widening between high and low SES families. Such mobility indicator factors include: fathers reading regularly to their children, parental time investment, and engagement with schools. Dr Lindsay Richards, report author and postdoctoral research fellow at Nuffield-CSI said, “Our research demonstrates that – well before exams are taken or application forms filled in – more advantaged children have had more investment in terms of time, they have done more extracurricular activities, and experienced fewer behavioural problems.” Read the Social Mobility Commission’s press release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/socio-economic-influences-on-childrens-life-chances See the news story on the CSI website: http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/?p=570 The research findings were featured on the BBC’s six o’clock news on 9th June and have been reported on the BBC website as well as by The Times, The Telegraph, and Financial Times newspapers.