Your five-point guide to the coalition’s social mobility report

The government’s new report into social mobility is, it tells us, all about “opening doors” and “breaking barriers” — but it’s probably taxing attention spans too. 89 pages of text and graphs, offset by the same pea soup shade of green that’s used for all these coalition documents. To save you from wading through it all, here’s our quick five-point summary:

1) The same story… Much of the report, as James suggested earlier, is familiar territory. After all, the coalition’s two most developed policy areas — welfare and education — are precisely designed to improve opportunities for the least well-off; so here they are again, restated and slightly reframed. The pupil premium is given particular emphasis, as is the thinking behind the coalition’s policy on tuition fees. Indeed, there’s so little new content that it’s hard not to conclude that this report is a crutch for the Lib Dems ahead of next month’s local elections: a chance for Nick Clegg, who is fronting the whole operation, to point out how social-minded the coalition is, and how much his party is achieving in government.