Apocalypse or new dawn? Social mobility and education in the post-Covid era

The COVID-19 crisis has shone an intense light on the role schools play in improving social mobility. On the one hand, it has exposed the deep inequalities outside schools that shape social mobility patterns, on the other it has also revealed escalating expectations placed on teachers to solve society’s ills. So what is the role of schools in improving social mobility in a post-pandemic world? How can we enable education to be the great social leveller, when it has been commandeered by the middle-classes to cement their status in society? Lee Elliot Major, Britain’s first Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter and Honorary Professor at the UCL Institute of Education, argues that we need to rethink education as we face a ‘dark age of declining opportunity’. Full information: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/events/2020/sep/virtual-event-apocalypse-or-new-dawn-social-mobility-and-education-post-covid-era