The origins of this book lie in the increasing interest in social mobility that our politicians have shown in the last couple of decades. This interest is a good thing. However, they have misunderstood what mobility means, how much of it is happening, what produces mobility and what can be the consequences of mobility at both personal and national levels. Such misunderstandings are a bad thing. In place of this confused and misleading perspective, successive chapters have clarified definitions, offered an alternative explanation of the causes of mobility, described some features of current mobility patterns and argued that social mobility is better understood as a series of connected but separable issues than a single monolithic process (the latter being evident in, for example, the call for ‘more mobility’ or ‘better schooling’).

These arguments can be drawn together in two ways. On the one hand, mobility can be thought of as the product of interacting general forces and social processes. The groups that make up society are all subject to occupational transition, gender and ethnic differences and wider inequalities. On the other hand, the starting point for thinking through mobility can be the classes or groups themselves, each of which encounters (and generates) specific movements and displays distinctive mobility profiles.

This chapter starts with the second approach, because the disaggregation of mobility has been one of the book's underlying themes. Absolute mobility rates are generally high, albeit reflecting a different kind of mobility than most politicians want. However there are several pockets of immobility that need to be addressed before turning to some of the wider issues.

Four kinds of class mobility prospects: the upper reaches

The earlier discussion of education suggested that private schools and Russell Group universities combined with forms of familial cultural advantage offer a separate route to the best jobs, such as the old professions. But these are also the preferred – if not the only – entry routes for a smaller group of people who hold the very best rewarded and most influential positions in society, such as those portrayed in Table 12.1.

Because this elite – or ‘the establishment’ (Harvey 2011; Hennessy 2014; Jones 2014; SMCPC 2014a; Stanworth 2013; Toynbee and Walker 2008) – is relatively small in number and consists of a number of sub-elites, its members have not normally been included in mobility studies as an identifiable group (there is no NS-SeC category for this elite).