evidence: Children and young people in the north of England are "too often left behind", according to a recent report from England’s Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield. This viewpoint helps to illuminate the very significant question of how intergenerational inequality – the gap between different generations – is intertwined with, and may continue to exacerbate, the UK’s stark regional disparities, which are often referred to using the shorthand term "North-South divide". [...] Although the North-South divide is generally well known, something which is less well publicised is that in recent years a significant gap has also developed between different regions in rates of social mobility. As the report from the Children’s Commissioner emphasises, children who come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds in London are now much more likely to climb the social mobility ladder than their counterparts in poorer English regions (even though the overall level of social mobility in the UK as a whole remains fairly low), a trend which the report puts down to divergent rates of improvement between northern and southern state schools.