The so-called “university admissions crisis” this summer has led to a decent amount of discussion in the media about the notion of social mobility. This is a complex concept with a number of possible interpretations, see for example the recent article by Stefan Collini in the Guardian, which presents three different models for social mobility.
One model for social mobility is the notion the idea of “raising aspirations”—the idea that people, regardless of background, should aspire to whatever job (or similar) that they are capable of doing. This is often simplified to the notion that working class students should aspire towards middle class jobs.
There is an important tacet notion here, which is that children from working class backgrounds have a concept of the middle classes. I would argue that this is not an obvious assumption at all. I would argue that this isn’t really true—for many working class children, the class structure consists of “normal people” and “posh people”. The gulf between these two groups seems vast. Interestingly, a similar notion applies the other way, with upper class aristocrats seeing anyone who works for a living as part of a general “working class”.
This massive perceived gulf makes aspirations towards social mobility harder than they ought to be. Working class children might well neither see it either as realistic or desirable to aspire towards being “posh” but don’t really have any notion of there being anything intermediate that could be a reasonable aspiration.