Earlier chapters showed that explanations of mobility draw heavily on assumptions about individual ability and achievement, rather than structural constraints on opportunity, to account for class outcomes. That individualistic discourse says achieving upward mobility and its consequent social benefits is fair because those who are downwardly mobile, or immobile at the bottom of the social hierarchy, deserve to fail since they are lesser human beings who lack ‘ability’. Educational qualifications (partly because they seem to come in a standardised, comparable form, and we have all experienced the academic testing which is integral to our schooling) have become the proxy for the ability assumed to explain mobility outcomes. It is therefore necessary to consider how mobility is linked to education, both because of its prevalence and as the cornerstone of the individualistic discourse of mobility outcomes. In Boris Johnson's (2013) somewhat complicated metaphor, education is essential if the cornflakes with individual talents and high IQs are to get to the top of the box.

The idea of a meritocratic society, with individual merit accounting for mobility, has become widespread (Hennessy 2014). Common sense says many technical and white-collar jobs involve complex skills and hence require extensive prior education to acquire them, while manual jobs need less training. Not everybody can do the more demanding jobs. Even mobility analysts using a social class framework see education as a key vector through which class is reproduced. The introduction of secondary education following the 1944 Education Act was a major issue in the LSE study (Glass 1954: chapters by Floud, Himmelweit, Martin, Kelsall and Hall and Glass) – a tradition continued in the Nuffield study (Halsey et al 1980). The education– mobility link remains central to research from pressure groups (for example, Atherton 2015; SMCPC 2015c, 27–54; Sutton Trust 2015a; Sutton Trust 2015b). Documents and statistical releases from ONS, the government's Departments for Education, and Business Innovation and Skills provide such extensive illustration of inequalities in educational outcome that there is a risk of disappearing in a sea of evidence.

There are in fact considerable local and historical variations in English education, which are almost impossible to cover even at book length (for example, see Ball 2013; Basit and Tomlinson 2014; Dench 2006; McNamee and Miller 2013).