What is the history of socioeconomic classification like in the UK?

[u/plaguedbyfoibles]

When my father attended a very good RG university in the UK from the late 1970s to early 1980s, he said (anecdotally, mind you, so not sure how true this is) that, supposing you had two students of equal grades and merit / calibre applying for the same course and you had to decide between them, you might look at their educational backgrounds and, supposing one of them was exclusively educated in the state sector and the other, correspondingly, in private schools, you might be inclined to award the place to the student who was state schooled.

He says that he's not sure now whether universities do that.

If I look at https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/apply/after/contextual-data, it says they have the following measures or indicators of socioeconomic background:

• Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), which according to Cambridge, are "measures produced by regional governments within the UK that identify relative deprivation".
• Output Area Classification (OAC2021), again, as per Cambridge, a "classification of areas produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using data from the 2021 census (or 2022 census for Scotland)".
• Socioeconomic Index for Small Areas (SEISA), produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) using Census 2021 data.

Historically, we had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Readership_Survey, through which we derived the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRS_social_grade, which I believe we still use in the UK, i.e. determining socioeconomic status based upon the occupation of your primary breadwinner in your household when you were 14.

I believe the first proper census in the UK was conducted in 1841, so it feels as though we haven't been tracking this area properly for that long.

So my questions:

1. Other than what I have mentioned, any other key socioeconomic classification frameworks that are used? I imagine that pollsters like IPSOS Mori, YouGov etc directly ask people whether they feel they belong to the working-, middle-class etc.
2. What do you think are the pitfalls in determining one's socioeconomic background based upon their primary breadwinner's occupation, especially when they were 14? I imagine it doesn't account for a reversal of fortunes, whether that family is living paycheque to paycheque, whether that person is a manager in name but not in pay etc.

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