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.
Showing posts with label University of Cambridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label University of Cambridge. Show all posts
Sunday, 7 November 2010
Thursday, 11 September 2008
UK Social Divisions Hardened By Education
If you want to know where Britain is going in terms of its social structure it is always worth reading the Education pages of websites like the BBC. Their stories, as is suitable for a website, are usually tightly focused, but it only takes reading a few stories to begin to see an overarching picture. I have commented before about how higher education is becoming closed off to children from both middle and working class backgrounds because of the huge cost and the debt it throws people into. The fees on study in England are likely to be uncapped in the coming years. Already students leave university with debts of £15,000 (€18,900; US$26,700) and this expected to be up to £17,000 this year. There are bursaries available, but actually you have to come from poor backgrounds to qualify for these and while they are not negligible to the poorest students, they leave out a large chunk of the population.
The government has been driving to increase the number of people going into higher education for over a decade now and they are succeeding, though the rise has slowed down since 2002 and it has still benefited middle class people more than working class. We are getting simply more people from the class that was the one which sent their children to university before. Public spending has risen on higher education by 48% 2000-2005. The UK is now about the OECD average for attendance at university which is 56% of school leavers going into higher education. This fits a common trend. Countries with smaller populations such as Australia (about 16 million people) and Iceland have seen the largest jumps and the highest level of participation. Poland, Finland and importantly the USA have seen larger jumps than the UK and have higher participation. The UK does lead EU rivals like Spain (which has recorded a fall in university students since 2000) and Germany as well as Japan. However, it is clear that this shift in the UK is having other collateral effects that might not have been anticipated. It is actually reversing rather than improving opportunities for social mobility.
I have noted before how a degree is almost becoming like a baseline qualification for people to get any kind of decent job. Reports on the BBC have shown that as a consequence the gap between those people who have degrees and those who do not, in terms of income, is actually widening. In 1997 graduates were likely to earn 53% more than non-graduates throughout their careers, now the figure is 59%. To some degree this is unsurprising, given the vast debts students now incur they will press for salaries which will help them pay this back. It is not only a an issue of income, but also the range of jobs to which you must have a degree to gain access. This situation has been worsened by the government cut-back of funding into 'lifelong learning', i.e. people going back to take new courses and/or retrain when they are in their 30s-60s; the number of people doing this kind of learning has fallen by 1.5 million compared to 2006. The UK is in danger of becoming even more like France, where if you have the misfortune to have trained in an industry which has become obsolete you find it almost impossible to get into another profession because of the training requirements. Basically, the UK is moving to a 'Brave New World' pattern. Rather than being categorised at 11 as used to be the case, it will now come at 18 and those who get a degree go into the 'Beta' class (most of us cannot get into the 'Alpha' class even with degrees because of the engrained position of wealthy families and privilege in the UK, you are categorised into that or not, at birth) or the 'Delta' class or even 'Gamma' class.
The split is not even. With women making up 56% of university students, there is going to be an imbalance with more female Betas than male ones. This is already happening and is clashing against a system in which women still earn 17% less than their male counterparts in the UK. Either this 'ceiling' will be broken or it is another way to keep down salaries as more of the Beta class is come to be made up of relatively cheaper women, so again keeping even skilled and well-educated people away from the decent incomes of the Alphas, the super-wealthy. The other thing is that it is very racially imbalanced. The fact that more people from Asian backgrounds go into medical professions compared to Caucasians who are the most numerous racial group in the UK, has long been a trend. However, in other reports, the continued challenges of advancing children from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds is still being noted. The blame seems to be levelled in turn at institutional racism, that schools give up on black children from the start and at youth culture among Afro-Caribbean children, especially boys, which glamourises crime and violence.
Personally I think both factors are to blame. However, I think this also neglects that actually all youth culture nowadays for whatever race the children come from glamourises a criminal lifestyle. This is as detrimental for girls as it is for boys as it suggests that it is good for them to become blond-haired, air-headed 'bimbos' who gain acceptance by complying with the demands of males and concentrating on fashion, binge drinking and drug-taking. For boys it is that they need to be tough, drink, take drugs, have lots of unprotected sex, carry a knife or a gun and buy credibility by being violent and carrying out criminal activities. This goes for white children, mixed-race children and Asians as much as it does for blacks. None of this is new, you can go back to 'West Side Story' of the mid-1950s to see similar views.
I agree that Britain like many countries in the EU suffers from institutional racism, but I think that on top of that is institutional class prejudice as well. It has long been recognised that teachers give up on working class children and it has been proven that intelligent children from such backgrounds fall behind less intelligent children from wealthy backgrounds almost immediately on entering school. This is because teachers privilege the language and culture of the middle classes and schools are dependent on the costly support for learning at home that comes through buying computers, paying for after-school classes, etc. that only middle class people (and increasingly only the top end of that bracket) can afford. As children are tested so regularly at school, the curriculum has become too large to accommodate in the school day and so it spills after school. The six-year old in my house is already doing homework, five years earlier than I started it. Homework increasingly needs an internet connected computer, a colour printer and has always needed a quiet spacious place. With libraries now noisy spaces with no room for study, those without sufficiently large houses are going to lose out. Problems identified in the 1950s are back with a vengeance. Of course Afro-Caribbean families are often working class and so suffer these issues twice over. Racial definition is too simplistic in the UK anyway, especially given how many mixed-race families there are and siblings and half-siblings with different skin colours actually get treated the same, not because of their particular individual racial characteristics, but because of the home context they come out of and how that is perceived by teachers.
So, even if there was not an active policy of hardening social divides, trends in British society, exacerbated by government policy are actually doing this. However, there is an added element which I picked up on in June and that is, that the privileged are beginning to bite back. Now more than even in the Thatcher years they are losing their shame about their positions and the benefits they gain. They seem to believe that the era of democratisation of the 1960s and 1970s is truly at an end, probably helped by the Blairite party having been in power and the Conservatives moving away from grammar school Thatcher and Major to Eton-educated, clearly elitist, Cameron. The statements of Rear Admiral Chris Parry in regard to keeping ordinary children out of private schools proved to be too rich, but it did mark a trend which it is clear is not going away and the privileged are becoming emboldened after his ranging shot. Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard, head of the University of Cambridge has said that universities should not be about social engineering. Effectively she was telling governments to back off and stop telling the elite universities to let in more ordinary people. Reports in July 2008 showed how there had been little improvement in the elitist approach to entry to all universities. Ironically Cambridge allowed in 59% of its students from state schools (which make up 93% of the secondary education sector) this year, the highest percentage since 1981. However, I doubt this level will be sustained. In addition, this figure also shows that by getting 41% of the places students from private education are effectively almost six times over-represented at Cambridge.
As I have noted before, Britain is moving to a very hierarchical society in which social mobility will be very limited. Education was once seen as a way to break such patterns but now it is clear it is simply reinforcing them. Any attempt from the government to challenge these things either economically (look how the windfall tax is being choked off by utility companies) or by policies is stopped by the ultra-rich and other privileged sectors of British society. After a few decades of having to keep their head down they feel their time has come and they are speaking openly about keeping back those (the majority) from other sectors of society and teachers are active collaborators in this. All are happy to have a youth culture that they can condemn but are actually please because it stops too many people questioning and challenging the hardening status quo.
The government has been driving to increase the number of people going into higher education for over a decade now and they are succeeding, though the rise has slowed down since 2002 and it has still benefited middle class people more than working class. We are getting simply more people from the class that was the one which sent their children to university before. Public spending has risen on higher education by 48% 2000-2005. The UK is now about the OECD average for attendance at university which is 56% of school leavers going into higher education. This fits a common trend. Countries with smaller populations such as Australia (about 16 million people) and Iceland have seen the largest jumps and the highest level of participation. Poland, Finland and importantly the USA have seen larger jumps than the UK and have higher participation. The UK does lead EU rivals like Spain (which has recorded a fall in university students since 2000) and Germany as well as Japan. However, it is clear that this shift in the UK is having other collateral effects that might not have been anticipated. It is actually reversing rather than improving opportunities for social mobility.
I have noted before how a degree is almost becoming like a baseline qualification for people to get any kind of decent job. Reports on the BBC have shown that as a consequence the gap between those people who have degrees and those who do not, in terms of income, is actually widening. In 1997 graduates were likely to earn 53% more than non-graduates throughout their careers, now the figure is 59%. To some degree this is unsurprising, given the vast debts students now incur they will press for salaries which will help them pay this back. It is not only a an issue of income, but also the range of jobs to which you must have a degree to gain access. This situation has been worsened by the government cut-back of funding into 'lifelong learning', i.e. people going back to take new courses and/or retrain when they are in their 30s-60s; the number of people doing this kind of learning has fallen by 1.5 million compared to 2006. The UK is in danger of becoming even more like France, where if you have the misfortune to have trained in an industry which has become obsolete you find it almost impossible to get into another profession because of the training requirements. Basically, the UK is moving to a 'Brave New World' pattern. Rather than being categorised at 11 as used to be the case, it will now come at 18 and those who get a degree go into the 'Beta' class (most of us cannot get into the 'Alpha' class even with degrees because of the engrained position of wealthy families and privilege in the UK, you are categorised into that or not, at birth) or the 'Delta' class or even 'Gamma' class.
The split is not even. With women making up 56% of university students, there is going to be an imbalance with more female Betas than male ones. This is already happening and is clashing against a system in which women still earn 17% less than their male counterparts in the UK. Either this 'ceiling' will be broken or it is another way to keep down salaries as more of the Beta class is come to be made up of relatively cheaper women, so again keeping even skilled and well-educated people away from the decent incomes of the Alphas, the super-wealthy. The other thing is that it is very racially imbalanced. The fact that more people from Asian backgrounds go into medical professions compared to Caucasians who are the most numerous racial group in the UK, has long been a trend. However, in other reports, the continued challenges of advancing children from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds is still being noted. The blame seems to be levelled in turn at institutional racism, that schools give up on black children from the start and at youth culture among Afro-Caribbean children, especially boys, which glamourises crime and violence.
Personally I think both factors are to blame. However, I think this also neglects that actually all youth culture nowadays for whatever race the children come from glamourises a criminal lifestyle. This is as detrimental for girls as it is for boys as it suggests that it is good for them to become blond-haired, air-headed 'bimbos' who gain acceptance by complying with the demands of males and concentrating on fashion, binge drinking and drug-taking. For boys it is that they need to be tough, drink, take drugs, have lots of unprotected sex, carry a knife or a gun and buy credibility by being violent and carrying out criminal activities. This goes for white children, mixed-race children and Asians as much as it does for blacks. None of this is new, you can go back to 'West Side Story' of the mid-1950s to see similar views.
I agree that Britain like many countries in the EU suffers from institutional racism, but I think that on top of that is institutional class prejudice as well. It has long been recognised that teachers give up on working class children and it has been proven that intelligent children from such backgrounds fall behind less intelligent children from wealthy backgrounds almost immediately on entering school. This is because teachers privilege the language and culture of the middle classes and schools are dependent on the costly support for learning at home that comes through buying computers, paying for after-school classes, etc. that only middle class people (and increasingly only the top end of that bracket) can afford. As children are tested so regularly at school, the curriculum has become too large to accommodate in the school day and so it spills after school. The six-year old in my house is already doing homework, five years earlier than I started it. Homework increasingly needs an internet connected computer, a colour printer and has always needed a quiet spacious place. With libraries now noisy spaces with no room for study, those without sufficiently large houses are going to lose out. Problems identified in the 1950s are back with a vengeance. Of course Afro-Caribbean families are often working class and so suffer these issues twice over. Racial definition is too simplistic in the UK anyway, especially given how many mixed-race families there are and siblings and half-siblings with different skin colours actually get treated the same, not because of their particular individual racial characteristics, but because of the home context they come out of and how that is perceived by teachers.
So, even if there was not an active policy of hardening social divides, trends in British society, exacerbated by government policy are actually doing this. However, there is an added element which I picked up on in June and that is, that the privileged are beginning to bite back. Now more than even in the Thatcher years they are losing their shame about their positions and the benefits they gain. They seem to believe that the era of democratisation of the 1960s and 1970s is truly at an end, probably helped by the Blairite party having been in power and the Conservatives moving away from grammar school Thatcher and Major to Eton-educated, clearly elitist, Cameron. The statements of Rear Admiral Chris Parry in regard to keeping ordinary children out of private schools proved to be too rich, but it did mark a trend which it is clear is not going away and the privileged are becoming emboldened after his ranging shot. Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard, head of the University of Cambridge has said that universities should not be about social engineering. Effectively she was telling governments to back off and stop telling the elite universities to let in more ordinary people. Reports in July 2008 showed how there had been little improvement in the elitist approach to entry to all universities. Ironically Cambridge allowed in 59% of its students from state schools (which make up 93% of the secondary education sector) this year, the highest percentage since 1981. However, I doubt this level will be sustained. In addition, this figure also shows that by getting 41% of the places students from private education are effectively almost six times over-represented at Cambridge.
As I have noted before, Britain is moving to a very hierarchical society in which social mobility will be very limited. Education was once seen as a way to break such patterns but now it is clear it is simply reinforcing them. Any attempt from the government to challenge these things either economically (look how the windfall tax is being choked off by utility companies) or by policies is stopped by the ultra-rich and other privileged sectors of British society. After a few decades of having to keep their head down they feel their time has come and they are speaking openly about keeping back those (the majority) from other sectors of society and teachers are active collaborators in this. All are happy to have a youth culture that they can condemn but are actually please because it stops too many people questioning and challenging the hardening status quo.
Saturday, 15 December 2007
UK Society: Divided and Lacking Social Mobility
Regular readers of this blog will know I am acutely aware of the difficulties of British society and how a lot of these are driven by corrosive attitudes and obsessions, notably over property and the very self-centred, consumerist attitudes so prevalent in the UK today. To some extent, people in Britain have been lulled into a false belief that the social divisions of the past have begun to be eroded. Apparently in the 1970s (a time when sociology was really developing as a research area) the UK was one of the most socially divided industrialised countries in the world. This was despite having had free education for a century and a welfare state since the 1940s.
One key difference between the UK and neighbouring states in Europe was that the UK had neither had a revolution nor had it had suffered the upheaval of either being occupied by a foreign power or being under a dictatorship. All of these factors disrupted the societies across Europe. Ironically people from ordinary backgrounds stood more chance of advancement under a Fascist, Nazi or Communist dictatorship than they did in British democracy. Partly, as I have mentioned before, this is because the UK is not a true democracy, half of its parliament is unelected and the prime positions in the Civil Service, Government, Military and its established Church, go to people (still predominantly men) who have attended a small number of select fee-paying schools called 'Public Schools' (ironically very exclusive and certainly not public). The next layers beneath the highest in each branch of British public life are held by people who attended less exclusive and a bit cheaper private schools. The highest that a person who has gone to a free state school can rise is to something like a senior doctor in a hospital or a chief constable (i.e. in charge of all the police of one county) or a brigadier in the Army or possibly their Naval equivalent (the airforce, the RAF, is more exclusive). Given that you have to be put on the lists of these schools the moment you are born and the annual fees are far higher than the average annual salary of people living in the UK, unless you have very wealthy parents you stand no chance of getting in and thus no chance of moving into the higher levels of British society.
Now, I accept that other European states have nobility and very wealthy families, the UK is not unique in this, it also applies to countries elsewhere in the world. However, if one looks at comparator industrialised countries, there are exclusive schools, but, say for example the Grandes Ecoles in France, even the poorest, intelligent pupil can get into them. In countries without a monarch, an ordinary person can rise to be president. In addition, middle ranking people who in the UK may never rise above being a low-level lawyer or civil servant or doctor or bank worker, similarly can reach higher positions. This means there is something to aspire to and you are not ruled out of so many areas the moment you are born. The USA has also suffered from social division. It has wealthy families who are politically powerful, but again it has structures that allow people to advance, no matter what their backgrounds. Show me the black people in the UK who have attained the level of power that Colin Powell or Condaleeza Rice have obtained; this is despite black people coming to Britain for at least the last 2000 years. In public service, the military and so on, as an ordinary person you can rise in a way that you could never do in the UK.
What the UK resembles is the post-Communist states like Russia, Poland, China (which is now really only Communist in name) where influence in political circles and so access to money from the break-up of the state machinery can give you an unfair advantage. To some extent social mobility in these states for those coming up in enterprise is currently greater than such small business people struggling in the UK. Many successful British entrepreneurs come from outside the UK especially from Eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent, rather than from within Britian. That is because they can draw on resources unfettered by British constraints. In addition they have often had access to the best education that their British equivalents are denied. This is one explanation for the growing percentage of people from an Asian background working as doctors in the UK. Ordinary white and black British people simply do not have access to sufficiently high level schooling to even aspire to be doctors and the wealthy whites in Britain lack the altruistic attitudes of their Asian-background counterparts to do something as beneficial as care for people.
The sharp divisions in Britain were exacerbated in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-90) infamously said there was no society, just families and individuals. However, her policies reinforced the social divisions in the UK. She was the daughter of a grocer and had only attended grammar school (i.e. a free school, though in the upper educational category) in her youth and yet made it to be prime minister, something I doubt will be repeated in the UK in coming decades. Her obsession with property-ownership wrecked the state housing sector (which in Scotland had housed 60% of the population) and pushed people to own property or to be seen as irrelevant. The rise in house prices increased homelessness, rising the numbers of people living on the streets or temporary accommodation and also removed from many working class people affordable housing permitting them the money to spend on improvement for themselves and their children, especially in terms of education. In addition, Thatcher scrapped grants for students to attend university substituting loans instead. Working class people have less access to credit and a greater aversion to debt than people in other classes so again it closed down what had been becoming at least one way for working class people to get on through education. This was worsened anyway by budget cuts on education and pressure on local authorities who ran schools at the time to cut their expenditure too. Certain schools were encouraged to leave the local authority system and it was these elite 'grant-maintained' schools which received direct, generous government money whilst the so-called 'bog standard' schools that most children attend could only survive by not repairing buildings, by selling off playing fields and fund-raising events.
Whilst the UK, like the rest of the industrialised world was facing shifts in industrial patterns, the economic policies of Thatcher led to a very abrupt closure of manufacturing industries leading to unemployment of over 4 million people (about 16% of the working population of the time). Whilst work in manufacturing and related industries, such as fuel resources, was varied there were many skilled jobs that had paid well in the 1960s and 1970s. In their place came low-skilled, low-paid service jobs, so cutting household incomes among working class people and also destroying the ladder for improvement through skill development and hard work. In a call centre you come and leave without having gained new skills and there is little chance for promotion. Similarly the casualisation of labour has increased with large numbers of even office workers being on short-term contracts. If they lack the skills needed when a company changes methods they are simply laid off and other workers employed. Businesses constantly whine that they want schools and universities to train workers to exactly match the skills they need; yet seem entirely unwilling to see a role for themselves in that process, again another difference from comparator countries, notably France and Germany.
Thus, through the 1980s the few opportunities for a solid base for the working class (the majority of the population) and their chances to rise up the societal ladder were pretty quickly smashed. John Major (Prime Minister 1990-7) who worked as an ordinary bank manager and rose to the highest position in the UK liked to talk of the UK's 'classless society' (for those unfamiliar with UK terminology 'class' in UK usually refers to socio-economic groupings, commonly working, middle and upper classes and sub-divisions in these; since the 1980s we have also had the 'underclass', people who are deemed to have dropped out the bottom of society and are usually homeless). In the early days of his regime Blair also spoke in the same terms, though it is notable that it did not survive his first time of office (1997-2001). It is clear that any reference to classlessness was a fantasy. Unemployment has fallen in the UK since the end of the 1980s, but the restructured economy is still very rigid in preventing people rising socially.
Why am I going on about all of this now? Well, it is because some people have been shocked by evidence that has appeared this week that brings how the reality of it. At the age of 5 the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds score far higher than the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds in terms of communication skills and other scholarly measures. By the age of 7 however, the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds exceed even the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds and from then on the poor children never catch up ever again and throughout the rest of their schooling never match less intelligent rich children. Partly this stems from the way British schooling works with the emphasis on projects and getting internet resources; the heavy encouragement to take additional classes outside of school hours and increasingly that children need to have home tutors too, all of these things are beyond my budget (and as I keep saying I earn 50% more than the average annual salary so am far from 'poor') let alone the average working class family's resources. With secondary schools being increasingly selective, when they reach 11, the poor children lose out in entrance tests to rich children who on an objective basis are less intelligent than them. Again partly this is because the tests are focused on knowledge common in the middle and upper social classes rather than the experience of the working class. It is not surprising then that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (reckoned to be the best universities in the UK) still take over 47% of their students from private schools (there are about 2000 private schools in the UK out of a total of around 30,000 schools of all kinds; primary schools tend to be much smaller so there are 22,300 of these whether state or private alone). More politicians for example have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge than any other university, so being blocked from them means you are often effectively blocked from parliament and alternative routes of the past such as coming through a trade union to being a member of parliament have been weakened as trade unions were hammered under Thatcher and have haemorraged members in an era when people are on short-term contracts and fearful of not being re-employed if they are politically active.
What has alarmed the government (and it is good to see that they are alarmed rather complacent) is that despite all the policies of the last decade under a Labour government (which coming from a Socialist background is supposed to be equality of opportunities for all) and an awareness of the need to challenge social division at least going back to the Labour governments of 1964-70, as a UK citizen it is as unlikely that your standing in society will improve during your life as it would have been 33 years ago. You could walk into a maternity ward at a hospital today and accurately predict the kind of work all the babies there will be doing in 2025 just by looking at their parents. (In fact whether you chose a state-run hospital or a private one would give you a good clue for a start). None of those babies will be able to improve on the level of income or education that their parents have.
Recently there was commentary on the novel by Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' (1932) which tends to get overlooked when referring to dystopian novels in favour of '1984' by George Orwell (1948). However, the novel shows a society driven by consumerism and in which happiness comes in the form of a pill. For this posting, though, is the fact that all children born in the UK of the novel (they are all test-tube babies) are categorised from birth into a range from Alpha to Epsilon depending on their mental abilities. That is effectively what we have in the UK today, except that an Alpha-intelligence baby from a poor family will be beaten in life by a rich Epsilon-intelligence baby. Our current dystopia is not even based on how beneficial a child can be to our society in terms of aptitude the way Huxley's was, it is far more arbitrary than that, it is simply based on who your parents are, nothing more.
If birth is the only qualification for success in the UK no wonder we are lagging behind rival countries. We effectively exclude millions of talented people from ever getting into a position to use their talents. How many people working in call centres in the UK, could instead be running successful businesses or government departments, if they had simply been born to richer parents? The UK would rather adhere to almost feudal mentalities than shake these up to benefit itself. I recognise that other industrialised countries do not have all the solutions, but if I was going to have a child I would want them to be born in one of those countries and at least feel that they could get as far as they have the ability to do so rather than being held back by the unbreakable caste system which denies them so many opportunities simply because of who I am rather than who the child is.
One key difference between the UK and neighbouring states in Europe was that the UK had neither had a revolution nor had it had suffered the upheaval of either being occupied by a foreign power or being under a dictatorship. All of these factors disrupted the societies across Europe. Ironically people from ordinary backgrounds stood more chance of advancement under a Fascist, Nazi or Communist dictatorship than they did in British democracy. Partly, as I have mentioned before, this is because the UK is not a true democracy, half of its parliament is unelected and the prime positions in the Civil Service, Government, Military and its established Church, go to people (still predominantly men) who have attended a small number of select fee-paying schools called 'Public Schools' (ironically very exclusive and certainly not public). The next layers beneath the highest in each branch of British public life are held by people who attended less exclusive and a bit cheaper private schools. The highest that a person who has gone to a free state school can rise is to something like a senior doctor in a hospital or a chief constable (i.e. in charge of all the police of one county) or a brigadier in the Army or possibly their Naval equivalent (the airforce, the RAF, is more exclusive). Given that you have to be put on the lists of these schools the moment you are born and the annual fees are far higher than the average annual salary of people living in the UK, unless you have very wealthy parents you stand no chance of getting in and thus no chance of moving into the higher levels of British society.
Now, I accept that other European states have nobility and very wealthy families, the UK is not unique in this, it also applies to countries elsewhere in the world. However, if one looks at comparator industrialised countries, there are exclusive schools, but, say for example the Grandes Ecoles in France, even the poorest, intelligent pupil can get into them. In countries without a monarch, an ordinary person can rise to be president. In addition, middle ranking people who in the UK may never rise above being a low-level lawyer or civil servant or doctor or bank worker, similarly can reach higher positions. This means there is something to aspire to and you are not ruled out of so many areas the moment you are born. The USA has also suffered from social division. It has wealthy families who are politically powerful, but again it has structures that allow people to advance, no matter what their backgrounds. Show me the black people in the UK who have attained the level of power that Colin Powell or Condaleeza Rice have obtained; this is despite black people coming to Britain for at least the last 2000 years. In public service, the military and so on, as an ordinary person you can rise in a way that you could never do in the UK.
What the UK resembles is the post-Communist states like Russia, Poland, China (which is now really only Communist in name) where influence in political circles and so access to money from the break-up of the state machinery can give you an unfair advantage. To some extent social mobility in these states for those coming up in enterprise is currently greater than such small business people struggling in the UK. Many successful British entrepreneurs come from outside the UK especially from Eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent, rather than from within Britian. That is because they can draw on resources unfettered by British constraints. In addition they have often had access to the best education that their British equivalents are denied. This is one explanation for the growing percentage of people from an Asian background working as doctors in the UK. Ordinary white and black British people simply do not have access to sufficiently high level schooling to even aspire to be doctors and the wealthy whites in Britain lack the altruistic attitudes of their Asian-background counterparts to do something as beneficial as care for people.
The sharp divisions in Britain were exacerbated in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-90) infamously said there was no society, just families and individuals. However, her policies reinforced the social divisions in the UK. She was the daughter of a grocer and had only attended grammar school (i.e. a free school, though in the upper educational category) in her youth and yet made it to be prime minister, something I doubt will be repeated in the UK in coming decades. Her obsession with property-ownership wrecked the state housing sector (which in Scotland had housed 60% of the population) and pushed people to own property or to be seen as irrelevant. The rise in house prices increased homelessness, rising the numbers of people living on the streets or temporary accommodation and also removed from many working class people affordable housing permitting them the money to spend on improvement for themselves and their children, especially in terms of education. In addition, Thatcher scrapped grants for students to attend university substituting loans instead. Working class people have less access to credit and a greater aversion to debt than people in other classes so again it closed down what had been becoming at least one way for working class people to get on through education. This was worsened anyway by budget cuts on education and pressure on local authorities who ran schools at the time to cut their expenditure too. Certain schools were encouraged to leave the local authority system and it was these elite 'grant-maintained' schools which received direct, generous government money whilst the so-called 'bog standard' schools that most children attend could only survive by not repairing buildings, by selling off playing fields and fund-raising events.
Whilst the UK, like the rest of the industrialised world was facing shifts in industrial patterns, the economic policies of Thatcher led to a very abrupt closure of manufacturing industries leading to unemployment of over 4 million people (about 16% of the working population of the time). Whilst work in manufacturing and related industries, such as fuel resources, was varied there were many skilled jobs that had paid well in the 1960s and 1970s. In their place came low-skilled, low-paid service jobs, so cutting household incomes among working class people and also destroying the ladder for improvement through skill development and hard work. In a call centre you come and leave without having gained new skills and there is little chance for promotion. Similarly the casualisation of labour has increased with large numbers of even office workers being on short-term contracts. If they lack the skills needed when a company changes methods they are simply laid off and other workers employed. Businesses constantly whine that they want schools and universities to train workers to exactly match the skills they need; yet seem entirely unwilling to see a role for themselves in that process, again another difference from comparator countries, notably France and Germany.
Thus, through the 1980s the few opportunities for a solid base for the working class (the majority of the population) and their chances to rise up the societal ladder were pretty quickly smashed. John Major (Prime Minister 1990-7) who worked as an ordinary bank manager and rose to the highest position in the UK liked to talk of the UK's 'classless society' (for those unfamiliar with UK terminology 'class' in UK usually refers to socio-economic groupings, commonly working, middle and upper classes and sub-divisions in these; since the 1980s we have also had the 'underclass', people who are deemed to have dropped out the bottom of society and are usually homeless). In the early days of his regime Blair also spoke in the same terms, though it is notable that it did not survive his first time of office (1997-2001). It is clear that any reference to classlessness was a fantasy. Unemployment has fallen in the UK since the end of the 1980s, but the restructured economy is still very rigid in preventing people rising socially.
Why am I going on about all of this now? Well, it is because some people have been shocked by evidence that has appeared this week that brings how the reality of it. At the age of 5 the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds score far higher than the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds in terms of communication skills and other scholarly measures. By the age of 7 however, the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds exceed even the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds and from then on the poor children never catch up ever again and throughout the rest of their schooling never match less intelligent rich children. Partly this stems from the way British schooling works with the emphasis on projects and getting internet resources; the heavy encouragement to take additional classes outside of school hours and increasingly that children need to have home tutors too, all of these things are beyond my budget (and as I keep saying I earn 50% more than the average annual salary so am far from 'poor') let alone the average working class family's resources. With secondary schools being increasingly selective, when they reach 11, the poor children lose out in entrance tests to rich children who on an objective basis are less intelligent than them. Again partly this is because the tests are focused on knowledge common in the middle and upper social classes rather than the experience of the working class. It is not surprising then that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (reckoned to be the best universities in the UK) still take over 47% of their students from private schools (there are about 2000 private schools in the UK out of a total of around 30,000 schools of all kinds; primary schools tend to be much smaller so there are 22,300 of these whether state or private alone). More politicians for example have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge than any other university, so being blocked from them means you are often effectively blocked from parliament and alternative routes of the past such as coming through a trade union to being a member of parliament have been weakened as trade unions were hammered under Thatcher and have haemorraged members in an era when people are on short-term contracts and fearful of not being re-employed if they are politically active.
What has alarmed the government (and it is good to see that they are alarmed rather complacent) is that despite all the policies of the last decade under a Labour government (which coming from a Socialist background is supposed to be equality of opportunities for all) and an awareness of the need to challenge social division at least going back to the Labour governments of 1964-70, as a UK citizen it is as unlikely that your standing in society will improve during your life as it would have been 33 years ago. You could walk into a maternity ward at a hospital today and accurately predict the kind of work all the babies there will be doing in 2025 just by looking at their parents. (In fact whether you chose a state-run hospital or a private one would give you a good clue for a start). None of those babies will be able to improve on the level of income or education that their parents have.
Recently there was commentary on the novel by Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' (1932) which tends to get overlooked when referring to dystopian novels in favour of '1984' by George Orwell (1948). However, the novel shows a society driven by consumerism and in which happiness comes in the form of a pill. For this posting, though, is the fact that all children born in the UK of the novel (they are all test-tube babies) are categorised from birth into a range from Alpha to Epsilon depending on their mental abilities. That is effectively what we have in the UK today, except that an Alpha-intelligence baby from a poor family will be beaten in life by a rich Epsilon-intelligence baby. Our current dystopia is not even based on how beneficial a child can be to our society in terms of aptitude the way Huxley's was, it is far more arbitrary than that, it is simply based on who your parents are, nothing more.
Finally I have come to understand why in my teenage years my father encouraged me so strongly to emigrate. By then it was too late I was infected with the British fear of the unknown and instead shackled myself to a society in which I can never have any better standing than my father did. In fact in terms of income, adjusting for inflation, I earn much less than he did when he was my age.
If birth is the only qualification for success in the UK no wonder we are lagging behind rival countries. We effectively exclude millions of talented people from ever getting into a position to use their talents. How many people working in call centres in the UK, could instead be running successful businesses or government departments, if they had simply been born to richer parents? The UK would rather adhere to almost feudal mentalities than shake these up to benefit itself. I recognise that other industrialised countries do not have all the solutions, but if I was going to have a child I would want them to be born in one of those countries and at least feel that they could get as far as they have the ability to do so rather than being held back by the unbreakable caste system which denies them so many opportunities simply because of who I am rather than who the child is.
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