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There is increasing interest in the emergence of a 'global middle class' in which high achieving young graduates increasingly look to develop careers that transcend national boundaries. This paper explores this issue through comparing and contrasting the aspirations and orientations of two 'elite' cohorts of graduates. Interviews with students at the University of Oxford, England, and Sciences- Po, France, reveal very different ambitions and allegiances. Our Oxford respondents portray their futures as projects of self-fulfilment as they build portfolio careers by moving from job to job and from country to country with limited social allegiances - epitomizing the nomadic worker of the transnational elite. Our Parisian respondents, on the other hand, display strong allegiances to the nation, state and civic duty. Their projects of the self involve reconciling their personal aspirations with strong allegiances to France. The paper concludes by discussing the significance of these differences. It argues that the enduring role of education in the formation of national identities should not be overlooked and that more detailed research is needed on the contextual specifity of transnationalism and the (re)production of elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the claim that the shift from a selective to a comprehensive school system had a deleterious effect on social mobility in Great Britain. Using data from the National Child Development Study, we compare the chances, for both class and income mobility, of those who attended different kinds of school. Where media attention focuses exclusively on the chances for upward mobility of those children from lowly origins who were (or would have been) judged worthy of selection into a grammar school, we offer more rounded analyses. We match respondents in a way that helps us to distinguish those inequalities in mobility chances that are due to differences between children from those due to differences between the schools they attended; we look at the effects of the school system on the mobility chances of all children, not merely those from less advantaged origins; and we compare comprehensive- and selective-system schools, not merely comprehensive and grammar schools. After matching, we find, first, that going to a grammar school rather than a comprehensive does not make low-origin children more likely to be upwardly mobile but it helps them move further if they are; second, that grammar schools do not benefit working-class children, in terms of class mobility, more than they benefit service-class children, but, in terms of income mobility, such schools benefit low-income children somewhat more than they benefit higher-income children - that benefit relating only to rather modest and limited movements within the income distribution. Finally, however, the selective system as a whole yields no mobility advantage of any kind to children from any particular origins: any assistance to low-origin children provided by grammar schools is cancelled out by the hindrance suffered by those who attended secondary moderns. Overall, our findings suggest that comprehensive schools were as good for mobility as the selective schools they replaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1800, public school education was already an accepted pattern of life for the upper classes of society in Great Britain. The eight schools mentioned in the article can be ranked for the first half of the nineteenth century as Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury, St. Pauls. This presents interesting parallel patterns with the position at the present day. Boys entering the acknowledged public schools, at that time, came from a wide range of social classes. The lower classes were excluded and the middle class entry was severely restricted to boys on the foundation. Of the professional groups as a whole, less than one out of ten sons of service officers, and less than one in six sons of clergymen were catered by the school while the proportion of boys from the other professions of medicine, law and scholastics was negligible. In the upper classes, however less than one in two gentry boys attended school and more than one in two for the titled aristocracy.

In a much discussed book, sociologist R. Pedley puts forward the view that the sixth forms of maintained grammar schools are the weakest link in the English education system. Their inefficiency is a result of their small size. Sociologist R.C. Oldfield has produced statistical evidence to show that small schools actually do significantly better than big ones. He shows that, although large schools naturally tend to get more awards than small, when the size of school is taken into account there is a significant tendency for small schools to obtain more awards per 1,000 boys than large schools. This article presents a study to examine the relation between educational achievement and school size. Findings of he study seem to show that Pedley is right in his view that the small schools are not producing such good results as the large. They show also that this tendency becomes more marked with higher levels of academic attainment. The better achievements of large schools are most evident in university awards and are markedly present in distinctions at advanced level. In passes and failures at advanced and ordinary levels the differences are less striking. However, it is not at all obvious from the results that Pedley is right in attributing the superiority of the big school to its large sixth form as such.