Don't blame the pushy middle-class parents for the lack of social mobility For starters, what do we mean by "social mobility"? When politicians use the phrase, they are usually thinking of intergenerational social mobility, defined as the extent to which a person's social class is influenced by the social class of his or her parents. But how do you define "class"? Are we talking about different income levels or different occupations? That's an important distinction, because if you measure intergenerational mobility according to income - that is, by looking at the correlation between the income of parents and their children - Britain has one of the poorest records in the developed world. However, if you measure it according to occupation using a standard, seven-class model, we don't fare too badly. In the international league tables, we are in the middle - higher than Germany, not as high as Denmark. Then there is the issue of what has happened to social mobility over the past 50 years. Most participants in this debate take as their starting point a famous study conducted by Jo Blanden, Stephen Machin and Paul Gregg - three economists at the LSE - that discovered that children born in the bottom income quartile in 1958 had a higher chance of making it out than those born in 1970. That study makes it look as though something has gone badly wrong and it is often cited by defenders of grammar schools as "proof" that their disappearance has made it harder for bright, working-class children to get on. In fact, only 15 per cent of the secondary school population ever attended grammars and most of them were middle class to begin with. So why has social mobility flat-lined since the 1980s? One theory is that the relatively high rates of inter-generational mobility in the 1960s identified by Blanden, Machin and Gregg were an aberration, largely due to the massive expansion of white-collar jobs in the public sector. According to this view, nothing has gone wrong in recent years; it's just that levels of social mobility have returned to normal. That might explain why successive governments have been able to do so little about falling rates of social mobility, in spite of all three parties identifying this as a political priority. Tony Blair said that he wanted to live in a Britain "where merit is the key to success, where the only thing that counts is not where you come from but what you are." In this, he comprehensively failed. As Alan Milburn, Gordon Brown's mobility tsar, pointed out in 2009: "Birth, not worth, has become more and more a determinant of people's life chances." Nearly all the solutions proposed by New Labour fell under the heading of "eye-catching initiative," i.e. they were largely ineffective, and I fear the same will prove true of Nick Clegg's "Open Doors" campaign. This is the package of measures, announced yesterday, that are designed to level the playing field when it comes to the competition for top jobs. For instance, he wants to see an end to unpaid internships on the grounds that only the better-off can afford to do them. The problem is, that doesn't mean business will start offering potential recruits paid work experience instead - they'll just cut their intern programmes. Most politicians who propose neat solutions to the problem of unequal opportunities gloss over the political complexities involved. Another theory about why social mobility has fallen since the 1960s is that more and more top jobs are being taken by women and, for the most part, they're middle class to begin with. This was summed up by David Willetts, the universities minister, with the line "feminism trumped egalitarianism" - and the grief he got for making that point is a good illustration of why politicians tend to steer clear of such subtleties. James Caan deserves credit for raising the problem of nepotism, even if the rationale he offered for why parents should avoid it was a bit muddled. The total number of white-collar jobs isn't going to increase in a flat-lining economy, so the only way to get more bright, working-class children to rise to the top is to ensure that dim, middle-class children sink to the bottom. But how? Middle-class parents are notoriously energetic when it comes to securing the best possible opportunities for their offspring. That's the reason New Labour's main policy for dealing with inequality of opportunity - expanding higher education - failed. Thanks to sharp-elbowed parents, the majority of new university places created by the last government were taken up by children of the better off. It's a safe bet that any solution that depends on parents being less pushy is doomed to fail, particularly in the current climate. A better approach would be to think up more initiatives like the free schools policy, which enlist middle-class parents in the cause of improving social mobility. I helped set up a free school in west London because I want my children to have a good education - the sort that is going to secure them a place at a Russell Group university and, eventually, a decent career. But it won't just be my children who will benefit. Of the pupils who were admitted to the school last September, 29 per cent are on free school meals. That's twice the national average. Thanks to the free school policy - and the pushy parents who set them up - hundreds of thousands of children from low-income families will receive a first-class education. In general, governments should focus their efforts on education up to the age of 18 to improve equality of opportunity and not try to force universities or employers to accept under-qualified applicants from working-class backgrounds. That risks putting British universities and businesses at a disadvantage when trying to keep up with their global competitors and will always be seen as unfair by those young people who have worked hard to obtain good qualifications. The solution is not to persuade middle-class parents to do less for their children, since that is completely impractical. Rather, it is to encourage all parents to be equally pushy - and to make sure that those families who will never be able to do much for their children have the opportunity to send them to a pushy school. Whatever the shortcomings of his latest scheme, Nick Clegg should be applauded for backing the Pupil Premium, which creates a financial incentive for good schools to admit children from poor backgrounds. There is no quick fix to the problem of falling social mobility. But the answer has to lie in driving up standards in our schools and making sure children from all parts of our society have access to a rigorous, academic education.