Can a person change really change their social class?

Journalism is one of the UK’s most elite industries, according to the charity Sutton Trust.

Almost half of newspaper columnists, for example, went to private school. Yet just 7% of the British population did.

I’m part of that 93% – I grew up in a council estate and went to a comprehensive school in Dagenham, east London.

Now I’m a journalist. Does that make me middle class?

So we asked Metro readers whether a person can change their social class, or are they defined by the class they’re born into?

‘One day I will eat smoked salmon and another day a tin of sardines’

For the most part, our readers said that what makes one person working class and the other middle class isn’t just the circumstances of their birth.

It’s your accent, the words you use, the places you go to and whether you can pop Lurpak butter in your Tesco basket.

Sarah Evans told us: ‘”Posh” in the UK can mean anything from “buys McVities biscuits” to “owns several counties in the south west”.’

Lynn Angel added: ‘We are what we are, we wear different hats for different situations.

‘One day I will eat smoked salmon and another day a tin of sardines.’

More than half of the public consider themselves to be working-class, according to YouGov data.

Often, being middle class is a checklist: a stable job, a mortgage, a family car or two and the ability to afford holidays and a pension.

Campaigners say that class is an invisible inequality – your parents’ wealth strongly influences your prospects of higher education and a good salary.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter how well off your parents are – you’re two-and-a-half times as likely to have a boss-level job if your grandparents were wealthy.

This is why some trade unions feel class should be a protected characteristic under the Equalities Act, akin to gender, race or disability.

Without this, legal experts say it is technically legal to discriminate against candidates due to their accents or addresses and for people to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about those who earn less money.

Carmen Lockyet said she noticed some of her colleagues have designer bags and go on expensive holidays, ‘while I’m standing at a bus stop and booking me caravan holiday’.

She added: ‘I’ve been faking it all my life. People are very judgemental make presumptions. I was dressed well, I spoke well, had after-school activities, etc.

‘People probably didn’t know I was living in a council house with my mum, trying so hard to get us there. ‘

Sometimes, the reverse is true – people get promoted at work and buy houses, all while having a ‘working-class accent’.

Nick Strickland said his dad was an academic, about as middle-class as you can get.

‘But he was born in a council house and he desperately tried to cling onto his working-class roots,’ Nick added.

In other words, you can take the boy out of the council house, but you can’t take the council house out of the boy.

Is social mobility possible? Readers and experts aren’t sure

As several readers said, everyone defines class a bit differently. What’s posh to one person is the bread and butter of another.

Nevertheless, there is pressure to move up the ladder, which iscla called social mobility.

A few readers said that while they grew up in council estates, they ‘educated themselves out of poverty’ – mobility in action.

Yet last year, government advisors found that few people are achieving this, especially compared to our European nations.

For example, they found that being born in London comes with more opportunities compared to a former mining and industrial town in Yorkshire, the Midlands or Wales.

Money – and the connections that come with it – can open doors which are tightly locked for most people. You need money to pay for classy activities like the opera, or to go to university worry-free.

As Anton Cavanaugh commented: ‘You can [change class]. But society will make it as tough as possible.’

Alan Doofy said that while it is possible to change social class by earning more money, the reverse is also true.

He said: ‘We also sadly see working-class and middle-class people falling into the “under-class” and living in poverty due to things like changes in personal circumstances and health.’

Not everyone felt that you could change your class overnight, if at all, no matter how many M&S avocados you buy.

March Purdy said: ‘We’re all closer to crossing the channel in a dinghy than we are to living in a palace.’

Or, as Jeff Thomas, maybe it’s come to scrap class altogether.

‘In 2026, I think we are all fed up with these definitions that go back centuries and are mostly irrelevant,’ he said.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

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