Education and Social Mobility

Watch the recording of Professor Richard Breen's lecture at the University of Edinburgh

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship Lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

This lecture will explore three key aspects of the question of how education and inequality are related. Firstly, does the education system reduce or worsen existing equalities between students from different backgrounds, and which aspects of education play a role in this process? Secondly, do countries with higher levels of education tend to have greater income inequality? And finally, how can educational policy, if at all, influence inequality among a population? While education is often proposed as a solution to inequality, this talk will offer a more balanced and measured perspective on education’s potential impact.

Speaker: Professor Richard Breen FBA, University of Oxford

Richard Breen has published extensively on the role of education in shaping inequality and intergenerational mobility. His publications include Social Mobility in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Education and Intergenerational Social Mobility in Europe and the United States (Stanford University Press, 2020, co-edited Walter Müller).

Chair: Professor Cristina Iannelli FBA, University of Edinburgh