http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/1.abstract
EDIT: from the paper, it appears that mass education in England toward the end of the Victorian era only made a short-lived dent in social mobility, presumably because any temporary advantage in being more educated levelled out after a generation.
In the UK up to the 1960s-1980s, working class people could get a leg up through grammar schools and fully-funded higher education (tuition and modest living costs subsidized by the government) - if you could prove you were smart and hard-working enough, you had a chance to rise up. This ladder was successfully kicked away by comprehensive education and mass higher education (with introduction of student loans rather than free grants). The politicians who introduced these measures of course ensured their own children were privately educated.