Unleashing Aspiration… 6 months on…
Rereading Milburn’s report “Unleashing Aspiration” it’s interesting to note some key points that remain outstanding, and particularly relevant as we head into a year of political change, whenever and whatever the results of the General Election.
The first graph that drew my particular attention concerns the % difference between different professions compared to the family income individuals came from. This seems to be a good indicator of social mobility as much as any can be. The report makes much of the distressingly rising numbers “top tier” of professionals from well off backgrounds but the figures around the Arts is of further interest. We sit as arguably the best of the professions on this graph in terms of a drop in those from well off backgrounds, but it would be interesting to query for how many the Arts actually represents social mobility, especially in a fiscal sense.
Not Arts-specific, but also shocking is the news in chapter 2 that ‘one in six children today grows up in a workless household’ – hard to believe in a supposedly developed country…
The report is well worth a read if you haven’t already, and the summary is excellent…
