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ABSTRACT This paper uses birth cohort analysis of a 1991 representative survey of Britain to establish trends in class, gender and ethnic inequalities in educational attainment. The data show some decline in class inequalities (especially at 0 level), a clear narrowing of gender inequalities and substantial progress among ethnic minorities, where the inequalities among the second generation (who were born and educated in Britain) are a great deal less than those in the first generation (born and educated overseas). However, overall class inequalities remain substantial and are considerably larger than the gender or ethnic inequalities. Given the slow rate at which class inequalities are declining, they are likely to remain a major problem for educational policy for the foreseeable future.
The term political arithmetic has a long history and goes back to Sir William Petty's volume published in 1691 and titled Political arithmetick, or A discourse concerning the extent and value of lands, people, buildings. Another notable early publication was Arthur Young's Political arithmetic. Containing observations on the present state of Great Britain; and the principles of her policy in the encouragement of agriculture, published in 1774. These works were largely descriptive and empirical, collecting together hard data (or at least the hardest data available) for informing public debate and policy-making. They were quantitative, hence the use of the term arithmetic, but they were geared more or less closely to issues of government policy, hence the term political.
These early works were not concerned with education per se. The phrase political arithmetic became distinctively associated with a particular style of educational research when Lancelot Hogben used it for a pre-war collection of essays which focused on inequalities in access to grammar schools (Hogben, 1938). A key paper in this collection was Gray and Moshinsky's research on class differences in ability and opportunity in secondary education.
Since Hogben's time, the political arithmetic tradition in the sociology of education has come to refer to a particular style of quantitative research which has focused on class inequalities in education. Notable works in this tradition have been Glass (1954), Floud et al., (1956) and Halsey et al., (1980). Like the earlier work of Petty, Young and Hogben, this tradition of research has attempted to chart with hard, quantitative...