On the face of it, Gordon Brown’s cabinet appointments tell you all you need to know about the state of social mobility in Britain today. A third went to independent schools, a third to grammars and only a third to comprehensives, where the vast majority of pupils are taught.

Climbing the greasy political pole of politics is harder, it seems, than ever, and certainly more difficult than it was during the days when more Labour politicians came up through the unions.

Or, look at Brown’s Business Council for Britain, chaired by Mervyn Davies of Standard Chartered and including luminaries such as Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco, Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer, Sir John Rose of Rolls-Royce and Stephen Green of HSBC. Most went to independent schools; Leahy to a grammar school.

Is this proof that Britain has become a socially static society, the ladder of opportunity that once allowed the poor to climb to the top having been kicked away? Last week Radio 4’s Today programme ran features every day on the crisis of social mobility in Britain. The country, it said, has the lowest social mobility in the western world. According to its website: “If you are born poor in Britain today you’re more likely than your parents were to stay poor. The country’s richer than it’s ever been but social mobility has stagnated and is at its lowest point for decades.” Can things really be this bad? Take Brown’s cabinet. While the one-third that went to independent schools looks high, it is no different to the proportion in the Attlee government (1945-51) or when Harold Wilson was Labour prime minister 40 years ago.

A London University study of ministers from 1945 to 1997 showed that 70% of those who served in the cabinet were privately educated, boosted by the high proportion of those with public-school backgrounds in Tory cabinets. Even there, however, the trend was downwards, from more than 90% in the Churchill and Eden cabinets of the 1950s, to fewer than 70% in John Major’s post1992 administration.

As for the fact that only a third went to comprehensives, that is mainly an age thing. Many of Brown’s cabinet went through the education system before most grammars were abolished.

Brown’s business advisers, similarly, are not quite a full house of privately educated boardroom bosses. They also include Sir Alan Sugar, the self-made millionaire who left school at 16, and Damon Buffini, managing partner of Permira, the private equity firm. Buffini, 44, is living proof that social mobility exists in Britain. Brought up on a tough council estate in Leicester, he was the son of a black American serviceman who was an absentee father. His mother got him into grammar school from where he won a place at St John’s College, Cambridge, later winning a scholarship at Harvard Business School.

His rags-to-riches story is more dramatic than most, but it reflects the rise of a new meritocracy, particularly in less conventional businesses. Two decades ago the City of London was dominated by blue-blood scions of the great stockbroking and merchant banking families. Double-barrelled names dominated City partnerships and took home the largest pay packets.

Trading in the City was always carried out by the “barrow boys” from east London and Essex, but before the “Big Bang” in 1986, they knew their place. Today, in contrast, the traders are in charge. Bolstered by highly educated technocrats – the rocket scientists – the City now is unrecognisable. That is also true in the hedge fund business and private equity. British business has never been more meritocratic.

Surely, however, the statistics tell a very different story, and point to privilege being entrenched? After all, is it not the case that social mobility is lower in Britain than anywhere else?

Actually, no. Researchers say that we simply do not have enough comparable data to be able to make that claim. The ground-breaking study in this area is Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America, carried out at the London School of Economics by Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin. It was sponsored by the Sutton Trust, the educational charity, and published in 2005.

What it showed was that for the small number of countries for which comparable data were available – Britain, America, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland – mobility in the UK was similar to the US but lower than in the other countries. That mobility in Britain was lower than in the traditionally “flatter” Nordic societies was perhaps not a big surprise and a long way from “the lowest social mobility in the world”.

The LSE study relied heavily on figures from the generation born in 1970. “Cohort” studies, in which those born in the same week in a given year are tracked throughout their lifetimes, are invaluable to researchers. The 1970 cohort was found to be less mobile than the previous one for which detailed statistics were available, those born in 1958.

The fact that the 1970 cohort has been used by Labour’s critics to back the claim that social mobility declined under Tony Blair is a little odd. Whatever his faults and those of his government, he could hardly be expected to wave a magic wand and transform the life chances of a group of people who were 27 when he took office. Researchers suggest that some of the patterns of mobility are established by the time children are three, indicating some blame should be laid at the feet of Sir Edward Heath’s 1970-74 government.

Even the 1970 cohort, however, pointed to a society that was far from preserved in aspic. While 37% of sons born into the bottom quartile of households (measured by income) were still in that bottom quartile by the age of 30, this meant that 63% were not, and had risen up the scale. Indeed 16% had risen to the top quartile and 23% the next; thus enjoying above-average incomes.

This was worse than the 1958 cohort, but only marginally so. For that generation, only 31% stayed poor, and 17% and 23% respectively rose to the top and next quartiles. Both generations suggest quite a high degree of mobility.

Career mobility may also be greater than it appears. When Britain was a manufacturing nation, the rise from apprentice to production manager was easy to track – and provided a lot of tangible mobility. In many service industries, jobs, titles and seniority are much fuzzier.

Certainly, mobility has increased in comparison with Britain’s stratified society of the past. Earlier studies looking at those born in the first half of the century suggested only 10% of boys born into working-class homes ended up as part of the professional classes. The comparison is slightly unfair; the expansion of the middle classes has allowed many more to be upwardly mobile. But it suggests we should temper some of our self-flagellation over social mobility.

There is more to be done. The Sutton Trust is right when it says the great expansion of university education has been mainly for the benefit of children from middle-income households. Private education will always be with us, but the state sector is not as good as it should be in providing a ladder to children from the poorest homes. Middle-class parents work the state system, though nobody can blame them for seeking to do the best for their children. Education is the key, as is “early years” intervention, of the kind this government has introduced. But there is only so much social engineering you can do. The image we have is of low-income hard-working parents trying to do their best for their children being constantly frustrated by Britain’s educational apartheid. The reality, too often, is feckless parents who do not care about their children’s education or whether they end up on the supermarket checkout.

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