This book brings together sixteen cutting-edge articles on education and social mobility. It also includes an introductory essay offering a guide to the main issues and controversies addressed by authors from several countries. The book makes an important contribution to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the changing relationship between origins, education and destinations. It is also relevant to policy-makers as education and social mobility are firmly back on both national and global political agendas, seen as key to creating fairer societies and more competitive economies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

1. Education and social mobility 2. Reflections on education and social mobility 3. Social mobility, a panacea for austere times: tales of emperors, frogs, and tadpoles 4. Education, opportunity and the prospects for social mobility 5. 'Class work': producing privilege and social mobility in elite US secondary schools 6. Higher education, social class and the mobilisation of capitals: recognising and playing the game 7. Social mobility and post-compulsory education: revisiting Boudon's model of social opportunity 8. The changing relationship between origins, education and destinations in the 1990s and 2000s 9. Framing higher education: questions and responses in the British Social Attitudes survey, 1983-2010 10. Interrupted trajectories: the impact of academic failure on the social mobility of working-class students 11. Rural students' experiences in a Chinese elite university: capital, habitus and practices 12. Cultural capital and distinction: aspirations of the 'other' foreign student 13. Meritocracy and the Gaokao: a survey study of higher education selection and socio-economic participation in East China 14. Educational expansion and field of study: trends in the intergenerational transmission of educational inequality in the Netherlands 15. The role of the school curriculum in social mobility 16. Three generations of racism: Black middle-class children and schooling 17. Resettling notions of social mobility: locating refugees as 'educable' and 'employable'