If you study social mobility you are pretty much forced to study it through the rear view mirror, looking back, as it were, over your shoulder. You can of course pretend you are Mystic Meg and on the basis of what you know about how kids are doing in school take a punt at fortune telling (sorry, model based prediction) and if that's your thing good luck, you need read no further. Personally I find it hard enough to say what happened in the past and I'll leave speculation about the future to others. But how far back should you go? That's a good question, but I'm going to substitute another: how ..read more

The current flurry of interest in social mobility seems to have lost sight of part of the motivation that sociologists (for, let's face it, sociologists have been consistently interested in social mobility for much longer than some other disciplines one could mention) had for studying it. Yes, estimating the probability that you can be found in a particular social class given that you started off in another class is useful. And ratios of such conditional probabilities (and even odds) can tell us important things about the "openness" of the society we live in. But there is another way of lookin ..read more

Fertility in the UK soared during the second world war peaking in the 1946 birth spike. By 1949 when the Royal Commission on Population's report was published the threat of population decline that had motivated its investigations had disappeared. Between 1946 and the mid-50s, when a second baby boom erupted, fertility plateaued at a significantly higher level than that achieved in the 1930s. Pessimism about the future gave way to optimism.  The children born between 1946 and the mid 1950s are often  tagged the lucky generation. The first to be born into a welfare state, they all, in ..read more

I learned a couple of days ago that a man I owe a lot too died in March. He was 85 so for someone of that generation had a reasonable if not exceptional innings. His name is Brian Richie, he was my English teacher in what would now be called years 9-13. I want to say something about him, call it a tribute if you like, but I have a small difficulty. I only ever met him once as an adult and my perspective is consequently mostly that of the schoolboy. About the man himself I know little. But I know what he was like in the classroom and I know what influence he had on me. Brian was of that generat ..read more

I'm very lucky to be on sabbatical leave and living until September (hopefully) in a country that has taken a different approach to the UK to dealing with the Corona virus epidemic. That means that I've not been forced suddenly into teaching online, for which I'm very grateful. A couple of years ago though I did decide to create some online video content for one of my courses and I'll share here what I learned about what to do and what not to do. I should start by saying that my ambitions were very limited. I wanted to produce something that was serviceable, but I had (and have) neither the ..read more

Solidarity ..read more