The concept of ‘life chances’ is natural and evocative but where did it come from and what does it mean now?
The term ‘life chances’ was introduced by Max Weber, a German sociologist, in the 1920s. Since then it has been the subject of several theoretical academic texts, such as by Ralf Dahrendorf, Director of the LSE, in the 1970s. Life chances is a combination of things you can do, opportunities society can offer, some where you have no control, and a bit of luck.
Debates about occupational social mobility have been developing since Erikson and Goldthorpe empirically in the 1990s. There is a difference between absolute mobility, having more money, and relative mobility, making more progress than your peers, important as income and work generally are changing. In the 2000s Blanden showed that different patterns emerge looking at income than occupation.
In the 2000s, life chances as a policy term was developed as relating between the ideas of social mobility and equality of opportunity, as well as material and structural factors. More recently these ideas were captured as the idea of fairness by government or equity in health services.
The idea of fairness is embodied in open practices and prevention of discrimination. So that recruitment criteria should be meritocratic, and selection processes should treat all applicants equally. However, this just pushes the problem down the life course if people have different opportunities to meet these criteria in the first place.
Social mobility relates your position in society to that of your parents, but this is very difficult as society is changing. Mike Savage showed in the Great British Class Survey that your occupation, wealth and cultural status are all related to your upbringing. However, what we see as social class has moved from a simple hierarchy of occupations to combine with age, capital and cultural activity.
Structural factors such as poverty are easy to implicate in limiting the life chances of children. They are also easy to provide policy for, such as providing free school meals. But simple reduction into two groups, ‘poor’ and ‘not poor’ is not sufficient to support he chances of all. A comparison can be made with fuel poverty where causes will depend on housing, income and health.
Frank Field wrote a report in 2010 making the case for moving beyond a simple idea of child poverty. Some groups have reduced life chances unrelated to poverty, e.g. looked after children. It focuses on an arbitrary threshold which is fixed for the country despite different levels of incomes around the country.
The pattern of child development being affected by social background was shown to great effect by Feinstein in 2000s. His ground breaking work has been reanalysed and updated a number of times and measurement is very important. In Too Many Children Left Behind, Bradbury and colleagues show particularly that the social gaps are established in the early years in four countries.
Life chances can be broken down sometimes as risk and resilience, so some things improve your chances and others make them worse. Resilience is also mixed up with ideas about personality and character, the ability to overcome challenges, as well as protective factors in your environment.
The government has in the last twelve months taken life chances as central to its strategy for the foundation years. The Prime Minister gave a speech on the topic and a strategy is published in the summer, with a consultation expected to follow. Abolition of child poverty was disputed but consultation will include life chances indicators.
Life chances is much more than just the first few years of life, even though these are critical. Longer term outcomes of employment and health as well as relationship formation and parenting are affected. At each life stage, people are affected by their experience and build up the skills and networks to support them in adversity.
The select committee report on social mobility for the non university route noted poorer children lack networks (i.e. social capital) to find work. The system promotes academic qualifications whereas employers wanted functional skills e.g. being able to communicate effectively. A life chances perspective allows us to consider the entire population rather than one group or outcome.
In health, the idea of life chances has been captured as a ‘social gradient’, in both access and outcomes. Michael Marmot showed that on any social measure, e.g. income, the more you have the better the health, longer life etc. General differences between groups, i.e. inequalities, are distinguished from inequities where this difference is unfair.
For use of health services, in what is known as the ‘inverse care law’, better off people with better health make more use of universal health services. This led Michael Marmot to propose proportionate universalism in health care, so that it is available to all but targeted at those who have greater need, to try to reverse this gradient.
Fuel poverty has been seen narrowly as older people being unable to heat their home in winter with associated health consequences. However, households can also be limited in improving the fabric of the building or poorly served by energy infrastructure which increases heating costs. Socially, high heating costs may limit the social use of home spaces if having visitors is awkward.
Thus there are substantial structural factors at play when we talk about life chances but there are also interventions possible. The behavioural insights team and what works agenda has put the focus on individual actions to some degree, in identifying routes to resilience. The life chances approach is trying to leave behind arguments about resources for services to focus on outcomes and value.
Somewhere this huge edifice embraces choices for individuals, and the role of government in providing choices. The neoliberal agenda and new public management has prioritised excellence and choice for all, but a life chances perspective should allow for individuals to desire different choices. But the House of Lords report suggested the elite academic route is seen as the only path.
References
Ralf Dahrendorf (1979) Life chances: Approaches to social and political theory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Robert Erikson, John H. Goldthorpe (1992) The Constant Flux. A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies, Oxfrod: Clarendon Press.
Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg & Lindsey Macmillan (2006) Accounting for intergenerational income persistence: non-cognitive skills, ability and education CEEDP, 73. Centre for the Economics of Education, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
Mike Savage (2015) Social class in the 21st century, London: Penguin Random House.
Leon Feinstein (2003) Inequality in the Early Cognitive Development of British Children in the 1970 Cohort. Economica, 70: 73–97. doi: 10.1111/1468-0335.t01-1-00272
Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, Jane Waldfogel and Liz Washbrook (2015) Too many children left behind, New York: Russell Sage.
David Cameron (2016) Prime Minister’s speech on life chances, London: Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street.
Frank Field (2010) The Foundation Years: preventing poor children becoming poor adults, The report of the Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances, London: Cabinet Office, HM Government.
Select Committee on Social Mobility at the Transition from School to Work (2016) Overlooked and left behind: improving the transition from school to work for the majority of young people, HL Paper 120, London: TSO.
Michael Marmot (2015) The health gap, London: Allen Lane.