Middle class[edit]
The middle-class in Britain often consists of people with tertiary education and may have been educated at either state or private schools.[54]
Typical jobs include: accountants, architects, solicitors, surveyors, social workers, teachers, managers, specialist IT workers, engineers, doctors, university-educated nurses and civil servants. Displays of conspicuous consumption are considered vulgar by them; instead they prefer to channel excess income into investments, especially property.
Members of the middle-class are often politically and socially engaged (a Mori poll in 2005 found 70% of grades AB voted at the 2005 general election compared to 54% of grades DE) and might be regular churchgoers (a YouGov poll in 2014 found 62% of those attending church at least once a month were NRS grades ABC1),[58][59] might sit on local committees and governing boards or stand for political office. Education is greatly valued by the middle-classes: they will make every effort to ensure their children get offered a place at university; they may send their children to a private school, hire a home tutor for out of school hours so their child learns at a faster rate, or go to great lengths to get their children enrolled into good state or selective grammar schools; such as moving house into the catchment area.[60]
They also value culture and make up a significant proportion of the book-buying and theatre-going public. They typically read broadsheet newspapers rather than tabloids. The only Mosaic 2010 geodemographic type where the proportion of residents in NRS social grade B was rated as "high" in the 2010 index was "People living in brand new residential developments".[57] The middle classes particularly of England and Wales are often popularly referred to as "Middle England".[61]
The comedy character Margo Leadbetter is a satirical stereotype for this group, as is Jilly Cooper's Howard Weybridge.[49]
Upper middle class[edit]
Harrow School. The public school is traditionally one of the key institutions of the upper-middle-class in Britain.[62]
The upper middle-class in Britain broadly consists of people who were born into families which have traditionally possessed high incomes, although this group is defined more by family background than by job or income. This stratum, in England, traditionally uses the Received Pronunciation dialect natively.
The upper middle-class are traditionally educated at independent schools, preferably one of the "major" or "minor" "public schools"[63][64] which themselves often have pedigrees going back for hundreds of years and charge fees of as much as £33,000 per year per pupil (as of 2014).[62][65]
A minority of upper-middle-class families may also have ancestry that directly connects them to the upper classes. Armorial bearings in the form of an escutcheon may denote such past status. A lesser status historically directly relevant to the upper-middle class is that of squire or lord of the manor, however, these property rights are no longer [66] prevalent.
Although such categorisations are not precise, popular contemporary examples of upper-middle-class people may include Boris
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