Episode 1

In the first of three essays exploring the subtleties of the barriers to social mobility, the writer Lynsey Hanley asks if our social class still largely determines the education we receive. She examines whether our birth postcode will funnel us into good or bad schools, into academic or vocational learning, and into long-established universities or post-2000 ones. She has a very personal starting point - her own education at a school where girls were trained for hair and beauty and boys for car mechanics.

Producer: Adele Armstrong.