This research will investigate micro-level determinants of the process of intergenerational social mobility in the context of macro-level characteristics of national education systems.

The Research programme comprises of three research projects with a common aim: the study of the mechanisms that underlie intergenerational class mobility, paying particular attention to the role of educational institutions and curricula. It will improve upon the existing research on social mobility through the use of longitudinal data, allowing the analysis to disentangle life-course, cohort and period effects. By comparing different education systems (over time and space) insight will be sought into the role that the structure of schooling might play in facilitating or hindering social mobility.

Studies of social mobility, whether using recent data or relating to earlier periods (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992; Marshall et al., 1997; Savage, 2000; Breen and Luijkx, 2004; Wadsworth, 1991), have rarely attempted to incorporate in their empirical analyses and theoretical explanations the role of institutional structures in producing relative social (im)mobility (one exception is Kerckhoff, 1993, see below). This proposal will take into account both individual and structural factors in the reproduction of social (dis)advantage across generations. Since education is an important means by which social (im)mobility comes about (Marshall et al, 1997), a study of the role played by educational structure and content in the reproduction of social inequalities should be part of social mobility analysis. Many empirical studies have demonstrated the importance of analysing the influence of schools on pupils’ educational outcomes (Kerckhoff, 1986; Gamoran, 1987; Kerckhoff et al., 1996). It would be plausible to speculate that there might be a school-type effect on individuals’ social class of destination too.