The Sutton Trust’s Chief Executive, Dr Lee Elliot Major, will argue that Britain has failed to address its problem of low social mobility, drawing on a range of international evidence.

This ‘stickiness’ is particularly persistent at both the top and bottom of society: the privately educated continue to dominate the leading professions and the proportion of children leaving school without basic numeracy and literacy skills remains stubbornly high. Education has largely failed to be the great social leveller; and widening inequality has limited social mobility. Failure to tackle immobility in modern Britain will not only cost the country economically, but lead to ever deeper divisions in society.