What kind of society do people want to live in - a society in which everyone is left to their own devices, a society of perfect equality, or something in between based around equal opportunities?

We asked this question of a nationally representative sample of 3,140 adults across Great Britain in April 2022. There were five options, with three variations on a society structured to provide equal opportunities (yellow, green and light blue). The answers, below, revealed a strong preference for equal opportunities over both equality, i.e. equal outcomes (purple), and a ‘small state’ (dark blue). Overall, 69.5% of respondents favoured equal opportunities over equality (12.5%) or a ‘small state’ (18%).

Do people agree with the idea that everyone should have a decent chance to succeed in life, so we should remove the key barriers that prevent people from having equal opportunities?

We asked this question of a nationally representative sample of 3,140 adults across Great Britain in April 2022 as part of a wider survey on fairness, and the results, shown here, showed that 76% agreed or strongly agreed overall.

As part of a wider survey in August 2022, we asked 2,000 adults across Britain to guess the current status of educational inequality in the UK. Median estimates of GCSE attainment for both disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils were very accurate.

We then asked the same group of people whether they thought that the real figures for educational inequality were fair or unfair.

We asked half of the group whether they thought British society was fair or unfair before they had seen these figures, and the other half after seeing the figures. The percentage of people in the second group who thought British society was unfair was 27 percentage points higher than in the first group.