What can the Labour Force Survey tell us about inter-generational social mobility?

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (www.gov.uk/smcpc) is inviting proposals for a short piece of analysis exploring the potential of the new social mobility questions in the Labour Force Survey to shed light on trends in, and patterns of, social mobility in the UK.

A key constraint in analysing trends in social mobility is the lack of information on the impact that social background has on labour market outcomes in adult life. Academic studies of social mobility rely on sources such as Birth Cohort Studies and the ONS Longitudinal Study but these have limitations. An important recent development is the inclusion of new questions looking at social background in the Labour Force Survey, asked annually from July-September 2014. This new data has the potential to help address a number of issues of interest to the Social Mobility Commission, for example:

• Trends in social mobility over time and across people’s lives.
• Differences in earnings between people from different social backgrounds within the same occupation.
• The impact of social background in the labour market over and above its impact through educational qualifications.
• Local differences in social mobility.
• Inter-generational worklessness.
• Differences in experiences of labour market trends by social background over time e.g. unemployment increases or entries into work.
• Other analysis looking at the impact/correlation of social background and other Labour Force Survey variables.

We want this analysis of the Labour Force Survey to cover a number of different areas

• Analysis of the responses to the social background questions in the Labour Force Survey, including around potential data quality issues.
• Descriptive analysis of what the Labour Force Survey tells us about social mobility in the UK, including looking at variation across different sub-groups of the population.
• Descriptive analysis of the correlation between social background and key labour market and other outcomes that are of interest for social mobility.
• Exploration of the potential of the new data to shed light on key social mobility policy questions, including ideas for future quantitative analysis using the new data.

Bids will be judged primarily on the proposed approach, expertise of team and value for money.