Education and social mobility in Scotland

The role of education in promoting social mobility is a central issue in sociological and political debate. This paper investigates the role of education in the process of intergenerational social mobility in Scotland. Over the past half century in Scotland there has been a significant increase in participation in education and radical changes in its schooling system, transforming it from a selective system to a comprehensive one. We use data from the 2001 Scottish Household Survey to analyse differences among birth-cohorts in the extent to which the association between origin and destination is mediated by education. Our results show that education plays an intermediary role between origin and destination but it does not account for all of their association. Moreover, in the youngest cohorts its mediating effect has not increased which means that middle class parents continue to transmit class advantages to their children through means other than education.