Comparing the social and geographical patterning of social-spatial mobility for Britain

Abstract

The primary aim of this thesis is to investigate the regional disparities in social mobility across Britain, it also explores the relationship between social and spatial mobility, investigating the structural possibility if internal migration can shape the geographic patterns of occupational mobility. Uniquely, this is the only study of its kind to use a full range of UK data to explore these questions allowing a methodological and substantive comparison of different datasets for analyzing regional inequality and social-spatial mobility together. By using nationally representative data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS), the British Cohort Study (BCS), the Next Step Study (NS), the ONS’s longitudinal study (LS), and graduate data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), it found there was considerable heterogeneity in social mobility across UK regions and districts; importantly, internal migration was indeed the ‘missing link’ in understanding regional disparities in social mobility. Places with higher social mobility tend to have higher spatial mobility. London and the South East was the ‘escalator’ region where consistently provides migrates from disadvantaged backgrounds better employment opportunities. These findings suggest linking up social and spatial mobility would largely enrich our understanding of how the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic characteristics would manifest with different geographical conditions, which largely contribute to drawing policy implications for current debates around the ‘Leveling up’ of UK regions.