Education and Social Mobility (PDF)

Phillip Brown is Distinguished Research Professor in the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). He is a leading sociologist in the field of education, work and the global labour market. Since the late 1990s he has been studying economic globalisation and the new division of labour including path-breaking comparative studies that fundamentally challenged Western policy debates around skill formation, social justice and the knowledge economy. He also has a longstanding interest in graduate employability, social mobility and the sociology of talent.

Diane Reay grew up in a working class, coal mining community before becoming an inner city primary school teacher for 20 years. She is now Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK, with particular interests in social justice issues in education, Pierre Bourdieu's social theory, and cultural analyses of social class. She has researched extensively in the areas of social class, gender and ethnicity across primary, secondary and post-compulsory stages of education. Her most recent book (with Gill Crozier and David James) is White Middle Class Identities and Urban Schooling (2011). She is currently writing a book on Education and the Working Classes in the 21st Century. As well as being an executive editor of British Journal of Sociology of Education, she is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Education Policy and Cultural Sociology.

Carol Vincent is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, UK. She has written and researched extensively on families' relationships with educational institutions, and, in particular, how these are shaped by race and class. She co-authored The Colour of Class (2015) which explores the educational strategies of the Black Caribbean-origin middle classes.