Why Technology Cannot Entirely Replace Times Tables

The other day I was listening to a high ranking technologist asking why 7-8 year old children were expected to learn times tables by rote. From what I hear most of his audience disagreed with him. His argument was that everyone carries technology now that allows them to do multiplication, so why should anyone bother to learn to do it in their head or on a piece of paper. He argued that only people who needed this skill should learn it later as young adults. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but my mobile phone nor the camera I habitually carry has the ability to multiply. However, with the majority of even 5-year old children now carrying mobiles, many of which are smartphones, one could see his point. Yet, he has utterly missed other significant elements about why it is so important to have these basic skills. Just because they can be done by a machine does not mean that they should.

I have worked in warehouses and was able to unload pallets of boxes quickly because I knew precisely how many boxes there were on a pallet. The number on pallets varied depending on the size of the box and the heaviness of the contents and if a box or two was missing. However, I would stand there as see a pallet with five boxes down each side and stacked five high and know that there were 125 on it. If the next pallet was stacked four high, it had 100 and so on.  I knew that a stack with 5 x 5 x 5 boxes had more in it that one which was 4 x 5 x 6 boxes despite how it might appear on first impressions ('but it's stacked higher!').  Of course, there was not an infinite variety and you tended to get set quantities but my mental arithmetic was there to work out if anomalies came up. I could also work out on a piece of cardboard with a pen how much I would earn if I did overtime and how much tax I would pay on that. Yes, I could have pulled out a phone and typed in the numbers, but you try operating even a large mobile phone while wearing working gloves.

Anyone who is a parent of school aged children will know that multiplication has changed. When the boy who used to live in my house started primary school his mother and anyone else in earshot was told not to help him with multiplication because we would do it 'wrongly'. Parents were pointed to a government website to show them the right way. The method now used is 'repeated adding'. In other words if you want to work out 4 x 3, you add up 3+3+3+3. This might be fine when you are doing basic sums, but once you reach 12 times something let alone 20 times something, then you begin to see its drawbacks. The said boy is now in Year 8, i.e. 12+ and has to do the square root of decimal numbers. Try doing that with the 'repeated adding' approach! I had to teach him long multiplication because the teachers had left him without the mental equipment to do the sums. At this stage he is not supposed to use a calculator, but I imagine most children do. The thing is, mathematics is compulsory for children up to Year 11, i.e. 16, so if he does not have the tools to deal with the sums in this year, how is he going to do it over the next three?

Like the speaker, you might argue, well it is no problem, the boy simply types it into the calculator. However, you need to know what to put into the calculator. The square root of a decimal number is always larger than the number itself. However, if you have no idea of the multiplication of fractions or decimals, you are going to struggle to know what to put in. Such calculations need a lot of estimation so if you cannot get into the 'ballpark' of the answer, you are going to spend a long time with guessing. The child is a quarter of my age but saddled with the repeated adding approach I can constantly beat him in how quickly I can calculate. It should be the other way around. You need some grasp of the mathematical concepts behind the calculations you want to make otherwise you cannot be certain if you are entering the correct data. How do you know what numbers to put in for calculating the area of a circle, which you may have to do when, for example, siting a toilet or a dustbin, if you do know that the formula is πr2 (i.e. r x r; I cannot show a superscript for squared on this system).
I use mental arithmetic on a daily basis, even without thinking.  Most often this is when I am driving.  Yes, I could switch on the sat nav and have it tell me my journey time, but on the daily commute this seems pointless.  Thus, constantly I am seeing my speed and working out how much time is left given the distance.  I also work out if I have time to stop for petrol - how much that will reduce my average speed and my overall journey time.  I might also consider an alternate route and how the extra distance has to balance against the speed I am doing on the current route - something too few people balance up hence speeding through 'rat runs' when they realise the 'short cuts' are not actually saving them time.  Maybe I think about my driving too much, but among the millions of motorists I cannot be alone.  I would feel pretty powerless if I did not have a grasp of time, distance and speed as I travelled along.

Thinking more broadly, the speaker may have lauded the internet for providing what everyone needs to know.  That may be the case in his subject area, however it is not in mine.  Despite common assumptions, the amount of information on the internet on many subjects is very limited and very repetitive.  I have written on numerous occasions about the boundaries of the internet when it comes to historical knowledge.  You can soon end up reading exactly the same information again and again, with nothing new being added, even if you have the ability to hop over to websites in other languages.  Wikipedia's encouragement of using translations to flesh out entries, simply adds to that as it is the source of so much material that is used by other websites.  You also run up quickly against bias whether political, racial or religious.  I have spoken about how comment on Muslim universities in Europe has been purged and the Wikipedia entry on universities spends more time in ruling Muslim and Orthodox Christian institutions out of the definition than it does actually speaking about what a university is.  Another example, everything on Mormons appears to have been edited by pro-Mormon writers, especially playing down the hostility to polygamy in the USA of the mid-19th century and especially the number of pioneers killed by Mormon forces.  This happens so much, that actually it made me more suspicious of the Mormons than I would otherwise have been.

The internet is far from perfect.  A lot of the information on it is erroneous and shaped by people with an agenda which has little to do with putting up objective facts.  It is a hostile environment.  I have spoken before how even reviews of a First World War poem attracted more ill-informed commentary that wrecked any chance of an interesting or informative discussion about it; drawing parallels to any other conflict was ruled out and it was even questioned whether it was a First World War poem given that it had been written after the war.  The danger of errors creeping into computerised teaching systems was parodied as early as 1967 in the television series 'The Prisoner' which featured such a system called Speed Learn, but which included an error about historical dates.  Too often the internet, primarily Wikipedia has become the 'right' answer even when it is actually wrong.  It would be wrong to see the internet as decreasing human knowledge, that is not at all the case, but what it does accentuate is populist views and often particular groups' agendas, over broader discovery of knowledge.  If a time comes when it cannot be countered by other sources, then there could be argued to be a decline in knowledge.

There are practical reasons why it is a mistake to promote an over-dependence on electronic devices.  As you will have witnessed yourself, many people go to pieces when they have their mobile phone stolen or lost.  They have no idea where they should be or what they should be doing; most importantly, especially for young people, they have no idea what they should be thinking.  You will see everywhere 'phubbing', i.e. two or more people sitting or walking together and yet not talking, rather all their discussions are going on with other people not present via their phones.  To deprive them of their phones is like snatching their souls away; literally you will see them with as much distress as if a favoured pet had been lost not a machine.  Despite such dependence, in recent weeks it has been highlighted how short battery life is becoming for smartphones.  With connectivity constantly on and so many apps running, the average life is a single working day, whereas a few years ago you could expect a phone to run for a week between charges.  I imagine in time battery life will increase but at present the number of things you 'have to' be doing via your phone is increasing faster than the power storage necessary to permit that.  How can you guarantee that the moment you need to do some multiplication your battery will not be dead?

The final reason why I would argue it is foolish to simply allow people to use machines to do their multiplications for them, is because the brain needs exercise.  Constantly we are advised that to avoid the onset of Alzheimer's people need to keep working at mental challenges.  As with the rest of the body, the brain can become 'flabby' if it is not exercised.  To rely on a machine to do calculations which should be typically part of every day business, certainly if simply going shopping or how many potatoes each person in your family should get or whether you need to buy toilet roll before the weekend or will run out of petrol before you get to work or will get a better deal on one mobile phone tariff compared to another.  Yes, we do have machines that can do times tables, but as with learning about personal hygiene, manners, eating well and exercise, these are things we need to instill into children otherwise they and society will suffer as a result.

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?

Public Sector Staff Cuts: Impact on the Ground

We have been told by the coalition government that in tackling its key objective of reducing the UK's deficit the whole public sector, bar the National Health Service and international development, but including the Armed Forces, will face a minimum of 25% cuts in staffing and perhaps as high as 40% in the next five years.  Before I proceed, if you are interested in where I get my figures from see: http://www.civilservant.org.uk/numbers.pdf  and the reports from the Local Government Association (LGA): http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/aio/5826934 and http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/aio/11637001 

I noted in a recent posting the size of different sections of the UK public sector.  It employs a little over 4.5 million people, only 16% of the UK workforce.  The thing is, when you speak about 1.1 million people losing their jobs by the end of 2015, it is difficult to comprehend what that will mean to you.  Of course, we could simply put every teacher and every social worker in the UK out of work and that would still only have removed about 490,000 people from the public sector.  There are 225,000 administrative civil servants, people working on the kind of grade that you meet if you go into a job centre or your local tax office.  In fact the Department of Work and Pensions and HM Revenue & Customs (which handles tax) take up 49.5% of national civil servants between them.  Defence has a further 15.8% and 'Justice' has 17.1%.  As it is, even if you took out every single administrative civil servant working for all national department (as opposed to local government departments) and added these to all the teachers and social workers, you would still be at only 615,000 and would be looking for another around 500,000 people to lay off.  This means you could also remove all of the 217,500 executive grade civil servants, so the people who manage your job centre or benefit office or are the actual tax inspectors and still would need another 280,000 redundancies.

Of course, the government will not expect the full weight of cuts to come from the national civil service, but also from local authority bodies too.  There are 34,400 people working in libraries in the UK, many part-time.  So you could close every single public library in the UK without making more than a minimal impact on the figure the government is aiming for.  Of course, selling off the books, computers, buildings and the land would help a little towards the deficit.  Getting rid of all of the 5,800 trading standards officers, all 38,000 housing welfare officers, all 8,000 school crossing patrol staff, all 15,000 nursery school nurses and 9,000 playgroup leaders, all 36,000 people working in refuse collection and recycling, every one of the 11,800 people who work in public theatres, galleries and museums, all of the 66,700 people who work in every public swimming pool and leisure centre, so closing all of these things down, still does not take us to the desired total.  Yet, even wiping out all of these jobs will mean no refuse collection, no sports or cultural facilities, no state schools, no social workers, no playgroups that are not in private, profit-making hands.  The government says these positions will be taken over by the private sector, so you will have to pay to have your refuse removed and to sign up to a private sports centre if you want to swim.  As for social work who is supposed to take this on?  The new poor houses?  I know back in the 1980s there was talk of 'Victorian values' but purging the public sector of so many jobs will plunge us back into that kind of society.

Of course, rather than take out whole sectors, national departments and the local authorities will carve chunks off individual sections and will hope the remaining staff can continue to deliver as good a service as before.  There is a belief that there is so inefficiency in the public sector that the remaining 75% staff will be able to increase their efforts by a third (not a quarter, think about it; 25% is a third of 75%) to lift their output back to just 100% of the current level.  As it is, there is a shortage of social workers and we have had extensive recruitment campaigns, now we are scheduled to lose a quarter of those we currently have.  Of course, there will be more children dying unprotected by social workers.  They are stretched now, it will get worse.  Of course, in the government's view this is a worthwhile sacrifice to pay back the loan that kept the wealthy bankers afloat.  Another thing, with all these teachers, social workers and librarians being out of work, who is going to process their unemployment claims and benefits with job centres having lost 1 in 4 of their staff?

Big numbers of thousands and millions of people are often difficult to assess, so I will finish off looking at a human-level example.  There is a primary school at the end of my road.  It is a very popular school, so for the 60 places each year there are at least 90 applicants.  It covers the school years from Reception (i.e. Year 0, though given the connotations of that name it is not called that) for children 4+ through Years 1-6 with children leaving aged 11-12.  There are two classes, each of 30 pupils, in each year so it has a total of 420 pupils.  Each class has at least one teacher and classroom assistant usually to help children with learning difficulties.  Some classes have two part-time teachers.  There is also the deputy-head and head, the former also does some teaching.   There is one caretaker for two sites and about six administrators.  So, I estimate about 45 staff for the whole school.  Now, remove a quarter of these, say, 11 staff.  You could remove most of the 14 classroom assistants.  You could take out all the teachers for years 0-4 and one from Year 5.  You certainly could close down the Reception year and take children at 5 as was the case when I started, but then how do you reach the government targets for children's achievement.  You could combine the classes, but that is not permitted and no school has room to have 60 children in a class.  You could only accept 30 children, but then where do the remainder go, given that every other school in the district will be facing similar cuts?  We are lucky that this is not a rural area and there is a choice of schools.  I suppose the government would argue that you could shave more staff from local authority running of schools, but it seems impossible that that could spare every teacher.  Even taking out just 5 staff from a school of this size would disrupt its working; teachers will have to do their own administration as well as teach and prepare and mark.

Of course, these grass roots challenges, as this single example makes clear, are of absolutely no personal interest to government ministers, their children go to fee-paying schools so will be exempt from any cut backs.  This means that ordinary children in the UK who coming through the school system in 2011-15 will be in more crowded classrooms with fewer teachers and poorer equipment will be further disadvantaged than they are now.  The number of working class people going to university has not risen since 2002 and adult learning has slumped since the mid-2000s.  The coalition government's policies seem to be driving yet another step towards Victorian style division in which the rich can afford to benefit from opportunities and the rest of us have to scrabble around for what we and our children can get.  This is far more sinister than it is being portrayed in the media.  People still talk of the blight for the generation that grew up in the 1980s in Britain and it is clear that such a disadvantage is going to be imposed on the children and others of the 2010s.

The Mutation of the English Language

Note that this post is not called the mutilation of the English language. As it is, English comes in quite a few varieties and even back in the 1990s I started seeing 'American' phrasebooks, so titled, in use in France and Germany. Having worked with South Africans over the past few years, I have seen the intricacies of an English with both British and American input. Though they number the floors the way the British do, i.e. ground floor as opposed to first floor being the lowest, they refer to 'pants' to mean trousers rather than underpants. Of course they mix in some of their own like 'conscionise' which I have heard nowhere else, unlike either the British or Americans they measure distance in kilometres and as for 'stay' and 'live' as in 'where are you staying/living?' the meaning is exactly reverse of what it is in Britain. The Americans had the input of Noah Webster (1758-1843) who through his 'An American Dictionary of the English Language' (1828) moved to USA to spelling harbour as 'harbor' and so on. There are differences in grammar too, for example, in the USA you 'write your father' whereas in Britain you 'write to your father'. In American the 'building is named for Abraham Lincoln' whereas in Britain the 'building is named after Abraham Lincoln' and so on. The Americans still have a Simplfied Spelling Society: http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j9/american.php with some sensible suggestions for easing the confusion in the English language further.


Having a seven year old living in my house I know how mad the English language can appear to newcomers. Just this morning there was a mix up over 'paws', 'pores' and 'pause', which in the dialect (middle class, southern England English) I speak, are all pronounced the same. Given that English is the second most spoken language in the world, it seems mad that we had adhered to all the complexities of this language and not made it a bit easier not just for foreigners but also for our own children. A lot of it comes out of the way English sounds, setting aside dialects, even in plain English you can 'fear', 'pier', 'weir', 'here', 'cheer', 'kir', 'Kia' all rhyme, whereas, for example 'schliessen' could never rhyme with 'schreiben' and most languages are the same.

The problem for the English is that they had too many inputs. We had the roots of what became Danish and Swedish, German and Dutch as well as French and Latin input too, and mixed in words from Hindi such as jodphur and bungalow. You could argue that this makes the language dynamic and so easier to use in the modern world. This can be compared with the challenges of say, the Vatican and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in finding Latin words to describe modern technology, or more often, those who oversee the Welsh language to create vocabulary for such innovations without simply taking the English word and pronouncing it in a slightly different way or altering the letters. The Welsh word for Pakistani is Pakistanii; the Welsh word for tyre (tire in American) is teiar, which in my view is pronounced the same. However, it means that to learn English you have to learn loads of exceptions and it has recently been declared that there is no point in learning spelling rules for English because there is so much variety.


Anyway, whatever learned scholars and politicians might suggest about altering English, it is changing while we sit here arguing. A lot of this stems for technology. Playing online games, as I have commented before, writing the way I do here, I use a very different language to that of many others. 'Lol' seems to have become a word now (steming from Laugh Out Loud) and there are less common ones like IMHO (In My Humble Opinion which sounds likes Dickensesque language brought into the 21st century). Of course this stems from speeding up the transmission of messages when texting or typing. Some are simple contractions, such as 'soz' for 'sorry' and 'luv' which is an old contraction from way back. I find the adoption of 'u' for 'you' interesting as u is the Dutch word for you and for a few shifts in history we could be using that. Such contractions even begin to evolve their own grammar, so 'ur' stems from 'you' and means 'your', as in the Pink album title, 'U + Ur Hand'. Of course not all texting is about words and even the oldest mobile phone users will recognise :-) and many ;-) though XD might be more of a challenge. So, for many, symbols are now mixed in with words, taking us back to a semi-hieroglyphic form of English.


Young people have always sought to use slang and even code languages both to mark them out from parents and to have a sense of belonging with others in their peer group. Pig Latin, is probably the most enduring one, but there are thousands of local varieties. Such a language was an element in an episode of 'Wallander', the Swedish detective series, I was watching recently, giving a little challenge to the subtitler. However, I believe that the current mutation of the English spoken in Britain is going deeper than that. In some ways it is based on social class with adult working class people adopting the text speak that middle class adults leave to their children. We are not at the stage of Imperial Russia in which the nobles spoke French and only the peasants Russian, but you can mark yourself out in British society by the language you use. Of course, this has always been a form of segregation. My father always quoted sayings about how an Englishman defines himself by the way he speaks. There is RP - Received Pronunciation, the upper class, South-East England accent which for decades was all that was permitted to be heard on British broadcasts. In more democratic times things have shifted and a few years back it was noted how even the Queen had moved towards so-called 'Estuary English', stemming from the cadences of Essex, where the estuary of the River Thames is located.


Having spoken to a woman back in the mid-1990s who was researching the impact of Arabic on French used in urban France, it is noticeable that British English is not mutating that way. We seem to have had our influx of Hindi words more than a century ago and there is no flow now of Urdu or Arabic or Polish phrases, perhaps because Britain has always had such a diversity of immigrants and not concentrated from a particular region as happens in France due to its intimate connection with North Africa. However, in the UK in our changing language we are now moving beyond pronunciation to grammar shifts. These seem prompted not just by simplification of the language for ease of use in speech and technology, but because errors are beginning to stick and become what is now seen as the proper approach.


One that has been developing now for quite a while, is 'I could of won the match if I had tried harder'. In this sentence it should be 'I could have won ...' with have defining the tense and the emphasis of the verb. This has come about simply because of and have, let alone 'ave sound so similar that people mixe them up. Now they write that way. The sense is not really lost but there is no way to explain why you would use 'of' at all in the sentence. Less tortuous, but perhaps bizarre is the appearance of what was once called the 'grocers' apostrophe'. The fact that could have been 'grocers apostrophe' or 'grocer's apostrophe' begins to show some of the difficulty. I was told at school that in Tudor times a man would write: 'Henry Brown, his book' and over time this evolved into 'Henry Brown's book' with the apostrophe after Brown showing the dropping of the 'hi' from his. I am sceptical of this explanation partly because I learnt German and in their possessive cases they often have -s on the end of a possessive noun or adjective. It also does not explain why it never became 'Elizabeth Tudor'r book' for women. I can understand that over time, to speed things up, people would drop the apostrophe and say 'Henry Browns book', but whilst this has happened in many cases of popular usage, the application of the apostrophe has now been added to plurals instead. This brings us back to the grocers, because it was first seen in signs advertising egg's, cheese's, cauliflower's and so on. In some cases, notably, potato's or tomato's it could be acceptable to point to the missing 'e' though that was not the intention. I realised that this unneccessary use of apostrophes in plurals had come into mainstream usage in 1998 when, in the Cabinet Office, in London I came across a report on the work of different government departments. It was a very glossy publication which would have cost you £50 if you had chosen to buy it and there I saw such apostropheed plurals. If it was being used at the highest government level then the rest of us need to get in line. The clearest swap has come in the anomaly that is it's and its. Its is like his and hers, it is a possessive pronoun, but of course, in the past people expected possessives to be made with a 's as in Henry's book. So, it was very common for them to use it's instead. However, it's is in fact a contraction of 'it is', with the apostrophe showing where the 'i' once was. With the disappearance of apostrophes to show missing letters and didnt, cant, etc. becoming words in their own right the switch of its and it's is now complete.


The problem, of course, is in contrast to France and Germany where the government and its appointed bodies make declarations on language usage, whether you can have three 's' in the middle of a German word and how much music should be sung in French on the radio no-one in Britain makes any ruling. This is where the key problem, confusion. If I read 'the girl's coughing' now, is it about the coughing of one girl; a joint activity by a number of girls or is it about the very immediate occurrence, i.e. 'the girl is coughing' with the 'i' simply dropped rather than something more continuous? Of course, a lot of language is contextual and that is possibly why the class issue creeps in. When working at a warehouse a man once told me, in a calm tone, that he was going to 'fucking fuck that fuck' which meant he was going to unload his lorry. Of course, that phrase in anger might have meant he was going to beat up someone or he was going to win a race or a score of other issues. However, standing by the lorry he had driven in, the context made more or less it clear, though still he might have set off to beat up someone who had cut him up or something and used the same phrase. Communication, though is not about the instance, it is about a broader usage. While we may use it to emphasise the exclusivity of our group, it is actually more vital in allowing us to get comprehension from those beyond our own group. While we get by day-to-day, there must be thousands of cases when clarity was needed and instead there was confusion. I am not saying we should or can stop English evolving, but once in a while we need someone to clarify what is the baseline. I never liked American spelling, but I now feel that simplifying English, especially now that so much of it is taught through phonics rather than visually, could only help not just newcomers to the language but us who have been using it for decades and want to ensure we are understood and can understand what is being written to us. In addition, there may be other benefits, because it is often argued that the British are so poor with other languages because they find their own one so difficult.


P.P. 24/07/2009: One thing I neglected to mention is the disappearance of silent letters from writing English. To some extent, I suppose this is overdue, the most common examples I have seen recently are 'wich' rather than 'which' and 'wat' in the place of 'what'. Of course 'wot' for 'what' has been a common element of the grafittier's vocabulary for many decades, but 'wat' seems a bit more elegant and has the example of Wat Tyler, though in this case it seems to be a variant, perhaps a contraction of Walter and ironically means 'commander of the army', so in fact in the context of Wat Tyler (1341-81; full name Walter) a leader of the Peasants' Revolt of England in 1381, it might have been a title rather than his real name.

Ranking People's Religious Faith

Britain has a long history of pressuring people to behave in a certain way in terms of religion, from the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 until 1656. Fines were introduced in 1559 for anyone who failed to attend church. Until 1793 Catholics were not allowed to vote in Britain and until 1829 could not become members of parliament; a Catholic still cannot become monarch in Britain. Up until 1689 Nonconformists, i.e. Protestants outside the Church of England, could not worship in their own buildings. In the 1944 Education Act the only compulsory subject in British schools was Religious Education and that did not change until the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988.

Now the main area in which we are seeing the segregation of the population in the UK of the 2000s is in terms of education and this stems from the rapid growth of faith schools since Tony Blair first came to power in 1997. Blair had a personal interest in expanding faith schools and he found support among middle class parents who favour segregation in schooling. In the UK faith schools almost died out in 1904 when they ran out of money and it was only state intervention then that allowed any to survive and from this basis to expand rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. It is correct that all faiths in the UK have the same rights in this field and that the Church of England (4,646 schools in 2006) and the Catholic Church (2,041) no longer have the ability to create faith alone and that Jewish (37), Muslim (8), Hindu (0) and Sikh (2) schools are appearing. However, there are tensions that the increase of faith schools are provoking. The issue for non-Christian schools has been generally on the curriculum and ensuring that it covers what is now expected to be taught in terms of 'citizenship' in the UK. In terms of the Christian schools the biggest issue is admissions.

It soon became apparent to the Christian churches that with the increase in faith schools they had gained a powerful tool. Middle class parents want schools which have selective admissions and faith schools generally are selective. In theory this is on the basis of faith, but as some religious families with children with special needs have learned, that faith is not always enough. There is also a tendency in the UK for certain classes of people to adhere to certain denominations of church and the Church of England congregation is far more middle class in make-up than say the Baptist congregation. British education since the late 1980s has been increasingly divided, the government website on types of schools lists the following types, just in the state sector: Mainstream state schools, Community schools, Foundation schools, Trust schools, Voluntary-aided schools (which includes some faith schools), Voluntary-controlled schools, Specialist schools, Academies, City Technology Colleges, Faith schools, Grammar schools and Maintained boarding schools. In addition their are privately run schools.

By increasing faith schools you have increased the schools which have selective entrance. All schools with selective entrance achieve higher grades and this is something that all parents want. Thus, we have got into the situation in which parents may emphasise their (or adopt a) religion in order to get their child into a local faith school. This has been stimulated by the neglect of the mainstream state schools which have lost out as funds have flown towards all these other types of schools. If most comprehensive schools were better funded then there would be less pressure on these other schools and all that has followed in its wake.

Given the rise in demand the churches have realised they can pressure parents to behave in a more religious manner. This has led to registers being kept at services to make sure that parents are turning up, the implied threat being that if they fail to do so, their child will be removed from the school. There has been very vocal criticism of parents 'faking' their faith in order to get a child into a school and you see clergymen on the television berating parents who do this. However, this approach shows how debased how much of the Church of England and Catholic Church has become in the UK. Unable to win congregations by their arguments or relevance to the modern world, they are now using selective education as both the carrot and the stick to press people into attending church. In addition it is not just any church, but particular parish churches. This has been going on now for almost twenty years. I witnessed it in the town where my parents live where a particular church which sat next to a mainstream comprehensive school over the years filled the board of governors with its members until the time came when they had a majority to suddenly change the school into a faith school, with the priority not simply given to Church of England members but to the parishoners of the particular church. Anyone not a Christian or not attending that particular church suddenly found their child could no longer attend the school. In my home town there are three Church of England churches within walking distance of each other and yet only one is tied to a school which it is in fact not very close to. This church as yet has not started keeping registers, but if it did, you can imagine the impact on attendance at the other two churches. This is not healthy for the community or the Church of England itself.

I do not usually put much store by what David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, says but I did appreciate it when in January 2008 he said he could entirely appreciate parents wanting their best for their children and so 'faking' their faith if that meant gaining access to a particular school. The thing is, in the light of such behaviour, some churches are going even further. The BBC highlighted this week how they are not simply expecting attendance at church services , but if parents do not arrange the flowers in the church or do a reading or take a Sunday school sessioon they are deemed 'not religious enough' with the penalty of their child being excluded from the school. This is madness. There are not enough jobs in a church to allow all parents to do them anyway. Christianity in the past century has not attempted to measure the level of commitment, generally participation has been sufficient, but clearly church zealots are pushing it further. This leads to terrible intolerance. They will not accept parishoners from other districts so are they any less religious? It is not only 'be an Anglican', but 'be an Anglican who attends St. X Church and who reads every Sunday'.

What about children who have parents who are from different denominations? Under such rules they may have one Anglican and one Catholic parent (just like the Tony and Cherie Blair) and be barred from attending either faith school. In addition, there is an all too easy assumption that the faith and level of faith of the parents will be exactly reflected in the child. In my house the 7-year old is the most strongly Christian person in the house in practice as well as thought.

As the Runnymede Trust report this week highlighted, faith schools and their associated churches are leading the way in breeding intolerance and division in our society. Their policies are getting harsher and they are not addressing the fact that people can even follow their faith but without the exact details being required and so are being shut off from the best school in an area. What does that say about the churches involved? There is no 'suffer little children to come unto me', there is 'suffer little children to come unto me, only if their parents are of the same denomination, come every Sunday to this particular church and are involved in a range of duties'. An elitist system is being created. Like Hitler who said 'I decide who is a Jew' many Anglican and Catholic churches are sifting among even the faithful and deciding who is 'worthy' to be permitted into their schools. This may seem like access into Heaven, but if you consider it it is hardly Christian. This whole issue shows the return of religious intolerance on an amazingly parochial basis unmatched in centuries.

British education is in a ridiculous mess. Comprehensive education has effectively been replaced by selective education which cuts off so many people from achieving all that they can. Selection needs to be challenged. I would ban all faith schools as done in France and say that religion stays in the church/chapel/meeting house/synagogue/mosque/temple and education focuses on bringing out the best in all children with an awareness of how humans should behave. To cajole people into attending church and behaving in a particular way in order to win the prize of a decent (not even an excellent) education for their children is too reminiscent of the churches of the 15th century rather than the 21st century. It causes division within denominations even within single towns and particular districts and that is not healthy for any religion.

John Prescott and Class

As I have commented before, I have thought that John Prescott received an unfair condemnation as a politician. I do not think he is the best politician the UK ever had and his support for Tony Blair especially over the war in Iraq angered me. However, his abilities and in particular his analysis of the UK political scene I think have been under-rated. Due to his physical stature, his accent, his behaviour that is like many ordinary men of his age and background, people have assumed that means he lacked knowledge and skill. However, even if incompetents rise to the top of various political systems he would not have been able to hold his position as deputy prime minister for ten years if he lacked ability; Blair removed even close allies if they blundered. Throughout his term as prime minister, Blair was almost untouchable for the media, so Prescott took some of this flack. In addition, Prescott's ordinary nature, his moments of temper made him an easier target. However, interestingly things that he was ridiculed for, such as bus lanes on motorways, actually worked. Of course in the UK as elsewhere bringing in a successful policy is less important than winning the approval of the media and thus the public. A key challenge for the media, of course, was that right throughout the period of rule by the Blair party (1997-2008) Prescott was seen as the embodiment of the Labour Party that had gone before. He complied with Blairist policies but there was always a suspicion from the right-wing media that he Prescott would contaminate the policies that they (and their constituency of the wealthy and the nationalistic) were enjoying so much with something that had more reference to the needs of the broader British community.

Prescott was the embodiment of man who had got on. In some ways he should have been the symbol of the input the Labour Part had made to the UK in the last 60 years. His grandfather was a coal miner, his father was a railwayman, having failed the 11-plus exam (which separated children at 11 into different types of schools and curricula) he worked as a ship's steward and yet ended his career as deputy prime minister. This says a great deal about increased opportunities and how education can help you get on. Someone coming from that kind of background today would find it far harder to progress than Prescott did through the more liberal times of the 1960s and 1970s. Ironically the Blair Party's policies have shut off so many routes that Prescott's equivalents in the 2000s could have come through.

Now, on 27th October 2008, Prescott presented a programme on BBC2 (you can still watch it on the BBC iplayer) called 'The Class System and Me'. Social class is a big issue in the UK. Despite rhetoric about the classless society in the UK since the mid-1990s in fact it is incredibly difficult to break away from the class you are born into in the UK and to be something of higher status than your parents. My father came from a working class background and moved into the technical lower middle class ranks. He could now be counted as middle class, as a property owner with investments. I attended university the first (and last) in the whole of my extended family to do so. Yet, rather than rising to a class higher than my father I am busily sliding down, pushed around by landlords, having few items that I own and with the casualisation of labour, having no career structure. I am back down to lower middle class and anticipate that by the time I retire will actually be worse off than my grandfather (who actually owned a house for many decades) floating down in the unskilled working class, certainly in terms of my income and what I own and the shops I frequent, if not in terms of the culture I put myself in.

Prescott saw himself as having risen from the working class into the middle class. That is a good thing. It is easier on you living a middle class life than a working class one (even easier if you are living an upper class life) so much more is done for you. It is unsurprising that Prescott enjoyed having the large cars that came with his job. Only those who had been used to driving themselves around in small, old cars or going by public transport truly relish having a car at your command. Prescott was ridiculed as 'two Jags' (as in Jaguar cars) but actually I would be more alarmed at someone who did not relish that opportunity and saw it as something normal. Prescott received criticism in 'The Guardian' newspaper for his programme on class. Having risen through the classes it is naturally a topic that interests him, added to this he comes from a political party that was founded on a class basis. It was suggested that he was somehow now only learning the 'ropes' of being in a higher class and that he should have known that before he became deputy prime minister. That utterly missed the point. It assumes somehow that middle and upper class behaviour is somehow more correct and more valid than behaviour of people in other classes. Of course that is not the case, though society insists that it is. In addition, whenever Prescott indulged in upper class behaviour, notably when he tried out the game of croquet, he was mocked for apeing his 'betters'. In the USA black politicians and business people (probably far less now since Obama) were often ridiculed for behaving like successful whites, and yet if they did not then they would always be seen as behaving 'wrongly'. This is the 'lose-lose' situation that social elites set up to keep capable people out of their ranks. In their view you must assimilate yourself into their modes of behaviour and so adopt all the assumptions and values that come with them, or you are invalid. However, some people, whether they are black or from a working class background will always be seen as invalid and so their attempts to assimilate or be assimilated are simply ridiculed and the British media was wonderful at doing that kind of social policing on Prescott on behalf of the elites who both feared and despised him. It is interesting to see the comments written on the BBC messageboards, some suggesting that it is wrong to see Prescott as having become middle class as even though he has middle class trappings, they argue, he will never be middle class, only his grandchildren could reach that ranking!

Prescott is not the first Labour politician to be in that position. We can see parallels to Ernest Bevin, a leading trade unionist and Labour Foreign Secretary 1945-51 who was in a similar position vis-a-vis the upper classes. Of course the progress of such men in British politics is portrayed by the upper class as demonstrating that we have an egalitarian society. As Lord Onslow noted to Prescott, there had not been an Onslow in the Cabinet since 1870. What Onslow of course conceals is that actually he probably wields far greater power outside the government than part of it. These days so much government policy is channelled by what the rich and the upper classes will tolerate. They were given their greatest burst of freedom by the Thatcher regime and no-one is really in a position to limit that. The policy arena in which Prescott operated had parameters set by Onslow and his kind, nothing could stretch beyond these. In fact all Labour governments in British history have run up against these parameters set up by the upper classes, but over the decades the arena for policy has been increasingly narrowed. People like Onslow, show, how effective the propaganda machine of the upper classes is, in making so many people believe that any reference to privilege, class structure and lack of social mobility is somehow 'outdate' especially since the collapse of Communist regimes in the 1980s. It might be portrayed in that way, but in fact the upper class and super-rich have far more grip on British society and have clamped down on social mobility in a way that they have not been able to do to this extent since 1945.

One aspect of Prescott's programme which received particular attention was his reference to private schools. As regular readers will know their privileges and their distortion of opportunities in education, especially access to leading universities, is something I have long bemoaned. Prescott was right on target when he noted that private schools uphold many of the elements of the British class system. I will add that you can see this in sharp contrast to France with its post-revolutionary society in which anyone who has the ability can attend a Grand Ecole, whereas in Britain only a tiny fraction of society, the most privileged will ever get into the so-called 'public schools' (the elite private schools) and from people from these ranks are heavily over-represented in senior political, legal, religious, civil service, military positions not because they are of greater ability but because they have the right connections. Prescott acknowledged that the parents of the 7% of children who go to private schools were seeking to buy their children the best opportunity in life and he did not begrudge them doing that. He did, however, note what that signals to the 93% of children whose parents cannot afford to send them to these schools.

Prescott wants the break down of the sharp divide in British education. It is ironic that the Blair government actually sought to increase division in education by further segregating the schools that 93% of children go to into faith schools, grammar schools, specialist academies, etc. so exacerbating the shutting off from access to good schooling to even groups of children who are in this 93%. Of course Prescott was attacked for being 'out-of-date', an unreformed class warrior and seeking to 'punish the successful'. They also said that a quarter of pupils come from areas of below average income. Well, in the UK in a single street you can have a wide range of wealth, you can see it all over London, so I would not put much store by that point. In addition these schools are successul because they are not constrained by the factors that ordinary, state schools face in terms of pupil numbers, constant monitoring and a sustained shortage of funds. If state schools each received as much money as the average or even poor private school, you would see immediate improvement. Of course people do not want to pay the taxes to provide that and parents who send their children to private schools have the gall to say they should be exempt from part of their tax bill as they do not use the state system (yes, but all your British teachers were trained by it).

Prescott argues that the only way to begin to erode the sharp class divides in the UK, which are detrimental to social harmony and its economic success, is to break down such divides and invest heavily in state education. To say that Prescott's views are outdated is utterly wrong. In fact given how social division is increasing in the UK and social mobility reducing rapidly, his points are even more relevant today than they were in the past. If we are going to have a better society in the UK in the future in fact we need many more class warriors like Prescott, all strength to him!

P.P. - 12/02/2009: I was pleased to see that he was behind a 13,000-signature petition to try to get the government to block banks that have been bailed out granting their employees huge bonuses. A good step, keep it up John.

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.