Jack Winterton is Co-Chair of our Alumni Leadership Board, and a PhD researcher at the LSE. In this guest blog, he explores the idea of the social mobility journey and explains the purpose of his creative exhibition, Ana, which was displayed at our annual alumni celebration last year.

The way we view social mobility often oversimplifies a complex situation. Two metaphors dominate discussions on social mobility, namely: climbing a ladder and breaking a glass ceiling. But both terms are poorly equipped to reflect the lived experience of social mobility in the UK. In their simplicity, they distort our understanding of social class instead of deepening it.

Social mobility is a complex, often painful, process of grappling with everyday questions of identity, family, status, money and thinking about hopes and dreams of the future.

The journey might be fraught with difficulty because of deeply entrenched inequalities in British society. These inequalities can leave some socially mobile young people caught between two worlds: their past and the better future that they’re working towards. The very idea of a journey indicates the distance that has to be overcome, often from a declining or disregarded part of the UK to the south where elite sectors such as financial services, law and consulting dominate.

Yet the emotional journey is often overlooked in favour of talk of climbing ‘ladders’ and smashing ‘ceilings’. The reality of a social mobility journey is far more complex than portrayed in more academic studies.

Social mobility is not always a clear linear progression, in which climbing each rung of the mythical ‘ladder’ represents a step change in status, income and opportunity. The reality often involves significant emotional turbulence throwing some young people far away from their physiological and familial home, while others are lucky enough to take these steps in their stride.

We need to move beyond traditional academic views of social mobility, using new narratives that provide a more rounded explanation of the lived experience of those who have struggled to overcome barriers to living the life they aspire to.

To do so, we must turn to art.

A recent exhibition that I have curated asks the alumni of the largest social mobility charity in the UK, the Sutton Trust, to capture their experiences of social mobility on one piece of A3 paper. The Trust runs a range of programmes to support academically able young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds to access competitive universities and careers. Over the past 27 years, the Sutton Trust has supported over 60,000 young people on their individual social mobility journeys. The exhibition was shown at the Trust’s annual Alumni Celebration last Autumn.

The participants are not professional artists. This is a community art project aiming to add detail or lived experience to a situation in desperate need of greater nuance. It brings together a diverse group. That word is thrown around a lot, but we actually are from every part of the UK, with different cultures, languages, struggles and experiences of social class and social mobility.

Why is it called ANA? Ana means a collection of anecdotes; by reading across multiple anecdotes you begin to build a narrative, identify threads that connect anecdotes together or see distinction that pull some stories apart. Telling these emotional journeys of those who struggle to become more socially mobile has never been more important.

Browse the pieces displayed at the exhibition here.

The opinions of guest authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Sutton Trust.