SO17: Social Stratification & Class

Social Stratification & Class

How society is stratified: social class, life chances, and how class affects access to resources, power and status.

📋 Key Vocabulary and Concepts

For Social Stratification & Class, you must know:

• Social stratification
• Social class
• Life chances
• NS-SEC
• Wealth gap
• Relative poverty
• Absolute poverty
• Poverty trap
• Social mobility
• Wilkinson and Pickett

❓ Practice Questions

✅ Answers

1. Stratification divides society into layers based on wealth, power and status. Class dramatically affects life chances: health, education, income, housing. These inequalities persist across generations.
2. Top 10% own 44% of wealth; bottom 50% own 9%. Marxist: capitalism concentrates wealth. Wilkinson and Pickett: inequality harms everyone. Some inequality may incentivise effort, but extreme inequality is harmful.
3. Class still affects health, education, income, housing. Counter: class identities are weakening; social mobility exists. Conclusion: class is less culturally significant but its material impact remains powerful.

🎯 Exam Tips

• Stratification = structured INEQUALITY. Life chances vary dramatically by class.
• Wealth gap: top 10% = 44%. Bottom 50% = 9%. WIDENING. Wilkinson & Pickett: inequality harms ALL.
• Class STILL matters for life chances even if class identity is weakening.

📝 Exam Technique

⚠️ Common Errors

✍️ Model Answer

📊 AO Deep Dive

📖 Detailed Notes: Social Stratification & Class

💡 Class Systems and the NS-SEC

Social stratification refers to the way society is structured in layers or strata, with some groups having more wealth, power and status than others. In the UK, social class is the primary form of stratification, though gender, ethnicity and age also create inequalities. The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) is the official class measure used by the ONS, replacing the older Registrar General’s scale. The NS-SEC has eight categories, from Class 1 (higher managerial and professional occupations, such as doctors and lawyers) to Class 8 (never worked and long-term unemployed). Unlike the Registrar General’s scale, which was based on status, the NS-SEC is based on employment relations — the type of contract, autonomy and job security a person has. This makes it a more theoretically sound measure, reflecting Weber’s idea that class is based on ‘market situation’ — a person’s ability to sell their labour on favourable terms.

Marx argued that class is fundamentally about the relationship to the means of production: the bourgeoisie (who own factories, land and capital) exploit the proletariat (who must sell their labour to survive). Marx predicted that the working class would become increasingly impoverished and eventually overthrow capitalism. While this revolution has not occurred, Marxist sociologists point to growing wealth inequality as evidence that Marx’s analysis of class exploitation remains relevant. Weber argued that class is more complex than Marx suggested — it is based on market situation (skills, qualifications and income) and is cross-cut by status (social prestige) and party (political power). Weber’s framework better explains why some groups (e.g. teachers) have high status but moderate income, while others (e.g. business owners) have high income but lower social prestige.

🔍 Life Chances and the Impact of Class

Life chances — the opportunities each individual has to achieve a good standard of living — are dramatically affected by social class. Health is one of the most striking examples: the Marmot Review found that men in the most deprived areas of England die on average 9.4 years earlier than those in the least deprived areas, and women die 7.7 years earlier. These differences are not just about length of life but also quality: people in deprived areas spend a greater proportion of their shorter lives in poor health. Class affects health through multiple pathways: diet (healthy food is more expensive), stress (financial insecurity raises cortisol levels), working conditions (manual work carries greater physical risk), and access to healthcare (though the NHS is free, middle-class patients are more likely to seek and receive timely treatment).

Education is another area where class has a powerful impact. The attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils (eligible for free school meals) and their peers is evident from primary school and widens throughout secondary school. By GCSE level, the gap is approximately 18 percentage points in English and Maths. Cultural capital theory (Bourdieu) explains this: middle-class families pass on knowledge, language skills and attitudes that are valued by the education system, giving their children an advantage that is unrelated to natural ability. The Sutton Trust estimates that 74% of judges, 71% of senior military officers and 51% of journalists attended private school, despite only 7% of the population attending private schools — demonstrating how class advantage is transmitted across generations.

⚖️ The Wealth Gap and Poverty in the UK

Wealth inequality in the UK is extreme and has widened since the 1980s. The Resolution Foundation reports that the richest 10% of households hold approximately 44% of total wealth, while the poorest 50% hold just 9%. The median wealth of the top decile is approximately £1.7 million, compared to £18,000 for the bottom decile. This wealth gap matters because wealth provides security, opportunity and power: wealthy families can help their children with university fees and house deposits, invest in businesses and weather financial shocks, while those without wealth are one crisis away from hardship. Wilkinson and Pickett’s influential book ‘The Spirit Level’ (2009) argued that more unequal societies have worse outcomes for everyone — not just the poor — including higher rates of mental illness, obesity, imprisonment and teenage pregnancy.

Relative poverty, defined as living on less than 60% of median household income, affects approximately 22% of the UK population, including 3.8 million children. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reports that the poverty rate has changed little since the 1990s despite significant economic growth, suggesting that the benefits of growth have been captured disproportionately by the wealthy. The poverty trap — where taking a low-paid job leaves people little better off because they lose means-tested benefits — is a significant barrier to social mobility. Food bank use has risen dramatically: the Trussell Trust distributed 2.5 million emergency food parcels in 2023–24, compared to 40,000 in 2010. While absolute poverty (inability to meet basic needs) has declined over the long term, relative poverty remains a persistent and divisive feature of UK society.

📊 How Social Class Affects Life Chances in the UK

❓ Additional Practice Questions

✅ Additional Answers

1. On one hand, class clearly still affects life chances dramatically: the 9.4-year life expectancy gap, the 34-percentage-point GCSE attainment gap, and the extreme wealth gap all show that class matters. The Social Mobility Commission reports that class remains the strongest predictor of life outcomes in the UK. On the other hand, gender and ethnicity also create significant inequalities that are not explained by class alone: the gender pay gap, the ethnic penalty in earnings (ethnic minorities earn less even when they have the same qualifications and class position), and the intersection of multiple disadvantages. Some sociologists argue that class identities are weakening — fewer people now identify as ‘working class’ even when they are in working-class occupations. A balanced view is that class remains the single most important form of stratification in material terms, but gender, ethnicity and other factors intersect with class to create complex patterns of advantage and disadvantage.
2. The richest 10% of UK households hold 44% of total wealth; the poorest 50% hold just 9%. The median wealth of the top decile is approximately £1.7 million, compared to £18,000 for the bottom decile. Marxist explanation: capitalism is designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie through the exploitation of workers and the accumulation of profit. This explains why inequality has grown since the 1980s, when deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy accelerated capital accumulation. Neoliberal explanation: inequality reflects differences in talent, effort and choices; high earners are rewarded for scarce skills and entrepreneurship. However, this explanation struggles to account for the scale of the gap and the fact that social mobility is low — if effort determined outcomes, children from poor backgrounds who work hard would be as likely to succeed as those from wealthy backgrounds, but evidence shows this is not the case.

📝 Exam Questions by Topic

• AQA Past Papers - Topic Questions -- AQA
• Edexcel Past Papers - Topic Questions -- Edexcel
• OCR Past Papers - Topic Questions -- OCR
• Eduqas Past Papers - Topic Questions -- Eduqas
• CCEA Past Papers - Topic Questions -- CCEA

🎬 Video Resources

• BBC Bitesize: GCSE Sociology
• Social Stratification (YouTube)
• Class and Life Chances (YouTube)