What is the class ceiling?

Children of doctors and lawyers are up to 24 times more likely to get in to the same profession as their parents compared to their less “socially privileged” peers, a new book has suggested.

The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged by Sam Friedman from the London School of Economics (LSE), and Daniel Laurison indicates traditionally elite jobs such as medicine, law and media are among the most “inherited” careers in the UK.

According to The Times, the book “explores the invisible ‘helping hands’ that allow the well-connected middle classes to retain their stranglehold on the elite professions and explores why people from working-class backgrounds are less likely to reach top jobs even after securing first-class degrees from top universities”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It suggests that that class pay gap is as big an issue as the gender pay gap, with people from working class backgrounds in elite roles earning on average £6,400 a year less than peers from more privileged upbringings.

“This is partly a question of culture – parental expectation combined with insider knowledge,” says Iain Macwhirter in The Herald. Yet “it is not just about culture and manners – about social barriers, and about ‘talking proper’” he adds. “The reality is that since the 1980s Britain has become deeply socially divided through relentless and accelerating inequalities of wealth and power.”

iNews says evidence of the so-called ‘class ceiling’ “comes amid rising debate over the existence of private schools in the UK”.

In an editorial in The Guardian, historian David Kynaston and economist Francis Green set out their argument that paid-for education was the root of inequality in British society.

“The existence in Britain of a flourishing private-school sector not only limits the life chances of those who attend state schools but also damages society at large, and it should be possible to have a sustained and fully inclusive national conversation about the subject,” they write.

“For far too long, public policy has been based on a casual assumption that economic inequality is not a problem so long as there is equality of opportunity. That’s it’s just about hard work, or intelligence. But it isn’t, and it never has been,” says Macwhirter.