The number of years of schooling and adult social class of 1417 adoptees are found to correlate with the social class of both their biological and adoptive fathers. For female adoptees the effect of both paternal social class values upon own social class appears to be mediated through the influence of the former upon years of schooling. For male adoptees, some residual direct correlations of paternal social class with offspring's social class, independent of years of schooling in the adoptee, are observed.

The concept of ‘need’ is currently popular in education. It is, as Dearden (1972) has pointed out, an attractive concept for educationalists, because it appears to offer an escape from arguments about values and about power. Those who uncritically accept the doctrine of needs can assume that there are educational experts who can unproblematically decide on needs, which can then be unproblematically catered for. Thus, when ethnic minority children began to arrive in British schools in significant numbers in the early 1960s, it was assumed that the schools—without experience or understanding of other cultures—could make an assessment of the needs of these children.

Rates of social mobility are some of the most revealing indicators of a society's character. In any society there is a tendency for privileged groups to try to close ranks, preserve their advantages and pass them on to their children, but the arguments of social justice, economic efficiency and social stability all suggest that these tendencies towards closure and inherited privilege should be curbed. In western liberal societies the dominant version of social justice is perhaps the one that advocates equality of opportunity: those with equal effort and talent should be equally rewarded whatever their class, sex, age, race or religion. Economic efficiency likewise requires that workers should be paid according to their actual productivity rather than to ascribed (and economically irrelevant) characteristics such as their race or sex. And theories of social order hold that the blocking of legitimate aspirations for social and economic advancement will be a potent source of social dissent and conflict (see Goldthorpe, 1980; Heath, 1981). On all three counts the opportunities open to members of ethnic minorities are of interest, but sociologically the third has particular interest for whereas within native white society failure to secure upward social mobility may lead to individual responses—to personal frustration and stress—an ethnic minority which experiences discrimination and blocked careers as a shared grievance is to that extent more likely to respond with collective protest and militant group action.