Social mobility took off after the second world war for two main reasons. First, the 1944 Education Act introduced free secondary education for all—for the bright at grammar schools and the less bright at secondary moderns. Grammar schools set clever working-class children on a fast track to social advancement; and the decline in the number of state-school entrants to Oxford and Cambridge can be directly related to the abolition of most of them in the 1960s and 1970s. Second, the university system expanded.

Mr Blair would argue that, by expanding the universities still further, he will get still more social mobility. But there are diminishing returns to tertiary education, particularly when so many people get such bad schooling. The real barrier to social mobility is now to be found in the secondary schools.

Labour's hostility to elitism has ensured that state schools remain non-selective. Private schools are increasingly academically competitive, so the quality gap between them and state schools is widening, and the government is trying to make up for its failure by fixing the university admissions system against those whose parents have the temerity to buy them a decent education.

There are things the government could do to encourage class mobility. Education vouchers, for instance, would allow poorer parents to give their children a leg up, but the Labour Party and the teaching unions are dead against them. Until the government adopts policies likely to make society less, rather than more, rigid, Mr Blair would do well to keep quiet about the iniquities of the British class system.

Good intentions about redistribution are not enough in school finance:
understanding the economics is important too (p. 3)