What type of working class are you?
Here's a table to help decide!
Are you working class? Were you working class as a child? And how do you even know?
At university this was a constant question because I was at Oxford in the early 2000s and everyone was very into social mobility. Universities were starting to charge for places while being forced to open their doors to ordinary folks from estates in small towns, or, as people would said while pointing in my direction, to “working-class people like you.”
But how do we measure someone’s working-class credentials?
Over the years sociologists have used different measures for working out if you’re working class or not. The Goldthorpe scale looked at dad’s job titles. University fees were originally based on your parent’s income.
It was with intrigue that I noted the SQE, the solicitors qualifying exam, now analyses working-classness using a three-tier box.
‘School type’ is based on where you went to school between 11 and 16. Household earners jobs is based on your parents’ jobs you were 14. And parents’ university attendance is “by the time you were 18”.
It’s a fairly handy scale although I’m intrigued by how you define if a job is ‘working class’ vs ‘intermediate’. If someone works in McDonalds, I’m guessing that’s working class. But what if she’s a shift runner? Store manager? Owns the store?!
And, if your dad did an Open Uni degree in computing when you were 15 is that really the same as going to a fee-paying school?
Still, I appreciate that there’s a range of questions, rather than just one, and that it doesn’t do lazy assumptions of state vs private schools, but instead adds the nuance of bursaries and state selection.
Hence, if I was looking at socio-economic indicators in research I would be tempted to use it.
If you’ve seen anything better, however, let me know in the comments.
As ever, no option for home education in 'school type'. Which is an interesting one because it really doesn't fit neatly into any boxes.
I've been involved in many attempts over the years to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives.
Indeed, it came up yet again just last week for a new project I'm involved in and so I went back to the first work I did on it back in 2010 when the coalition government were trying to build a Social Mobility Toolkit for employers, providing a comparative way of recording SEB so performance and improved could be measured and tracked. They'd gathered experts who all compared notes on how this is a genuinely impossible task to be both simple and accurate.
Even if a simple measure is ever possible, I'm pretty convinced an accurate one isn't. People's complex individual stories will always be diminished by one-dimensional pigeonholes. That said, aggregated data that approximates at scale to patterns and trends is better than the historic, condescending approach of three classifications of class, based on vague notions about jobs, income, region and accent.
The best practice, I think, is the Government Statistical Service's recommended series of questions which it has devised to try to harmonise standards. You can find them at https://analysisfunction.civilservice.gov.uk/policy-store/socio-economic-background-harmonised-standard/. These use some of the same markers that you found for the SQE, but in a more sophisticated – and therefore more complex – way.
In 2022, the Social Mobility Commission in partnership with The Bridge Group also came up with a new toolkit: https://socialmobility.independent-commission.uk/toolkit/the-building-blocks-an-employers-guide-to-improving-social-mobility-in-the-workplace/, which is the gold standard for employers wanting to take social mobility seriously.
Ultimately, when it comes to socio-economic background – or class, as some might call it – there is something to be said for abandoning more scientific approaches and embracing self-identification. What class you are may well be best defined by where you feel your 'belong'. For some people that will never change: former politicians, enrobed in ermine in the Lords, often insist they are still working class, and a titled aristocrat, bankrupt and scraping a living, may never lose their upper class tag.
For other people, class is mutable. Social mobility, of course, suggests that it is – or, at least, even if 'class' is fixed, everything that gives that word meaning can be changed.