Opportunities Denied At 10 Years Old

Back before the last general election I wrote at how opportunities for people who have not been to a public school (i.e. an elite fee-paying school in the UK sense of the term) to have a good career and a decent salary were being closed off: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-of-opportunity.html  I anticipated that if David Cameron came to power then this situation would worsen, which is certainly the case.  I also see that I thought that it would be difficult for Cameron to get into power which also proved to be the situation given he was only able to do it as a part of a coalition which was difficult to negotiate.  Up until now I have tended to view the decline in the opportunity for ordinary people (the 90% of the population who earn up to £40,000 per year or less; the average yearly income was £38,547 [€45,870; US$59,740] in 2011 which means since I was made redundant in 2010; on £35,000 per year, I have fallen back below average whereas in 2005 I was earning about 50% more than the average) as a rather objective situation.  However, with the 10-year old living in my house it has began to impact literally closer to home.

In his first week back at school he received a letter advising his mother about the steps she could take to prepare him for the 11+ examination.  This letter went out to all parents no matter what academic ability they have.  Until the 1970s the 11+ exam was universal in the UK.  It was the examination which pupils took at 10 to determine which school they went to.  There were supposed to be three strands along the lines of the German model: the grammar school for academically capable pupils, the secondary modern school for the ordinary pupil with a vocational focus and the technical school for pupils who showed particular technical ability.  Typically for Britain the number of technical schools was tiny and many have become technical colleges these days instead offering post-16 education.  This system was introduced in 1947 and while it began to disappear from much of the UK in the 1960s and 1970s it was retained in certain counties such as Kent, Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire and parts of other counties such as Wiltshire, Warwickshire and Merseyside. 

The trouble with the so-called Tripartite (read Bipartite) System is what it denied the 75% of pupils who would be sent to a secondary modern school.  They would not have a chance to study a foreign language and the school would be poor in science facilities.  The secondary modern pupils would not have the ability to study the curriculum for certain qualifications let alone take the examinations.  Thus, there would be no chance to go to study in further education (i.e. for 'A' Levels) let alone higher education.  You can see why the creation of the Open University in 1969 setting no such hurdles was so radical in this context.  At the age of 11 a person was locked into a path which unless they were incredibly lucky or their parents had the money to take them out of the system and pay for a school place, they could not escape.

There was a further challenge.  Across England and Wales 25% of pupils went to grammar school but the level at a local level could vary considerably.  A mark in the 11+ plus which would have easily got you into a grammar school in one district, say one with an ageing population, would be insufficient to win you a place in another district with more younger families.  Some towns had more grammar schools than others.  Grammar schools were often single sex so a twin boy and girl could get exactly the same grade in the 11+ and one would get into grammar school and one would not, usually the girl as the mark needed to get into grammar schools was higher for girls than boys both due to provision and girls' abilities at 11.  In a country that was trying to develop an educated workforce and provide equal opportunities you can see why the system was unsatisfactory.  If you have, as I have done, spoken to teachers who work in secondary schools in the areas where this system persists, you find how demoralised secondary modern school teachers are knowing their pupils are being shut off from a range of opportunities.  Similarly talk to parents shifting across the Kent-Sussex border. 

In most places in England and Wales schools steadily turned to comprehensive schools which means that they take pupils without any selection by ability, though they may select on the basis of where they live and increasingly on faith as well.  As was reported last month, the Church of England will be able to associate itself with schools that have previously been non-faith, despite the fact that only 5% of the UK population attends any denomination of church regularly.  When a school becomes a faith school it can discriminate against pupils and staff on the basis of religion and even which church or other religious institution in the case of non-Christian faiths, they attend.  Discrimination on the basis of faith is also a covert way to discriminate on the basis of social class and ability, something I have discussed before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/12/ranking-religious-faith.html  The woman in my house sent her son to a faith school and he got in on grounds of proximity to the school rather than her particular faith, to the disadvantage of less capable pupils who were regular attenders at the associated church.  An additional unsettling fact about the school is how self-righteous its interaction is with parents and how with a faith is supposed to come a subscription to a kind of lifestyle which was going out of date in the 1950s: mother at home all day, able to bake and sew to provide cakes and historic costumes for school events at regular intervals, able to collect a child from school at any time of the school day.

The Blair governments in the 2000s allowed the creation of more faith schools and of new grammar schools, thus beginning to turn back from the comprehensive model which had been promoted by the Labour Party in previous decades.  To a great extent this was because Blair's personal agenda was Christian Democrat rather than Socialist, Labourite or even Liberal.  We now have a mish-mash system with a mix of faith schools, selective grammar schools and academies which are centrally funded schools often revived failing schools with a particular curriculum focus such as in art, sports or technology.  On top of this are the so-called 'free schools' permitted by the coalition government which can be created by groups of parents or other interested bodies.  It might appear that this creates wider opportunity through greater variety.  However, it becomes an issue of Venn circles.  If you are not of a particular faith (or even if you are but attend a different church), if you child cannot pass a particular examination, if you did not have the time to insinuate yourself into a particular circle of parents, if your child's strengths are not in the area of the specialist schools in your district, then you quickly find that your choices have fallen away.

I will turn to the particular example of the selection facing the 10-year old in my house.  Those who live in the town, which is in southern England, may detect it from the statistics, but as always I will hold back from naming it due to wanting to protect my identity.  In the town precisely 30% of the secondary schools are girls' schools and 30% are boys' schools.  This is an unusually high percentage and I wonder what the history is behind this.  In the town 20% of the schools are selective grammar schools; 20% are Christian faith schools of different denominations; 20% are specialist schools focusing on two different subject areas.  As you will have guessed, there is some overlap between these different categories but I will not outline how many fall into more than one category for fear of giving the town away too easily.  Now, only 20% of the schools are co-educational, comprehensive schools.  Thus, if you do not mesh against the particular criteria (a number of which are mutually exclusive, i.e. boy/girl, different denominations, different specialisations) you rapidly come down to selecting between only 20% of the school stock in the town and that is entirely ignoring geographical location.

The boy who lives in my house has already been told that he cannot sit the 11+ as his handwriting is insufficiently good. As it is, the guidance provided by his primary school (which though a faith school is comprehensive) is that unless his mother can afford to buy past papers and engage a personal tutor then his chances are low.  We are already familiar with income shutting the boy out from certain opportunities as even our combined household budget does not stretch to the £365 needed for him to attend the residential course for Year 6 pupils and so he is shut out from that.  We are not a 'poor' 'family' compared to those on benefits and yet even in our kind of average income we cannot access opportunities that would benefit the boy; it will be worse when he reaches secondary school. 

It is ironic that he is already written out of the 11+ as he is in the top set for mathematics in his school and his abilities in computing and science have already been recognised; his vocabulary too is extensive and his reading age is about 12 though he is too lazy to read more.  Now, the National Curriculum compels all schools to teach a wider curriculum than was the case with secondary modern schools.  Even specialist schools ironically have to teach subjects which seem a long way from its specialism.  In addition we do not live in an entirely tripartite system area and whilst 60% of the schools select on certain criteria they do not explicitly discriminate in terms of ability.

The trouble with the rum assortment of schools on offer is the attitude.  Single sex schools benefit girls much more than boys.  However, in an age where the division between sexes is hardening at an alarming rate and is a tendency which promotes sexist behaviour and violence especially from young men, it seems terrible to put so many boys into an environment without girls.  Ironically the teaching will still be a more female friendly approach but without the girls to show how this works.  It is tougher for the boy from my house as he works so well with girls let alone being popular with them.  I can just see him being transformed into one of these thugs that expects girls to serve him sexually and that fighting is a norm.  In a town with a grammar school he will know from the age of 10 that he is 'not good enough' to attain that level.  What does that do to his aspirations?

Until the mid-2000s Britain was doing pretty well in encouraging people who were 'late developers' in academic study or need to change track in what they had studied.  Funding has been shut down for such education and the number of mature students going to university has already fallen by 15%.  Thus, as back in the 1950s once you have failed to get into grammar school, later opportunities will be scarce.  A 10-year old is amazingly alert to such divisions and the likelihood is that he will be shut off from pupils who might write more neatly and yet not be half as good in science or computing and be made to feel that he is the 'second best'.  He may also be shut off from girls as if they were a different species.  What is that going to do to his interaction with the opposite sex when inter-gender relationships are becoming dangerous, not only in terms of personal relationships but in the workplace where they need to function well. 

I know I am beginning to sound like an embittered middle class parent whose child failed the 11+.  However, this is the perspective of the majority in England and Wales.  The British schooling system may have faced difficulties but since 1997 there has been a rush to wreck even the good that was there and to adopt so many different fads and to adopt so many criteria on which children can be categorised that we have been left with a bewildering array of schools without an increase in overall quality and which promote mindsets that say putting people into boxes on gender, religion and ability is fine.  You cannot sustain a fair and equal society when so many young people are being exposed both to such segregation and for so many a sense that already at the age of 11 they have failed.  Are we surprised at the disengagement with our society and the violence that breeds if a child of well-educated (pseudo-)parents of a reasonable income face such disappointment, how much harder must it be for those without such advantages?

Is It Time To Revive The Concept Of Class?

Working in London I come into contact with a far wider range of people than was the case when in an office in a medium-size town in southern England.  There are many more opportunities, especially on public transport, for eavesdropping.  One thing that has become very apparent to me returning to London properly (i.e. being here on a sustained basis rather than for one-off visits) for the first time in over a decade is just how many universities there are.  The number of actual institutions may not be much higher than it was in the late 1990s but certainly the number of students is, and, whilst staff:student ratios may have altered, the number of lecturers and administrators must be higher.  Consequently, travelling between home and work or going out for an evening you stand a good chance of having students and even academics around you.  A lot seem to head to central London, I guess they have evening seminars, lectures, meetings and things.  As readers know, having attended university in a very different time for education and the UK as a whole, I am interested to see what is happening to them these days.  Is eavesdropping an invasion of privacy?  Some people talk so loud it would be difficult not to hear what they are saying and academics seem to get into lively debates wherever they might end up.  I suppose I should be grateful that that remains true, not least as an antidote to the 'I don't want to hear that', silo approach in which everyone seals themselves off from each other, from life itself with their ipods.

Anyway, this posting is less about the potential for interaction in academic discussion on public transport and more a debate sparked by some of this eavesdropping as well as talking with acquaintances of my own.  It seems the concept of social class is so out of fashion that anyone who writes an academic article featuring the term is very likely to have it rejected.  The term 'culture' is acceptable apparently, though I guess something like 'working class culture' would not be.  I suppose we should not be surprised.  Margaret Thatcher claimed she was 'working class' because she worked 'jolly hard' (there is interesting analysis online about how much of a Victorian she was in attitude, maybe this is what distinguishes her brand of societal destruction from that of Cameron).  She further denied that there was such a thing as society, saying there were just individuals and families.  John Major trumpeted that the UK had developed the 'classless society', though that seemed to be on the basis that under his administration middle class people started having their houses repossessed like poorer people once had.  John Prescott as deputy prime minister in 1997 claimed 'we are all middle class now', though I think that was more a comment on the styling of the Blairite New Labour than on society.  Parallel to these political developments, it is clear that universities threw out class along with the the leather patched jackets and the 'History Man' beards.  Yet, they cannot really turn their backs on it entirely as there is still the OFFA - Office of Fair Access, which seeks to have those from 'under-represented' sectors of society gain equal access to higher education; part of the deal over the increased fees is tied to supposedly widening this access.

I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that people think Karl Marx invented class.  Consequently with Thatcher, Major, Blair and their adherents keen to make Socialism, which in some elements is based on Marxism (though it surprises some people to find there are other things like mutualism and even Christian viewpoints in the mix), a thing of the past, felt that they had to purge the UK of the very concept of class.  This shows a lack of historical knowledge or more likely a deliberate misinterpretation of it.  The Greek cities had citizens and some had helots.  The Roman Empire had slaves, freedmen (and -women) and citizens.  Even among the citizens you had to have a certain wealth to be able to be appointed to particular political office.  India had its caste system, China had a very hierarchical structure from the emperor down, (though there were some opportunitie for meritocratic progression), and until the destruction of the Shogunate in the mid-19th century Japanese society rigidly enforced class immobility which interestingly, from a Western perspective set peasants above merchants who languished just above the 'untouchables' despite them being wealthier than the average member of the samurai class.  Medieval society was clearly full of class divisions like the serf, the cottar, the yeoman, the knight, the nobleman and so on.  In addition, many of these society had parallel classes, for example, the structure of the church from the Pope all the way down to a lay brother.

The 19th century portrayals of society as a vast pyramid with each in his or her 'station' probably crystalised the perception of class that we have still lingering in many of our minds despite the efforts of politicians over the past 30 years.  In addition, the social upheaval, especially rural-urban migration and the success of factory owners in raising themselves into the higher levels of society previously held exclusively by large landowners.  In the context of burgeoning capitalism, its exploitation of workers through longer hours, low pay and unhealthy conditions, combined with an apparent new fluidity of people rising and falling through the social classes, ideas around working class, middle class, etc. came common political currency.  Of course, it was never as simple as that.  Even Marx spoke of the lumpen proletariat of unskilled workers as opposed to the proletarian aristocracy of the skilled workforce.  In the UK for over a hundred years there have been numerous sub-strata within classes, the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled working class; the lower, middle and upper middle class, with the really only the latter being the bourgeoisie of property owners in the way that Marx had seen the middle class.  Whilst of little interest to the mass of the population, the British upper class also sub-divided itself on many different bases, into 'old' and 'new' money, connections to particular schools and regiments, location in the country and proximity to titled nobility and the royal family.

The concept of class was hardened in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century on the basis of class-based parties.  Left-wing parties had opinions ranging from outright violent revolution to bring about change across to gradual modification of the capitalist system rather than its abolition on the lines Marx and his adherents proposed (or in fact, felt was inevitable no matter what people or parties did).  This meant that politics shifted from two parties of similar social backgrounds arguing over economic policy such as free trade vs. protectionism to the dominance of a party seen as upper class - the Conservatives and one seen as working class - Labour.  It panned out similarly in much of democratic Europe, though typically with a wider spread of parties falling under these two designations.  In Canada and the USA, however, the model has remained very much like that of Victorian Britain with Liberals and Conservatives; Democrats and Republicans with even working class parties let alone revolutionary ones making minimal impact politically.  Thus, it can be argued, as many British counter-factual commentators were doing in the 2000s that even in Britain there was no inevitability about class-based politics.

Does this suggest that it is only really an accident of history combined with alarm at a political philosophy which could have easily faded into obscurity along with so many others (One Nation Toryism, Whiggism, Social Darwinism, Guild Socialism, Syndicalism, anyone?) that meant that the concept of class continued to persist in Britain as long as it did?  I guess that, in fact, the opponents of class-based politics actually sustained the view of Britain as a class-based society through their rhetoric.  The Conservative Party are the main culprits in their insistence about moving away from class-based politics, partly because they always knew that workers would outnumber their natural base of support.  In many ways they need not have been as fearful as they were.  For 64 years of the 20th century the country had a Conservative government or a coalition led by the Conservatives and even the New Labour government of the last years of the century owed much more to Conservative values than it did to anything the Labour Party had stood for since its creation.  In addition, the Conservatives have always attracted strong support from the so-called 'working class Tory' voter, someone who labours but supports their views on control of society balanced against reduction of regulation; the role of the police/justice system, military and the monarchy; the culture of British society and Britain's standing in the world, even though at times to others these can seem damaging to the interests of those in such a position in the economy and society.

Whilst on one side the political rhetoric has perhaps sustained conceptions of class, on the other shifts in the economy, society and culture may have reduced the acutality of distinct social class.  When the language was developed there was a lot of commonality between millions of people.  Manufacturing had replaced agriculture as the key economic activity in the UK and, as a result, the experience for the bulk of the population: living in houses surrounded by people who did very similar types of work to themselves, fitting with a common daily, weekly, annual pattern, wearing basically the same clothes and eating much the same food, formed a basis.  Of course, the British like to emphasise their differences and group themselves in tribes.  Distinction between people from different regions and ethnicities, distinction between skill levels and gender were all used to show shades of difference between people at a time when, in fact, the life path for the bulk of them was very similar.  The similarities can be grouped into what can be termed the class culture.  In many ways it was little different for those in the various ranks of the middle class, where the only distinctions really came down to whether you worked in a protected profession or not.  Of course, that economic pattern has gone and so have the similarities that permitted useful grouping of people in certain categories.  Particularly notable is 1974 when service-sector jobs exceeded those of manufacturing jobs for the first time and those who once had operated heavy industrial machinery began the progress to being call centre staff.  Yes, they wear a suit to work, but the control of their working lives and the 'minding' aspect of their work is no different; purely a cosmetic change, trumpeted by too many as representing a shift to a classless society.

Culture is an important element in defining class in Britain, often far more than income.  Skilled working class people would often exceed the income of lower and middle-middle class people and yet because of their dress, language and pastimes would never be seen to be on the same level.  With the erosion of real salaries for over four decades now (except among the top 10% earners) and insecurity of employment and property ownership even for those in what were once secure professions, culture is often all that remains for someone to use to distinguish themselves from someone they feel remains 'beneath' them.  Interestingly, I feel that consequently we have moved a little in the direction of E.P. Thompson's view of class.  This is summed up, if I remember rightly in 'The Making of the English Working Class' (1963).  Now, despite Thompson being an avowed Marxist, he eschewed Marx's view of class as this almost rigid, society-spanning structure, I think, in part due to his aversion to Stalinism.  Thompson's view of class that it is almost in constant fluidity, shifting almost moment to moment as we define ourselves in relation to the others we interact with.  Thus, it is a perception that we generate of ourselves and our family in relation to the perceptions we hold of others.  This is different from people having a kind of label as being working class based on what work they do.

Thompson's perspective seems to fit well in modern Britain in which the nature of work has changed so much and has become fragmented.  The commonalities have disappeared, hence the great importance in so many jobs on the title of the job and who can be described as an 'operative', an 'assistant', an 'officer', a 'team leader', a 'manager', 'middle management', an 'executive', 'senior management' and so on.  After all, if I can be a senior manager in a company of five people but am probably earning less and have to use fewer skills and have less reponsibility or control than a team leader in a mult-national.  We generally have no idea what other people earn, and anyway, with the vast difference in pay rates, house prices, loans you can get, debts we have to pay back, income is no indication actually of the level or standing of the job you do. 

As a consequence, we fall back on the cosmetic, the 'cultural' aspects and categorise people by the size of their house; but also the clothes they wear; how they have their hair done or what make-up they wear; what television programmes they watch, if they even still watch television; whether they go to the theatre or a gallery; what food they eat, what they call their children and what clubs the children are members of, which schools they go to; where they go on holiday (not simply due to the cost but the perceived 'quality' of the location, it may be more expensive to fly to Florida than stay in a house in the Dordogne region, but the latter has a far higher class cachet).  When driving there is a constant judgement of 'class' by the type and age of the car driven and on this basis much driving behaviour in the UK is based, notably which cars you flash to have them move over on the motorway; which you feel you can intimidate into letting you into the flow of traffic even when you have no right of way.  Class is alive and well in the UK but it is no longer really an economic category, it is more a cultural category which has its roots in how much money you have but beyond that, what things you choose to buy to manifest your wealth and their own perceived 'value'.

Value is certainly itself up for contest.  There was always pride in working class culture, but there is now a more active assertion that a certain brash culture is somehow better or at least more correct.  I think Britain is unique in seeming to value in popular culture an approach that is not based on acquiring education.  The often vocal assertion that the 'school of hard knocks/university of life' is better than attending a real university is very common.  The disparaging of geeks, boffins and nerds is prevalent; people are ridiculed too often for their learning in a way they would not be even in the USA.  The privileged actually are now promoting this attitude as they feel that universities have been filled by too many of people who, in their view, are not the 'right kind' and that this has reached a level at which it is impacting on those who 'should' be at university.  Yet, no-one has managed to make alternatives, despite the periodic statements that vocational courses are as valid, gain any value.  This is because status in UK business still derives not from your skills or aptitudes but from your background and family.  Those with power rarely have technical or strictly vocational skills, they generally have skills about simply asserting authority or bullying, such as sales.  Those with technical skills are rarely a full time part of the body which runs a company, they are simply called in to answer specific questions and then dismissed.  Consequently, from the highest mult-national in the UK down to the man who runs a carpet-cleaning company, the view that education is of no benefit rules supreme and the emphasis on simply asserting yourself, generally through being loud and aggressive is raised even higher in its place.

So, when I say that the concept of class should be revived am I simply saying that we should detail categories based on what people possess and make it clearer that you can move from C1 to B if you buy a 4x4?  Of course, that is not what I am saying.  Instead, I think class should return in a great measure to what it was once about: opportunity.  Opportunity comes from where you stand at the present and then what restrictions prevent you from moving from that position to something 'better' whether you personally define that in terms of what you can learn or do or simply what you can own.  The most privileged have ample opportunities, they can go wherever they want, they can do what they want, they can pick out their lives very easily.  The least privileged have no opportunities, they have minimal choice over where they live, where they can go and what jobs are open to them.  When living in Poplar and Mile End I was struck by how few people living there strayed outside a 3 Km radius of their house, about the same radius that a medieval serf would have had as their horizons.  Occasionally they would go to the mill or into the woods; occasionally my neighbours in the East End would go down to the slightly larger supermarket or to the park, but generally this was all within walking or short bus ride of their house.

Opportunity does often stem from wealth, but there is not always a direct correlation.  Rich celebrities often find this when they try to get into or get their children into a specific school or club.  This comes back to the use of the cosmetic to separate us from others and to know who are the 'right' kind of people.  From the other side simply being offered a place at university even with all the bursaries, does not mean a young person or even a mature person will be able to take it up, because of the lack of opportunities that they have in terms of living expenses, the extras needed for study, factors like care for their parents or children.  Let alone cultural aspects put up in their way because of how they dress or speak or even their attitude to the world.  The lines are hardening as all the fuss about people having to have unpaid internships first to get an unpaid job.  For every breach of the barriers put up to personal progress by the less privileged, the privileged, especially in the current climate, set up new ones. To complain about the way of the world and demand opportunities was once seen as radical and expected of students; these days it is seen as rude and ungrateful, thus, undeserving.  These days you have to do a lot of forelock tugging even if given an opportunity, so suppressing the range of attitudes and cultures that are deemed 'acceptable' in our society.

Social class has always cut across gender and ethnicity.  This is why David Starkey is simply not just bigoted, but entirely wrong in his assessment of the recent rioting.  What we saw was unrest from a class of people who have had the last fragments of opportunity snatched from them by government policies added to which are many people from what may still be called the 'middle class' seeing such restrictions increasingly imposed on them after over a decade of them and their parents feeling that the UK was being engineered to best benefit them.  The coalition government, headed by those clearly from the upper class, both David Cameron and Nick Clegg are closing the door even on people who would naturally be Conservative supporters but are on a social par with Margaret Thatcher, let alone John Major.  As Marx warned, the greatest danger to stability comes not from those at the bottom of the capitalist system, but from those feeling that changing circumstance are thrusting them down into that pool.  In addition, when so much of our status in UK society is simply defined by the model of television or mobile phone we own is it of any surprise that people go and loot these things?  The riots were a protest about closing off opportunity in so many ways whether ending the EMA or simply saying to people that they will never have even the chance to afford the consumer goods our emphasise so much.  This is why Cameron has so strongly emphasised the 'criminality' to detract from the actual political motivations, even if these are distorted by the consumerist viewpoint on life that has been so imbued into our society.

To address the tensions in Britain on the basis of the old economic perceptions of class would fail.  As it is, despite his rhetoric, Cameron has no desire to 'fix broken Britain' he simply wants to secure the position of the elite and ensure that the little ethnic shop they buy their spices from is not boarded up.  Class needs to be defined by what it really was a century or so ago, about opportunity.  This means that we move away from the superficially divisive aspects like whether we watch 'The X Factor' or the Danish version of 'The Killing', there is no need for cultural uniformity in the way George Orwell might have demanded.  We need to get back down to the perception of people on the basis of whether in this capitalist society they have any chance of altering their situation or whether to a greater or lesser degree they will die pretty much the way they were when they became an adult and when their parents became an adult and so on.  This means that even in families you will find different classes.  As I went to university in the 1980s, I have been in a higher opportunity class than the 9-year old who lives in my house who, it appears will have no chance at getting a degree even if we superficially live in a 'middle class' house.  I had the opportunity to travel abroad with my family, he never does this.  I had the opportunity to go on school trips and join any club I wanted.  Now, for this he is worse off than me, but far better off than many of his contemporaries; both of us are worse off than my parents.  Of course, opportunity does not mean the same as receiving.  Both my parents could have gone to university, my brother too, but for various reasons none decided.  In addition, my parents retired with a much higher opportunity standing than when they became adults, the difference between the 1950s and the 1990s; if they had been twenty years younger that progression would have been reversed, i.e. from the 1970s to the 2010s.

The goal of governments should be, if they truly believe in equality and justice, to pursue policies that enable people to progress from say opportunity category 40 to opportunity category 30 or 25 or 20, in the course of their life.  This forms a useful basis on which to judge people's progress broadly.  Of course, individuals will pick something different to what they are offered.  However, if we can see that a child born in opportunity category 40 is now only likely to make it to 38 whereas two years ago he had a shot at 32, then we know something is wrong.  When we know that people who are in opportunity category 40, 50, 60 see only a chance now to end up in category 75, 80 or 90+ (I define someone as 99 who is living on the streets), as is happening Cameron's 'hammered Britain', then we should have no surprise if we witness rioting and looting, perhaps to raise them a couple of points, but mainly to rail against the realisation that in the 40-60 years of their lives ahead of them, it is never going to get any better than this and most likely, far worse.

In the myth of Pandora's Box it is said that when she released all the evils from the box, Pandora closed it to keep 'Hope' trapped inside.  It might seem odd that hope was stored among all the evils.  This is because the popular renditions of the story have made an error, in the original it is 'Foreboding' that she traps.  Foreboding is an evil, because with it you feel that there is absolutely no point in continuing if everything will just end up badly.  Now, throught their policies especially towards young people, the coalition government has unleashed the evil of foreboding, by making it so explicitly clear that for millions of us only circumstances worse than what we are experiencing now lie ahead of us.  It is an evil to snuff out any prospect of improvement and as a consequence it has received a virulent reaction as seen in the rioting.

The English Baccalaureate: Overnight Invention To Increase Division

Like a lot of people who take a passing interest in education stories, I was at once both surprised and not surprised to hear the government's figures for pupils achieving the so-called 'English Baccalaureate'.  It is in fact no such thing and bares minimal relationship to the International Baccalaureate which has been taught in some British schools for many years.  What this new element is, is simply a grouping of subjects, taken at GCSE level, i.e. aged 16: Mathematics, English, two Sciences, a Humanities subject and a language (interestingly either ancient or modern).  This resembles the kind of collection of subjects that pupils taking a baccalaureate  would take, but, of course, given that this approach has never been adopted in most British schools, they would never have been treated as a whole, instead students would have made individual choices of subject.  In addition, the results coming out now were taken by pupils in May and June 2010, just when the current government was coming to power and the pupils would have chosen their spread of subjects back in mid-2008 long before the coalition government was even a nightmare.

On this basis, it is unsurprising that only 1 in 6 of pupils have achieved the 'qualification' that they and their teachers had no idea that they were going to be measured on.  At 270 state schools, no children 'achieved' it, and at 1600 state schools less than 10% did.  The emphasis on 'academic' subjects (and how many state schools actually teach Latin?) is a reversal of the recent emphasis on diplomas and the desperately needed focus on vocational study that the UK has been battling to introduce for the last 150 years.

The so-called 'English Baccalaureate' is simply a way for the government to continue its disparaging approach to education, showing clearly that private schools of the kind ministers in the large part attended are 'better' than the schools that the bulk of the population attended.  As with universities many commentators have wanted a clearer divide between different schools and this is one way to show it.  It turns back all the recent emphasis on the value of vocational qualifications which the country desperately needs to raise the skill levels of the average worker to bring it in line with competitors in the EU. 

Given that the coalition government clearly wants universities to return to being institutions which only take a small elite from privileged backgrounds I have a suspicion that the next step will be to say that no-one who has not achieved the 'English Baccalaureate' will be able to progress to university.  This would reverse the attitude that certainly the Conservatives despise, espoused since the 1960s and reinforced in the late 1990s, that everyone should have a chance of higher education if they are capable of doing it.  Bluntly, someone doing a Tourism course at a post-1992 university is in fact going to contribute a great deal more to the economy than someone studying Classics at an 'ancient' university.  However, efficiency and a strong economy is of second value to the current government which is bent on reintroducing a very socially divided, hierarchical society to the benefit of the already privileged.  This creation of a fake qualification as a measure to demean schools which are doing good work in educating the bulk of the population, is another weapon in which to drive UK society back a hundred years.

The Death of Opportunity 2: Cutting Off Chances in Further Education

Now having been unemployed for five months these days I spend most of my time in a 2Km radius of my house with occasional trips out of the town for job interviews.  I interact with very few people: the woman who has been assigned my case at the Job Centre, a couple of staff in the Post Office and a few others in a couple of supermarkets in short walking distance of my house.  Consequently a lot of my input has to come via the internet or the newspaper.  I view the BBC website for news and I buy one or two copies of 'The Guardian' per week, so my media intake is pretty restricted, though giving how alarming so much of it is, I probably could not take much more.  Call me weak, but at the moment I could not stomach any content which told me that people of my kind are lazy and bringing down British society.  Someone offered me a copy of the 'Daily Mail' in a cafe the other day and I turned it down warning her that she would just hear me shouting at it: I would rather gaze out at the people walking by in the wealthy town I had been called for an interview in.

One columnist I read in 'The Guardian' is Polly Toynbee.  I welcome her articles, even if I do not always agree with them all, because she has such a broad scope and each week seems to shine a light into a corner of the socio-political landscape that many others are overlooking.  I disagreed with her when she advised Gordon Brown to step down before the last election, but now see that she was probably right.  It should not have made any difference, but in our society which makes more out of the style rather than the substance of what politicians are saying, it might not have meant Labour winning more seats, but it may have done and it might have strengthened the chance of a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition rather than the one we ended up with which is busily taking the UK back to the 18th century in terms of social division and making it into a replica of Greece in the 1970s in terms of its economy.

Toynbee's column reminded me that in my recent posting about the rapid destruction of higher education, i.e. universities, in the UK, like many commentators I had missed the greater damage that was being done to further education, i.e. education for pupils 16+ though also often encompassing vocational and skills training for older people.  Whilst higher education has expanded rapidly in the past 15 years, it still impinges on far fewer people than further education.  Toynbee's argument is that damaging this sector, and other elements of education I discuss below, will shut off far greater opportunities for people than even the damage being down to universities.  I find her argument convincing.  Last year I looked at how despite the efforts of the Blair Party to increase social mobility in fact they had pretty much failed:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-of-opportunity.html  I had detected a resurgence among the privileged and that has obviously continued far more vigorously now that David Cameron is in power. 

It is interesting to note that if they had lived under the regime Cameron is imposing, previous Conservative prime ministers Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and especially John Major would never have got the opportunities that they did and would never have got close to the top of the Conservative Party let alone becoming prime minister.  Cameron is vigorously pursuing a social counter-revolution, not only seeking to turn back equality gains of the 1960s but even, it seems, of the 1910s.  There is an assumption by many that the current public expenditure cuts are only temporary measures and sometime after 2015, presumably with the deficit reduced, things will ease.  This is an utter mistake.  Cameron would have pursued his New Right destruction of the state even if there had been no deficit.  Cameron has no intention of ever restoring the welfare state and other branches of government to anything close to the level he has found them in.  People's lives are being wrecked right now in order to fund the huge salaries and bonuses that Cameron's friends in the City are receiving and to supply all business with a low waged and compliant workforce that it lusts after, so as to make even larger profits.

What Cameron and his cronies are doing now will damage the UK long after Cameron has died of old age.  In the 1990s, as in the 1960s, it was recognised by all the leading political parties that the UK was falling behind not just European but global competitors because it had a poorly educated and trained population.  You only had to work in the civil service in the 1990s to see how many Spanish and Danish people were in senior positions to know the UK was not generating enough intelligent people to hold those positions; we sent fewer than half the civil servants we were entitled to, to the European Commission and had to make up our quota using people from states like Sweden and Austria at the time outside the EU.  That is just a tiny example.  You can look at the fact that so few UK utility companies are now owned by British companies.  Now, I am not prejudiced, I would not say: no foreign ownership of companies in the UK (something interestingly even the BNP and UKIP have not argued), if they are better than UK companies, then it is a factor of capitalist market competition that they should win.  It is just that the UK hampers the chances of its citizens by offering so few of them the chances to be educated and trained to the level needed to run successful companies.  I know people say that successful business people are born and not made, but on that basis why are MBAs so popular to study?

The recognition of this need led to the expansion of higher education.  However, no business is simply run by the high level executives, it needs educated, trained and skilled people at all levels and this is something, which even in my recent writing, I have failed to really emphasise in the way Toynbee did so well last weekend.  The Labour government's attitude to boosting training at all levels has been almost covert, and, at times, ambivalent.  Notable is the sharp cutbacks in the mid-2000s funding to 'lifelong learning', i.e. training for people who were adult learners, often seeking to retrain or raise their skills.  The funds were shifted to 16-19 training provision.  There was an attempt yet again to resolve the problem of the British looking down on vocational training, but yet again, pretty much as it did at regular intervals in the 19th and 20th centuries, the vocational diploma is seen as a failure.  Vocational training always fails due to snobbery, parents 'want better' for their children than to be trained to be skilled rather than academic.  This is because, unlike, say, Germany, which I think all of us would acknowledge as still very successful in industry, there are never technicians, engineers, let alone workers on the boards of companies, rather people who studied Classics at Oxford.  In addition, UK companies always want the state to simply train students to be able to work in their particular company, as if they should be designated like citizens of 'Brave New World' (trained for one specific purpose and discarded when no longer wanted).  This is incredibly short-sighted.  Unlike, say, German employers, who see that a pool of skilled workers is better to be able to draw from and induct into your way of working, rather than a pool of untrained workers who you then have to train up to basic levels before even getting them to engage with your company.  In the UK this obsession that a worker must be locked into your company for as long as you need them and no other method is acceptable, has really hampered the development of an educated workforce at all levels.

Even with the governments of Blair and Brown which seemed sympathetic to greater opportunities, not only for the high flyers but also the middle-ranking people who fill up so much of any company, there were challenges in raising the training levels of British workers.  Now that is going entirely out the window.  This is going to impinge on not only the quality of British companies, but also, as with all of these things, the prospects for millions of people.  Toynbee noted things that too many have forgotten, that Further Education (FE) colleges already received lower payments for students compared to schools with 6th Form years (i.e. years 12 and 13) attached: £4,631 compared to £5,650 per student.  FE colleges are the places where students who are taking a little longer to get their basic qualifications catch up and they are the places where the core of vocational training goes on.  Even for people on apprenticeships or company training courses, a lot of the actual teaching, and this is not simply in the classroom but in college workshops, goes on in the local college.  Out of FE colleges come people trained in a vast range of activities such as caring, agriculture, hairdressing, mechanics, catering and office work. 

FE colleges are what now produces the skilled working class as opposed to the unskilled, with the machine minders of the past now call centre workers.  Having skills of a nationally recognised standard (and you only have to think back eating in restaurants and cafes in the 1990s to see the improvement through things like NVQs)  not only means that companies have more skilled workers, but also that these people have more opportunities and through better pay inject more money into our consumer-driven economy.  No economy can run on simply having the unskilled alone.  The likelihood is that skilled workers from across the EU will come and fill the gap that, through its cutbacks (because FE colleges are funded by local authorities), the government will quickly open up.  The other element which damages opportunities is the shutting off of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).  This was something that until a few months ago, you heard advertised regularly.  The EMA was only £30 (€34; US$48) per student per week and was only paid to families with a combined income below the national average salary.  The total bill was £500 million, just over a third of the cost of (building, let alone maintaining) the two aircraft carriers not to be in service until 2014 and 2016.  The thing is EMA, introduced in 2004, made the difference for many young people between being able to stay on at FE college and be trained and being compelled to go to work immediately, by definition in a lower paid job, or now as unemployment rises, be unemployed.  It is a double loss to the state as they will have to receive some benefits in order to live and in some families it will mean teenagers being pushed out on to the streets into crime.  As Toynbee notes, the supposed concessions in the cuts, such as £150 million in university bursaries and the 'pupil premimum' will benefit wealthier middle class families rather than the poorer ones who gained from EMA, not just in the immediate term but longer because their children could go into better jobs.

Noting this, shows up how prejudiced the government's policies are in terms of social class.  As recent revelations about the state subsidy of the pensions of teachers teaching at the UK's most elite schools, Harrow and Eton and the fact that the head of Lloyds bank which is 40% publicly-owned is being paid £8 million per year shows that the elites are not 'sharing' the pain of the supposedly deficit-imposed cuts.  Further down the social hierarchy, whilst the middle classes feel they too are being unfairly punished (to a degree I think Cameron under-estimated, but that is the 'me first' society Thatcher and her inheritors created - deal with it Cameron) they will gain some sops by having money taken from those people already in lower social categories, increasingly being locked into those categories and being both disparaged and pressured in terms of cuts, because they are not only more dependent on state assistance but other things such as public transport which is going to suffer too.  We see a regressive spending policy which seems bent on hardening social division and robbing the poor to give yet more to the rich.

Toynbee highlights a further example, which is Sure Start which was begun in 1998 and even I have generally overlooked it as one stand out achievement (along with the minimum wage) of the Blair governments.  We all know that children from different social backgrounds with equal intelligence when they start school will find two years later that the poorer child is already falling behind the wealthier one.  In many ways we are already in the 'Brave New World' model that because of opportunities, internet access at home, a mother not compelled to go out and work and a father employed by family-friendly company not compelled to work long hours, is always going to help, especially as IT now plays such a role in education even in pre-school years.  Sure Start was a useful gateway which brings us back to the FE colleges, because the 'one stop shop' approach meant not only assistance with pre-school learning and also parenting skills that many feel parents need training in, but also connected parents to training and retraining at local colleges.  This is now all going with its government funding frozen (so falling in real terms) and again local authorities further pressed for the cash they would have put into Sure Start.

I am grateful for Polly Toynbee for continuing to scratch behind the headlines, dominated by higher education, to show how extensive this government's damage to opportunities is.  If they believed in a successful private sector with skilled, trained staff, then they would not be ending EMA.  Though no-one has stated it, and too many continue to divorce the financial aspects of the spending cuts from their social impact, it is clear we are heading towards a society in which you will have no chance to get yourself out of the social category into which you are born, even through study and hard work.  You will be condemned from birth by this government's attitudes.  I guess they think middle class people no longer able to aspire to higher education will take over the vocational places and give up hope of 'threatening' to come close to the 'natural' elite that Cameron and his ilk clearly see themselves as being.  I see a bleak future for FE colleges, always in a challening situation in terms of their funding; some, I have noticed are rebranding themselves as FE/HE colleges, seeking to capture the kind of 'community college' market, a cheap university, as in the USA.  However, I believe that the government have made a severe miscalculation and very quickly the UK will be lacking skilled workers even skilled middle management and this will have to be supplemented with people from other parts of the EU where you can still get training in these necessary aspects of work.  Many of the opportunities left are being closed off right now in your street and right across your town, for the benefit of the wealthy.

P.P. After I wrote the first draft of this posting I heard on the BBC news that the School Sports Partnership which now involves 6.5 million children, has introduced 1 million children to doing competitive sport in the past year alone and costs £150 million is to be axed.  The government says it wants to encourage more 'competitive sport' and leave choices up to school heads.  Yet again they show their upper class prejudices, that somehow, state-backed sport is not about encouraging competition and this scheme replaced rather than augmented school provision.  Given the challenge of childhood obesity in the UK, the cost of this step will not only be on opportunities but additional burden on the health system in the years to come.  It is apparent that again, with the apparent carte blanche provided by the deficit, the government is social engineering once again.  Sport has often been a 'way out' for a few individuals from ordinary and poor backgrounds, but now such opportunities are being choked off.  It is very likely that the British teams competing in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics will have have the same social profile as those competing for the UK in 1920 or 1924.  Sport will become an elite activity once more not an opportunity for people from ordinary backgrounds to shine.

The University Market

Back before the election in May 2010, I commented how it appeared that the Conservative Party had very little stated policy.  Wrongly I thought that this was because basically they were not far in policy terms from the Labour Party, especially in its Blair Party incarnation up to 2008.  I was wrong in this.  It is now clear that the Conservatives were planning an extreme New Right version of Thatcherism and knew that if they were open about that fact it would lose them votes.  Given that they did not win a majority anyway, in terms of electoral strategy they were right in terms of making electoral gains to keep quiet about their real intentions.  What I, and other commentators tended to overlook, was that there was policy out there being stated not only in the right-wing media but even in more liberal output.  None of the speculations were as harsh as the policy that has in fact been introduced, but if you look back at what was being discussed while Gordon Brown was prime minister, you see the desires of commentators, and, by implication, influential people behind them, that encouraged the kind of policies were are now seeing enacted.


Two trends I did pick up on and comment on, though did not really understand how they would form the basis of future government policy, certainly in the way we have seen it were: the desire for the return of the 'whip of unemployment' - http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/09/cracking-whip-of-unemployment.html and also the desire to have a far greater demarcation in university education, so that the privileges the already privileged are gaining were not lost among the fact that more people from ordinary backgrounds were getting degrees - http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/02/uk-universities-snobbery-and-decay.html  That second posting was prompted by comments in 'The Guardian' which though it gave its support to the Liberal Democrats during the election was hardly a supporter of the harsh monetarist, small state policies that the coaliton involving the Liberal Democrats has introduced.

Universities have always been a challenging issue for political parties.  Higher education until the 1990s remained the preserve of an elite, with in the 1980s, only 6% of 18-year olds getting to it.  Before 1992 there were two classes in higher education: universities which were funded by the central state and polytechnics, in the UK more vocationally focused and funded by local authorities; these were seen as 'second class' despite the good courses many of them ran, many of which contributed far more to the economy than university degrees.  Even with this small percentage with the population rise and the desire to cut public spending the grants to students were reduced and removed and loans were introduced in 1990, though at this stage they were not to pay fees which were still paid for by the state, they were to give money to live on.  Universities were expanding but not at a massive rate and so generally could balance income and expenditure.

In 1992 polytechnics and many other institutions were allowed to become 'new' universities.  This upset many people (it still does) who felt that the elitist nature of universities was being watered down.  Coming from a smaller scale, more industry-focused background many former polytechnics were actually better equipped to deal with the growing 'market place' of higher education than the more established universities that had been used to students automatically turning up.  Many of the new universities moved quickly into research which is what had distinguished universities previously, and in certain areas became very leading in this respect.  However, they were more alert to the fact that the students were effectively their 'customers' and whilst they may have had less space than universities they actually paid attention to what students wanted in a way that the older universities had often been neglectful of.

The big change came in 1997 with the government of Tony Blair coming to power with the slogan 'Education, education. education'.  The goal of that government was that 50% of 18-year olds would go to university.  One driver for this was how low our level of graduates was compared to other states in the EU and competitors across the world.  The high level of pupils leaving school with no qualifications was another factor but received less attention.  The post-1992 universities had grown and now grew even faster as many of the students from 'non-traditional' backgrounds often went to their local university and on to courses that could offer them a better chance of a job than studying English at a traditional university.  The increase was incredible and I now find that universities that friends of mine went to in the 1980s now take four or five times as many students than they did 25 years ago, though often jammed into much the same space.  Expanding universities so quickly, with all the new demands for computer facilities and students not tolerating the kind of accommodation we put up with, meant that universities found it hard to sustain the growth.  It seems most of it was funded not through taking more UK students (or even students from elsewhere in the EU who by law could not be charged more than British students) but taking students from Asia and to a lesser extent the Americas and Africa.  The big supplier of students is China.  Students from outside the EU pay fees three times higher than what English students pay.  Here it is important to note 'English' students because when tuition fees were introduced for students in 2006/7 they did not come to Scotland for Scottish students studying there and there were reduced rates in Wales and Northern Ireland, already a differentiated 'market' was appearing.

The market in 'international students' as they are called is not infinite and with China building more universities and other EU universities teaching courses in English, plus continued competition from the USA and Australia, only briefly dented by their difficulty with foreigners following the 11th September 2001 attacks, UK universities can no longer rely on these students as a 'cash cow'.  Also these students only want to study particular courses, especially in business rather than the full extent of the curriculum.  Talking to one lecturer they said that on some business and management courses the classes are 90-95% Chinese students now.  Universities have expanded faster than their revenue base has done.  Some have balanced this well, some badly, and, of course, the current sharp cuts in public spending, cutting the grant universities get for teaching by 40%.  Apparently from 2012 only science, engineering, mathematics and foreign language degree courses will receive funding, other subject areas will have to generate their own income.

Up until last week universities were limited in what they could charge UK students.  This limit has been raised to £9000 (€10,600; US$14,400) per year, i.e. £27,000 for a three year course. Effectively this brings the charge to UK students in line with what international students were charged.  In fact some so-called 'premium' courses especially in business have had exemptions and been charging such high fees already for everyone.  Students will be loaned this money and will only have to pay it when they start earning £21,000 per year.  Given that unemployment of recent graduates is around 25% at present, many of them are not going to be repaying for many years to come.  The so-called graduate 'premium' of earning more because you have a degree only really applies to sectors like banking in which most people can become rich.  Remember these days that nurses have to have degrees and yet the starting salary for them is just on £21,000, which is around £10,000 lower than the national average salary.   Now, with the current fees, most universities charge the maximum, they need the money.  However, there is an expectation that with the £9000 some universities will charge less, the implication being that those 'lesser' universities so perceived last year will become cheaper universities; they will attract poorer people to do cheaper courses and leave the 'proper' universities to the wealthy and privileged it is clear that a lot of commentators feel should be the only people to go to university.  As Margaret Thatcher said about studying Anglo-Saxon in the 1980s, I believe at the University of Oxford, 'what a luxury'.  A 'good' degree from an 'elite' university is now going to become something the wealthy can indulge in.  By the back door, the polytechnic segregation has been re-introduced.

We cannot avoid the fact that if we want universities as large as we have them now money must come from somewhere.  This current government is unwilling to provide it.  I favour a graduate tax, but this was ruled out a couple of months ago by the government, one which is averse to anything called a tax.  In many ways, however, the tax is effectively a private one as students will pay back the money with 'real' interest rates.  Up until August 2010, student loans were repaid at a nominal interest rate, which with recent low rates had actually fallen to a negative interest rate of -0.4% on loans taken out before 1998, which meant that even if you made no repayments your loan decreased.  Now, however if you took the loan out before 1998 you pay 4.4% and if later, 1.5% unless the bank base rate rises which if it does the interest rate will rise to a maximum of 4.4%.  Before August the rate for these later loans was 0% which meant students just paid back the capital.  Now, even before the cap on fees was taken off and even before a more market-orientated interest rate was introduced the average undergraduate was leaving university with debts of £25,000.  There is a whole issue about how high rents, food and utilities are in the UK anyway, which obviously contributes a lot of what students spend.  Many supplement their state loans with bank loans, at commercial rates of interest.  Even if fees had not been permitted to rise, student debt levels would have risen.  Student debt has meant that people from social categories 4-7 (i.e. the old working class categories) going to university has not risen at all since 2002, the ongoing rise has been in middle class people and even they now are feeling the squeeze. 

The government is saying that universities charging more than £6000 per year on a course must put in steps to assist working class students to attend.  In fact they were compelled to do this from when fees were first introduced and most have a sliding scale of help, though this then annoys the middle class students just out of the support band and allegations of parents splitting up so their children can get funding.  There is no evidence that since 2002 such assistance has raised working class participation in universities, but perhaps the level has not fallen in the way it would have done if such university grants were in place.  One factor that is constantly overlooked is how people are actually averse to getting into such vast debt even if help is offered.  This tends to affect people from working class backgrounds more than other social groups and men more than women which is one reason why there are no 6 women studying at UK universities for every 4 men.  Knowing that you will have £27,000 of debt just for fees, let alone the debt for living costs which we can estimate is around £16,000 for three years (obviously depending where you are studying, which is why so many students stay at home with their parents now), you are looking at £43,000 of debt, which even on the magic £21,000 is more than two years' salary.  With the interest rate of just 1.5% and taking 10 years to clear the debt, just for the fees, you will pay £31,334 by the end, that is a lot to clear in 10 years, so we will most likely see people stretching it out over 25 years like a mortgage (perhaps meaning they cannot get a mortgage as well, taking the best educated people out of the market for buying houses) and this would cost you £39,175.  If the rate is 4.4% then it is over £41,000 over 10 years, again, note, just for the fees.  It will be very easy for students to rack up more than £100,000 of debt by the time they have paid it off, with even currently very low interest rates.

People are going to be very critical of what they get for their money.  I have heard students on public transport pricing up individual lectures, and complaining while the snow was closing roads, that they needed a refund for the lectures cancelled when staff and students could not get in.  They will demand courses that will give them jobs.  This is what the government want.  They want ordinary people only to study a narrow range of vocational courses and places seen as 'cheap' or 'second rate' and leave the rest to the already wealthy.  It is clear universities will have to close many humanities subjects let alone things like art and even pure sciences such as astronomy.  If there is no clear occupation at the end of the degree it is going to be off the curriculum.  In addition, you will find the only people who become researchers in social sciences or astronomers are people from very rich backgrounds, just as was the case in the 18th century, the kind of society it seems apparent David Cameron wants to engineer.  Even in the Conservative Party he is turning back the clock from the culture of the days of Heath, Thatcher and Major in which hard working people from ordinary if not poor backgrounds could get on in the party, now you have to already be from the elite.

Some universities, probably led by the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge, will become private.  It makes no sense for them to chase after the measly sums the state is giving them, with what they might see as restrictions when they might as well charge their students the same fees and get to have it all on their own terms.  Some UK universities are already struggling, in some towns lay offs have been in their hundreds.  People do not seem to realise that universities employing 5000 or more people are like large factories and when they close it ripples out through the local economy as expenditure in local shops, on rent and public transport, as well as a cheap supply of labour disappears.  Closing a university will take thousands of previously well-off people out of the local economy, plus all the tens of thousands (most universities now have over 20,000 students) of students.  I know many towns loathe students but they will miss the money they bring especially during this recession (or is it bad enough yet to call it a depression?)

These institutions will be absorbed by others or private companies or may simply collapse.  I imagine we will see mergers and ironically, those post-1992 universities who have had a more robust market model actually buying up parts of more established universities who have had a not as tight an economic model during the boom years.  At many universities students from outside the UK will become the majority as they already are in some subjects.  As unfunded courses are dropped and the focus is purely on the most profitable, those courses which already attract lots of foreign money will become dominant.  UK students will become a minority on many campuses.  There will also be lots of redundant academics swilling around in the economy, especially from arts, humanities, social sciences and pure sciences.  Given the commercial sector's aversion to anyone from an academic background, it is very likely you will have a lot of unemployable but highly educated people and what they will do as they fall into poverty is an interesting question, especially as the public sector where they might have previously found work also contracts. 

I envisage some imaginative students will leave the UK.  Apparently the University of Maastricht is happy to take students at equivalent to £1500 per year fees at present and teach them in English (knowing that most British people have no grasp of any language bar their own) and with lower living costs than the UK.  British university students are perhaps going to move into the position that Chinese and Indian students have held coming to Europe and the USA in the past.  Clever American universities would also tap into this market, if they need to.

In David Cameron's shockingly vigorous drive to make the UK a far more divided and elitist society, universities which, since the 1960s, have been seen as a way for ordinary people to advance themselves, are clearly going to come under attack.  The thing is, our competitors are still turning out more graduates than the UK and right across the subject spectrum not just in very limited areas.  It seems likely that in the future the government will find it difficult to find any British people qualified to advise it on the economy or social development let alone cultural issues, it will have to rely on Chinese people.  Students often stay around the university town they go to, Sheffield in particular has benefited from this.  The UK now will be exporting intelligent people to the Netherlands and other EU states many of whom will not come back.  I imagine many more will flee the UK to escape the huge debt burden on their heads.  As with so much of the current government's policy, this is being done for extreme ideological reasons, to smash meritocracy and return British society to the control of the privileged.  All the stuff about the deficit is just a front to cover such ardent ideology. 

I lived through a period of growing opportunity, with higher education a core element of that.  It is being killed off very quickly.  Before the next election we will see a fall in university students, the closure of some universities and a new elite, high-priced band of institutions, some of them private, and even these teaching a far narrower range of subjects than before.  Other institutions will be offering what are perceived as second or third rate degrees, still necessary to get a job whilst being disparaged, and coming at a huge financial cost to individuals who as a result will be unable to contribute to the economy.  The choice will be to join private business and scrape enough together to buy a house or study and rent for the rest of your life.  Both models favour the kind of society that the government wants: one in which landlords and banks make vast profits, even beyond their previous excesses, for the crumbs they provide to ordinary people.  It will be a society in which study will be reserved for the rich not the intelligent.  This will naturally mean that talent will go abroad and the UK economy will be weak compared to its rivals, but if the city merchant bankers can still make their profits, the government's view is that the rest of us should be humble and grateful for what we can scrape and have no right to protest about the lack of opportunity and penury the rising generation face.

University of Exeter: Home of Snobbery

I have been working quite a bit in South-West England and have stayed recently in Exeter, the capital of Devon, though the local authority for the city is breaking away from the rest of the county.  It is a pleasant enough city with nice pedestrian areas and gardens, a pleasant cathedral and some decent pubs.  It also has a university, not an ancient one, being set up in 1955 so a decade ahead of the 'plate glass' universities of the mid-late 1960s expansion.  It achieved some reputation in the 1980s, simply because of its advertising campaign which used the typography of the Carlsberg beer company and even lifted their slogan (I imagine with permission) as 'Probably the best university in the world' in the place of 'best beer'.  Aside from that it seems to have trundled along not attracting much attention, though I have been told that its teacher-training branch is rated third after Oxford and Cambridge, that sort of fact does not penetrate the newspapers, I guess unless you read specific sections.  Its Chancellor is Floella Benjamin, born in Trinidad, known to millions as a television presenter on children's programmes, and notable in that fact because she was a black presenter in the 1970s.  Recently she was made a baroness and now sits in the House of Lords for the Liberal Democrats.

It seems ironic that Floella is Chancellor of a university of a city which seems to have one of the least ethnically diverse populations in the UK.  I have not been to Plymouth yet, it is farther South-West of Exeter and has a post-1992 university.  In the city you do see some West Asian and East Asian students, but very few people from other ethnic groups and certainly very few outside the student population.  I imagine that in part this was one reason why the actress Emma Thompson's adopted son, Tindyebwa Agaba, originally from Rwanda where his entire biological family was killed in the genocide, found studying at the university so hard.  When he graduated in 2009, Thompson spoke about the racism he had faced and assisted with a cultural awareness event at the university.

It does not seem that racism is the only problem that Exeter has faced.  Having stayed in hotels in Exeter on and off over the past year, I have encountered a few new staff and even some mature students, usually there for doctoral course meetings who have pointed out the real class consciousness of the university.  One man working as a manager there explained how he was suffering because he was felt to 'not be appropriate' for a managerial role because his family was skilled working class and on repeated occasions he had been told to apply for lower grade jobs. Having faced similar challenges in the past year, I lent a sympathetic ear. He said that it was incredibly frustrating that the concern seemed to be more with his background and there was disregard for his skills and experience.  One woman of the same grade who droned on about her aga cooker (the cheapest costs £6000) and got upset because he would not sit there and let her lecture him on the 'best way' to do everything.  When he tried to have a dialogue and share ideas she ended the meeting.  Naturally you meet arrogant, self-obsessed people in all jobs but you would expect slightly more open-minded attitudes in a university.

I subsequently met a parent, from Bournemouth, whose son had applied to the university and she said she was glad he had not got in, because she felt everyone 'looked down their noses' at you if you were not of a particular social status and did not have the trappings like a large 4x4 vehicle.  Obviously the location of the university in pretty rural part of the UK and in the southern part which is the most expensive (though it is cheaper in Devon than, say in Hampshire or Berkshire, farther East), you might expect it to attract people from a certain social class and certainly the students I encountered, even one working in a pub, are very much upper middle class or even upper class.  The University of Exeter is in step with the national trend in having a sizeable majority of female students, so the place (I wandered around the campus one day out of interest, it lies close to a pub I like) is full of flicky haired women with tops from the lacrosse club or sailing club or riding club; no-one seemed to be in the usual sort of societies you expect at a university.  The student union shop stocks 'The Lady' and 'Horse and Hounds', not the usual magazines students at university read.

Given the demands that I have noted before from journalists, parents and others that in this age of over 40% of 18-year olds going to university, there is a greater distinction made between different 'qualities' of university, favouring something even more divisive than the old polytechnic/university divide scrapped in 1992, I am surprised that Exeter University has not made more of its elitist approach.  It is never going to have the old buildings of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, etc., but it clearly has the same kind of mindset of these places (I lived in Oxford for two years and gatecrashed the odd University lecture and debate and blagged my way into a number of bars at different colleges, just for the hell of it). 

Maybe there is some website or Facebook connection which advises families of the elites that if their child has not got into Oxford of Cambridge, Exeter is the best place to send them to mix with the 'right' kind of people whether students or staff.  I imagine given the hard economic times, though Exeter University seemed to do well out of the last funding round, the university cannot be seen to be too off-putting to potential students from all kinds of backgrounds, they are simply too valuable in terms of fees.  However, as that Bournemouth mother found out, I would warn any parent who is not upper middle class or higher, to avoid the University of Exeter like the plague.  There may be advantages in your child hob-nobbing with the elites, but from the people I have heard from, they may be compelled to do a lot of 'forelock tugging' and be deferential to staff and other students unless they want to be ostracised.  If you are upper middle class or above, and your beloved has not manage to make Oxbridge, then I can assure you that they will find much the same culture, albeit in more modern buildings (and the university is currently the biggest building site in the South-West region so must be doing well financially) that they would find in Oxford or Cambridge, mixing with the 'right' kind of people and taught and administered by staff who are drawn from the 'appropriate' social class. 

I know we now have a government which favours the privileged, but I am surprised that given their desire for greater social mobility, and even Lord Mandelson emphasised this back in 2008 when reviewing the future of universities, the government did not bring the University of Exeter more to book.  It seems to be one institution that has benefited financially but has a culture which is opposed to social mobility and instead fosters social division and providing benefits to the already privileged.  Clearly the journalists whining for more distinction between universities are not looking hard enough.  Perhaps they know about Exeter but only let their friends into its approach rather than write about it openly.  Now I am no longer working in the South-West I wonder if I will come across other universities, which quietly are drawing sharp dividing lines in terms of who they admit and who they employ.  I do feel we have a duty to 'name and shame'.  Universities in my day were about opportunities for those who could take them on their ability not simply who their parents were and I fear we are running rapidly away from those days to them simply helping privileged children to be more privileged still.

The Death of Opportunity

Last month I put up an essay I had produced eight years ago about the political consensuses in Britain. However, I realised reading about the Alan Milburn report of last month into the restrictions on social mobility than a period of social consensus was coming to an end too. Of course even the concept of society took a bashing during the period of the Thatcher regime. However, ironically, Margaret Thatcher coming from a non-professional middle class background to becoming prime minister, like her successor John Major effectively from skilled working class to working in a bank, demonstrated that there was a degree of social mobility and a bank clerk could feasibly dream of holding the highest position in the UK. Contrast these to David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party who assumes he will be the next prime minister and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London; both attended the elite Eton school. These are the face of the Conservative Party as it enters the 2010s just as they could of been when it entered the 1930s.

Cameron has done nothing in his life except work for the Conservative Party, he does not even have the experience of business, the military or the media that many of his fellow Conservatives have done. Johnson is a moron, a poor quality journalist who is adept only at offending people. He has gained and retained positions just because of who he is and who he knows and seems incapable of actually showing any real ability in anything; even as a host of a comedy quiz he struggled. I do not think he should be unemployed and the electorate of London are free to elect who they could, but if he had not come from a wealthy family he never would have been in a position to even stand as a candidate let alone garner votes.

Perhaps, Tony Blair, former lawyer, began the move away from that trend, but I think it is behind the scenes that the changes to end the attitude of the 1960s-70s that people should rise as high as their abilities will allow, was really being killed. However, in the Blair years we did see the expansion of universities with the aim of 50% of 18 year olds attending them. In theory this would open up the routes especially into the professions for a broader swathe of the population, and, it was intended mean more capable people coming into public life in particular. The benefit was mainly for middle class children and working class participation after a brief rise has been static since about 2002 and with the decline in funding of lifelong education is likely to go in reverse in the next few years.

Of course the privileged have not sat still in terms of defending their interests. It was easy when only 6% of the population went to university, you could bar people from professions like medicine and the law by simply asking for a degree. Despite the success of the Open University the numbers were not sufficient to alter the balance of the intake into those areas. In fact there were other aspects happening in terms of equality for women and ethnic minorities if not for the majority of the population, i.e. working class people. Steps have been made, but if you compare the UK to many neighbouring states, most professions do not reflect the fact that 53% of the working population is female or that 17% of people in the UK are members of ethnic minorities. However, there were clear signs that even the Christian Democrat approach favoured by Blair was alarming the privileged.

All the writing about how universities should be distinguished from each other as of different ranks and people mourning the fact that in 1992 polytechnics became universities was one sign of this. Of course, many of the post-1992 universities are in a far better situation in the current economic crisis than their older rivals and just as some people now expect some UK universities to close (London Metropolitan after its fraud must be a leading candidate) others will be merged or taken over, probably by one of the stronger post-1992 universities. Other things such as dismissing of 'A' level results and the favouring of the baccaleauriate and places like University of Oxford discussing having entrance examinations again, seem like actions by the elite to reduce the pressure from the active middle class in trying to join them.

Milburn highlighted another way in which this is being done, through the use of internships. In some ways this is an extension of the policies adopted by fee-paying schools. They educate 7% of the population and yet provide 33% of MPs, 45% of civil servants, 70% of finance directors and 75% of judges. Of course, they would argue that that is because they can provide the best education and facilities, though if you go around the average fee-paying school you often find that is far from being the case and many of them are in out-of-date buildings with old equipment and old educational approaches. It is more the fact that even if they taught their pupils to do nothing except recite the complete works of Rudyard Kipling, the bulk of their pupils would get good jobs due to family connections.

In the 1990s noises were made about these privileges and the fact that how could such for-profit organisations be charities so such schools gave bursaries and in 2006 regulations were changed so that the Charities Commission could be stricter on for-profit schools who were not aiding the local community sufficiently. A couple have been criticised this year and one had the charitable status revoked. However, this misses a huge point, is that even a child who gets to such schools on a bursary will never be a proper part of the school. Their parents cannot pay for the ski trips, the instruments, the other lessons that are taken for granted, actively encouraged in such schools. There is superificial widening of access but if your parents do not have sufficient money your access will never be more than superficial.

Via a long route round, this brings me back to internships. There are a couple of issues going on with them. It is clear like almost all training for young people, employers use it to get cheap or free labour and in exchange give very minimal training. 'The Guardian' reported how even MPs are exploiting the system, like glamorous industries such as fashion, journalism and other media, they use the desire of the young people as a way to get cheap workers despite the fact that each has £104,000 year to spend on help which many of them use to employ family members. They save the government £5.3 million per year, but are selling young people false hope and exploiting them as badly as the worst modelling agencies.

To work for free costs money, especially if you are going to do it for a decent amount of time sufficient to gain real skills for work. This again relies on the family income, that your parents can support you through the period of internship. Yet, internships are now seen as vital for a decent job; US websites show that in the USA students are now expected to have completed two internships by the time they have graduated if they want to get a decent job. Internships are both exploitation and a new way of putting obstacles in the way of aspirational people from non-upper class backgrounds.

Privileged people would argue that the meritocracy fostered in the 1960s (originally used a pejorative term) has failed, given the state we are in. However, many of the problems we are facing notably in terms of the environment and the financial crisis have been fostered by greedy, privileged people with an inability to see beyond their own bank balances and their children they have raised purely through nepotism rather promoting people on ability. If you want to see the kind of damage such systems promote, look at the record of the British Army.

I have recently been reading about how in 1811 the Duke of Wellington's unwillingness to meet with the Portuguese commandant of Braga allowed the army under General Soult to escape capture by the British forces in Portugal. The commandant had come to tell Wellington of the potential escape route for Soult's forces along a Roman road, but Wellington would not meet him as he was deemed to be of too low class and the British general emphasised hierarchy. This meant 20,000 French troops escaped. Wellington was one of Britain's best generals. Others who came on through status and position were far worse. The fiasco of the retreat to Corunna in Spain in 1808, the retreat from Kabul in 1842, the bulk of the action in the Crimean War and certainly the logistical support, the same in fiascos of the Zulu Wars and the Anglo-Boer Wars in South Africa 1899-1902 let alone most activity on the Western Front in the First World War (and in fact I keep thinking of more examples, just look at the American War of Independence 1775-82 and the Fall of Singapore in 1942) you can see how foolish men ignorant of basic strategy, of the fighting machine they had under them, the requirements of an army, the ingenuity of their opponents and above all disregard for their soldiers meant the UK has a huge record of military fiascos that led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and lengthened wars.

If, as Milburn reports, social mobility is declining in Britain there is a 'closed shop' culture in the professions which is not levelling off but increasing. After the shifts of the post-war era there was not an infinite capacity for people to always do better than their parents, but what is happening now is so many are doing far worse. The opportunities for intelligent, hard-working and innovative people are becoming fewer and when they come they come at such a huge financial costs in terms of student loans as to hamper the rest of that person's life. Despite all the bursaries and the access, university, feasibly is still only open to the children of the rich, certainly if it is not the last thing in their lives they can afford to aspire to do. The 'me first' culture fostered from the 1980s onwards is allowing the privileged to strengthen their position. Not for the first time do I feal we are trundling back to the 1930s with Baldwinian policies waiting in the wings to be introduced by David Cameron (though I am still not convinced he will win easily) and a social elite approach to opportunity that appears modelled on the one shown in 'Gosford Park' (2001), i.e. set in 1931 with people complaining that the unemployed would not take positions as domestic servants.

Some will see the greater egalitarianism of the 1960s-70s as an 'experiment' or a 'phase' that proved to them that it could not succeed, though seems to be doing pretty well in other countries. I know the USA has always had an imperfect system but being educated in the state system and working hard can still get you a lot further than in the UK, let alone if you look at France or other European states. Yes, there are inequalities, yes there is privilege, no, not everyone can become prime minister, but these discussions actually pivot on the lives of millions of individuals and whether they will ever get the chance to head the department they work in or whether they will be barred from that on some spurious grounds and have the boss's son with minimal experience put in over them. That is what these broad debates are about frustration is household after household, life after life.

As a society, we will never know the cost of the medicines that will not be developed, the efficiency of our economy and the running of our state that will be lost because so many young people have no hope. These days they cannot even aspire to be the same as their parents in their occupations, many millions will be poorer and less secure in their work than their parents ever were. The privileged love to see binge drinking, drug abuse, youth crime, the assigning of ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) because it allows them to say that other classes do not deserve opportunity and so should not have the right to it. In fact shutting off opportunity in the way that is happening so actively now, simple rots society. There were always be criminals and the socially dysfunctional, but by shutting off any hope of a better future for whole swathes of the population you simply exacerbate the problem and bring unknown misery to millions. New Labour should have really smashed the 'glass ceiling' for social as well as gender, disability and ethnic equality, but instead it has overseen a hardening of these divisions and that is a legacy all of us are going to be dealing with for the next few decades.

P.P. 09/10/2009: New findings have revealed that students from independent schools are over-represented on 'vulnerable' (i.e. to having their departments closed) but economically important degree courses such as modern languages and engineering. Independent schools teach 7% of pupils in the UK but provide 28% students doing French degrees; 38% on Italian and 41% on Spanish degrees; 25% of students studying mechanical engineering, 26% on civil engineering and 38% on general engineering degree and 38% on medical degree courses; the 42% of independent pupils who make up the students doing economics cannot really be deemed to be in a valuable subject area given how much damage such people have done to the UK in the past two years.

These figures may be taken as an excuse to boost independent education, but what such a step neglects is that these are the kind of pupils who always went to university. These degree programmes often stretch over four years, for languages you have to go abroad for a year and engineering degrees often have a year in industry, so students need more money to complete the course than on other degree programmes. In addition, these figures show up the opportunities independent school pupils have at school and to travel before they even reach university; also that their parents are more likely to speak foreign languages and particularly to be doctors. What the figures show is that if you go to a comprehensive school or even a grammar school you stand little chance of moving into these subject areas. For the sake of the future of the UK more resources need to go into state schools otherwise it will continue to be the case that too much of British industry is driven by people who have come from a particularly narrow-minded mould, out of touch with the bulk of UK society. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8291320.stm

P.P. 14/10/2009: The evidence that even attending university does not give you any greater benefits in terms of social mobility seems to keep on coming in. It also seems that the peak period of such opportunity, sometime in the early 2000s is now well passed without having made much of an impact on the social background of those in professional jobs. With the recession it is likely to worsen. It is easy to slip into seeing the recession as having been engineered by the elites to knock back what they saw as middle and even working class people becoming too 'uppity' and pressing into the jobs that were usually reserved for their children. Whether it was ever intentional or is just a by-product of what is happening, the elites can sit back and be happy that they are facing far less challenge from the lower classes than they would have done 5-10 years ago.

The BBC continues covering these issues: 70% of judges, 54% of CEOs, 54% of leading journalists and 51% of doctors went to independent schools which only educate 7% of the population. As anyone who has been round many independent schools knows they often are in worse conditions than children at a local comprehensive and often receive outdated teaching, but of course they do not have to try as hard as many of them will be guaranteed jobs and easy career progression simply because of who they know. I am heartened to see that 32% of MPs and 24% of vice-chancellors of universities went to independent schools, though this still means that indepedent school pupils are over-represented 3-5 times, this is better than 10 times over-represented. However, I do worry that the balance will get worse again meaning that even more than at present the bulk of us and our children will never stand a chance of holding a professional job certainly one that shapes the country even if we are capable of doing it. In our place will be incompetent people who simply got there because of who their family is and which school they went to. For the latest BBC coverage see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8295524.stm

P.P. 25/01/2010: Working for a company which seems to think it is normal that what is or not acceptable to say in any situation seems to be the privilege of affluent employees no matter what their standing within the context of the company, I am feeling the bite of the power of the privileged more sharply than I have for many years.  That aside, I noted the continued attempt, now that higher education takes in so much more of the population to try to draw divisions within it, down the line of old fashioned assumptions.  No-one, even the Million group which represents post-1992 universities seems willing to say that in some fields you stand more chance of getting a job with a degree from a newer university which properly engages with the subject than from a stuck-in-the-mud traditional one.  Now this snobbery is spreading to schools as well.

The government has resisted the rush by independent (i.e. fee-paying) schools to adopt the IGCSE in the place of the GSCE, so now people like the head of the elite Harrow School Barnaby Lenon is whining that poorer children are being lied to about their chances of having a decent career studying the standard qualifications that the bulk of schools still offer.  He refers to 'worthless qualifications' and inidicates that he feels educating the masses of young people will simply lead to circumstances like Weimar Germany or current day Zimbabwe, not realising that actually in those countries education qualifications were/are a rarity reserved for the elite.  So Lenon is equating mass education with dictatorship, rather what is in fact the case, it promotes democracy.  Of course, Lenon does not want to advance democracy and certainly not equality, he wants to keep education and the paths it opens restricted to those who have privilege already.  See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8475876.stm

It is clear that the privileged feel they are beginning to win the argument and with a few more pushes will be able not only to push back some of the increase in social mobility of the past decade but also push it back to before the 1960s changes in opportunity.  This will certainly come about if the Conservatives, no longer fronted by middle class people who worked their way up like Margaret Thatcher and John Major, but by people from the elite, notably David Cameron, win the next election.  The further shutting off of opportunity for thousands of young people is iniquitous and needs to be fought strongly.  This is not about struggling for greater opportunity for ordinary people, it is about maintaining the opportunity opened up over the past four decades and not allowing us to slide back to a situation of the 19th century in which people got a position because of who their father was, not because of any ability.  Returning to that means not only frustration for many thousands but also decay for the UK as a whole.