Invitation to Tender (ITT) for Social Mobility Commission State of the Nation 2025 and 2026 Research

The Social Mobility Commission (SMC) monitors progress towards improving social mobility in the UK and promotes social mobility in England. It is an independent statutory body created by an Act of Parliament and is sponsored by the Cabinet Office.

As part of its remit, the Commission undertakes an annual "State of the Nation" report. This report is part of the Commission's statutory duty to monitor UK-wide progress on social mobility each year. The production and synthesis of key statistics related to social mobility will be part of the reports that will be published in the autumns of 2025 and 2026.

The Commission is seeking a supplier to provide updated analysis for the 2025 and 2026 reports. The supplier will help to create the statistics for the reports and work with our internal report team to interpret and build a narrative around them. These reports will then be laid before Parliament.

The SMC wishes to continue building and improving on its Social Mobility Index and data explorer tool. Additionally, to commemorate 15 years since its inception, for the 2025 report, the SMC would like to include a retrospective focus by looking at how social mobility has changed over time, through the lens of the Index. For the 2026 report, the SMC is yet to decide on its focus, but we would like to update the index with the latest available data and include a narrative of the trends observed in the report.

The SMC's index offers an accurate and robust framework to measure social mobility. It includes three main components each of which consist of multiple indicators:

Drivers: These are background conditions which enable social mobility such as availability of high quality schooling.

Intermediate outcomes: These are early social mobility outcomes of young people which are observed from the school years into post-18 education and then into the labour market. These are measured across different socio-economic backgrounds and broken down by geography and protected characteristics such as sex, ethnicity, and disability.

Mobility outcomes: These are the full social mobility outcomes of people once they have reached their 50s. We measure this across five dimensions: occupation, income, education, housing and wealth.

See our Data Explorer Tool for the full suite of indicators and Annex 1 Table 1 for more information on what is needed for the upcoming report.

The full tender document is below, which outlines the full details of the project.

Bidders must submit their Bids before 4pm on 18 November 2024. All Bids must be submitted to contact@socialmobilitycommission.gov.uk. Failure to return Bids by the time and due date or in the required format may disqualify Bidders from consideration.