Improving social mobility is a long-term challenge involving factors across generations and life stages.
Academic measures of social mobility compare the income and/or social class of children during mid-adulthood with that of their parents. They are backward looking, telling us about the impact of the policies to improve social mobility of up to forty years ago.
There are, however, a range of indicators that are likely to predict long-term social mobility and which could allow us to estimate progress over a shorter time frame to evaluate the success of our approach.