Tackling Social Mobility

Lee Ellliot Major, Britain’s first professor of social mobility, will be giving a guest lecture in Huriya Jabbar’s Economics and Finance course. All COE faculty and graduate students are welcome to attend. 

Presentation Description: Low social mobility is an increasingly pressing issue – defined by stark economic, geographical and political divides and the growing specter of downward mobility. How can we enable education to be the great social leveler, when it has been commandeered by the middle-classes to cement their status? We need a fundamental shift in debates about social mobility and social justice. Only by establishing general principles of fairness in society, can we agree on the major policy reforms outside and inside education that can create a more mobile and just society.

Speaker Description: Appointed by the University of Exeter to be a global leader in the field, Major’s work is dedicated to improving the prospects of disadvantaged young people. Major was awarded an OBE for services to social mobility in the Queen’s honors.  His books include Social Mobility and Its Enemies published by Penguin and What Works? Research and evidence for successful teaching, published by Bloomsbury. He was formerly CEO of the Sutton Trust education foundation and a founding trustee of the Education Endowment Foundation.  He is an associate member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics International Inequalities Institute. He is the first in his family to attend university.