Sent From Home At 8 Years Old: How Boarding Schools Screw Up Britain

It has always struck me as odd that local authorities and children's homes battle so hard to find adoptive parents or at least foster parents for the children in their care, 'in care' as the phrase goes and yet wealthy parents are permitted to send their children away from home to boarding schools which pretty much resemble children's homes of the past.  It is argued that children need solid families to permit them to grow up as balanced individuals and less likely to fall into crime, mental health and a whole range of problems that impinge on UK society.  However, the rules for the privileged seem to be very different and they are allowed to put their children into a context which severely damages them and in fact makes them socially disfunctional.  The huge difference is that a child from a children's home will never become an MP whereas a child sent to a boarding school quite possibly will end up in the government or a leading civil servant or military commander or lawyer or clergy person.  Why do we think it is fine to cut one set of people off from their families, and in some cases actually see it as a better method and yet for another set of people it is seen as something we should be trying to end and to find families that will take these children and give them a 'proper' family? Of course, one argument is that it is about money.  By definition, a child sent to a boarding school comes from a wealthy family so even if they have no talent or are lazy they will succeed and will get a house and a good job whereas a child from a children's home or local authority care has no-one to provide these advantages so are more likely to end up homeless or facing mental health issues.

The thing that triggered off this posting was the Channel 4 programme 'Cutting Edge' which today had an episode 'Leaving Home at 8' about 8 year old girls sent from their parents to a boarding school.  For those unfamiliar with the UK system, boarding schools are those at which a child stays all year except during school vacations.  They sleep, eat and live at the school.  Some of these boarding schools are the elite 'public' schools, but there are other less prestigious institutions.  They all do, however, charge high fees which mean a small slice of the population can attend.  However, as adults this small slice is over represented among the elites in British public life and business.  In total 67,000 children in the UK attend boarding schools; 59,000 children are in local authority care.  Of children in care 53% leave school with no qualifications; 45% end up with a mental health disorder (compared to 10% of the general population) and of those people in custody 30% have been in care, though children in care make up only 0.5% of all children.  In contrast 70% of judges, 68% of barristers, 55% of partners in law firms, 54% of journalists and 54% of doctors went to fee paying independent schools, of which boarding schools make up 13% of the total private school pupil population.

The programme was harrowing even though it featured very privileged people, the girls themselves were distraught at being separated from their parents and many of the parents were too.  This is unsurprising.  At 8 a child can do many things on their own but they are far from being an independent person.  Whilst boarding schools probably lack the bullying and in fact torture of pupils by others whether their peers or older, that happened in the past, certainly it is an unhealthy environment into which children should be put, and this is recognised by the fact that, as noted above, local authorities and charities always seek to house children in their care with adoptive parents as much as they can.

The damage that boarding schools do to children was highlighted in a 2008 investigation by MPs:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/may/11/publicschools.schools  Of course, not only are there the initial problems created by taking a child from their home and putting them in an instituion, anyone who has worked in the UK especially in London and towns like Oxford where adults who went to boarding school are more numerous, sees the problems that such an education lays for life.  The people who have been through the boarding school system have been doing something like military service for their childhood and of course this makes them tough but it also makes them very callous and uncaring about others.  I have seen no evidence in adults who attended boarding school, of the team spirit that such schools argue they promote.  When you have had no privacy, no space of your own, no space to be yourself and no security for the things you hold dear, of course you will always snatch whatever you can from others and give no thought to anyone's needs bar your own.

I will take a real life case: a woman I met some years ago in Oxford.  Her name was Tiffany 'Tiffy' Foster who though from Suffolk had attended a boarding school in Oxfordshire.  Her family numbered senior military officers and clergymen in its ranks.  I worked with her for nine months and found immediately that she viewed anyone she met who had not been to such a school with disdain which was ironic as she wanted to become a school teacher in a comprehensive school presumably to lord it over the pupils and fellow staff.  She argued that we who had not attended a boarding school were all too weak to deal with life. I was particularly angered when she complained that neither a single (by determined choice) mother who had an incredibly intelligent  daughter able to produce poetry that scanned at the age of eight stood no chance in life before she was not faced with the toughness of a boarding school.  She made no apology for the advantages of wealth and connections she had gained that made her life so easy.  However, this did not stop her taking other people's things in the office without apology.  I guess that the privileged do not feel rules apply to them or really that anyone else's concerns matter.  Another offensive remark she made was to ask what all the fuss was about the First World War (she intended to teach history).  I asked her what was the lowest rank of any of her family who had fought in that war and she said colonel; none of her relatives died in the war.  The highest rank any of my ancestors attained was sergeant-major and that was because he had served in the Anglo-Boer War in which he was decorated.  He was demoted twice for striking officers who were younger and less experienced than him but casualties always meant re-promotion.  He survived the war but died soon after from the affects of gas poisoning.  I have come a long way in social standing from that ancestor of mine (he drove a tram in peacetime) but I realised that it brought minimally closer to where Tiffany saw herself as standing.  To make such a remark about the war that took the lives of millions and mutilated many others was sickening.  Other boarding school families were not spared in the way the Fosters were, yet her own narrow horizons and self-obsession, promoted by her schooling barred her from seeing that.

This is one example, I have encountered many others in my career, but fortunately now I am out in the provinces, far fewer than I once did.  The trouble is that the higher echelons of our society are filled with these people and unfortunately no-one seems to really ask whether people who have been through such a harsh, uncaring school system (despite the efforts of the teachers to make it welcoming, the whole set up of divorce from their parents cannot be counter-balanced effectively) are really mentally fit to have so much power.  Of course, the generation above them lift them up without even thinking about it and they have an effective propaganda machine working for them.  When training as a teacher in a comprehensive school in Oxfordshire I was stunned to find that the headmaster of that school which took a wide range of ordinary pupils had a peculiar deference for neighbouring boarding schools.  Did he have no faith in the system he was part of?  Did he simply do it because it was a job?  Did he look on his own pupils with disdain and only see his role as fulfilling some compelled duty?  He might have been an isolated case, but the way that he privileged teachers who had had a boarding school background, was rather unsettling.  Even though he had not been part of that system he was incredibly deferential towards it much to the dismay to those who had come up through the same type of school that he was overseeing.  I do not have to say anything about the Harry Potter stories and how they show that boarding school pupils are 'magic' and special, to indicate that boarding schools get lots of free propaganda, most importantly to educate us, the bulk of the population, how reverential we should be to their pupils and alumni.

The sense that boarding schools are 'special' producing exceptional people, rather, than in fact, screwed up ones with out-of-date knowledge, is terribly prevalent in UK society.  Even the review in 'The Guardian' of this 'Cutting Edge' programme ended saying '... the kindness of the teachers shows that the boarding school model, somewhat [!] anachronistic in the 21st century, can still work.'  Work at what?  Producing another whole generation of people who will get power as a gift, almost a right, and yet have been screwed up by a system that makes it impossible for them to engage properly with the large majority of people they will encounter in everyday life.  However much they dislike it, they will have to mix with the rest of us.

Anachronistic is the word.  The boarding school system harks back to a period long before even the Victorian era.  I would argue that it owes much to ancient Sparta and the sense that children need to be becoming warriors from birth and that the weak should be exposed, marginalised from 'proper' society.  If we witnessed families, say in China, sending their young children, to be taught in 'education camps' there would be dismay and anger and yet that is what we see in the UK.  There would certainly concern about the future of China and its place in the world if these children were being groomed to run the country.  Yet, that is precisely what happens in the UK.  Boarding schools are bad for the UK because they screw up the people who are going to be our leaders and make them unsuited for the posititons of power they are going into.  Of course, I would ban them immediately.  In the meantime, however, I hope we can shift opinions of those people, you and me, who suffer at the hands of the selfish, arrogant, greedy former boarding school pupils and rather see them as 'special' in a way that we should pay deference to, but see them as people with 'special needs', people effectively mistreated by uncaring parents and in need of particular help in living in modern UK society.

The Bitter Legacy of Recession

To people of my grandparents' generation (my grandfathers were 17 and 29 in 1929) there was one 'Depression' the economic downturn which affected the World from about 1929-36/9 depending on where you lived; New Zealand and Australia had been facing difficulties as early as 1927. Anyway, it was a period of economic slowdown leading to mass unemployment, peaking somewhere over 6 million people out of work in Germany in 1933 and globally unemployment was around 22% of people of working age in 1932. In the UK my grandfathers generally escaped the severest of the problems because they worked in the modern parts of engineering and were based in the South-East of England, the most prosperous part of the UK. Elsewhere in the UK, notably the heavy industrial regions of South West, North-West and North-East England and Central Scotland there was far worse times leading to hunger and deprivation. In those days the welfare state was minimally developed so there was little protection for those who were unemployed or their families. As always the wealthy saw it as an opportunity to grab back rights over individuals and for example, to compel women to go back into domestic service at low wage rates as in the 1920s it had proven tough to get cheap servants as more employment opportunities had opened up for women in the wake of the First World War.

Looking back in the 1970s, the Depression was something that these men and women never expected to see a repeat of. Anyway, the welfare state that had been constructed since 1945 made it far less harsh on people than had been the case forty years before. Then of course came the Thatcher years when the Conservative government engineered an economic downturn for political gains, primarily to smash the position of the trade unions, lower wage rates and make a workforce that was more compliant than the one they felt their government had inherited after the industrial unrest of the 1970s. Of course in 1974 the UK's industrial base for the first time had a majority of service sector jobs over manufacturing jobs and the decline of manufacturing continued apace across the western World. However, in the UK it was accelerated by hostile government policies. Added to this was an ideological element. In line with the American New Right attitudes, unemployed people were made to feel guilty for not having a job, they were portayed as lazy, unwilling to be flexible in finding work and somehow even 'sleazy' for accepting welfare payments in order to stay housed and feed their families.

Despite the complaints that British workers were unwilling to move to find work (viz Norman Tebbit's cry to 'get on your bike' to find work - though given the sharp differences in house prices the Conservative insistence that you were nothing if you did not own your own house actually reduced labour flexibility) I constantly encountered men who had travelled from other parts of the UK to South-East England where the service sector was prospering and lived in cramped accommodation often with many men to a single bedroom, just the way that foreign immigrants had typically done in the past, so they could earn money to send home. Let alone those Britons who went abroad to find work. Many people refer to the drama series 'Boys from the Black Stuff' (1982) as encapsulating the era, but they should also look at the comedy 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' (1983) about British builders in West Germany to show another facet.

To people who had lived through the Depression or knew its history, we seemed to be back in those times once again. Unemployment officially was around 3.4 million in the UK at its peak, but on the way we measure it now it would have been something like 4 million. Certainly given the rise in female employment throughout the 20th century and the need since around 1966 to have two adult incomes to sustain a family of four, made exclusion of married women from the unemployment figures wrong.

Of course, often with hindsight people see the 1980s as an era of 'greed is good' and people able to make millions. Because some people did, this was used to show us that all of us could. However, the fact that much of such sums were derived through asset stripping other industries and forcing down wages shows the lie. Most of us had to be exploited by such conditions in order for those people to make their profits. Sound familiar?

I was growing up in the 1980s, I was 13 in 1980 and 23 in 1990. I managed to avoid most of the problems because I lived in South-East England and went to university and had prosperous parents who did not lose their jobs. Yet even I was aware of the impact that the Recession of the 1980s had on people. The key impact which still lingers today, was fear. Parents in particular were terrified of what would happen to their company. Life became grey, holidays were cancelled, people even complained when people on benefits had a television or wanted hot food. Families were broken up by the unemployment. Even at university, where we were the privileged (only 6% of 18 year olds went to university then compared to over 40% now) we all feared a long period of unemployment ahead of us at graduation. Despite graduating in 1990, I did not earn above £10,000 (€10,000; US$14,800) until 2001. When colleagues at work talk about how long the second recession of 1990-3 actually went on, lingering to 1996 and beyond, I wholeheartedly support them in their statements. In fact between 1981-96, the British economy as the bulk of the population experienced it was in a bad state and unemployment in reality was always far worse than statistics made out.

I find it ironic that there is a current radio advertisement encouraging young people to go to university and 'taste the opportunity' and 'be everything' that they 'could ever be'. Recession as were are experiencing now and will at least until 2015 if not longer clamps down on opportunity. Of course tens of thousands more young people go to university now than they did in 1985 and they have been lied to that for the thousands of pounds of debt they are incurring they will have a chance for a good job. This is utter rubbish. They have little chance of a job let alone a good one. Unemployment is set to return to 3 million and there is no sense it will stop there. This time we do not only have structural readjustment and a consumer downturn but we have vulture funds wrecking established companies for nothing but their own gains. Unemployment among people aged under 25 is at least 40%, i.e. 1.25 million people and unemployment in this age group is rising faster than among other age groups. Unlike their predecessors graduates in this group have massive debts that on a normal basis it would take years to clear, but this will be prolonged by a long period of unemployment.

Of course graduates are those with greatest privileges, they tend still, mainly to come from well off families and by definition to be best educated. So if they are being pushed into unemployment what about those young people with lower qualifications. Even in the mid-1990s you would see graduates hiding their degrees from their CVs so that they could get the low paid jobs that were going. Carl Gilleard, chief executive of Graduate Recruiters has advised graduates to do this, to take the mundane jobs. Of course this simply displaces the less qualified from those posts. For young people at whatever level of education, there is now no opportunity. You fight tooth and nail against everyone just to secure that job in a call centre as you know there is nothing else. When there you make no protest and simply work harder and harder, knowing that simple dislike from your line manager is sufficient to doom you to unemployment.

Everyone seems to forget the terror of the 1980s. Of course it was deliberate, the wealthy felt that workers were not sufficiently obsequious let alone grateful for their jobs and sufficiently subservient in the way they should be. Of course to any employer such things should be part of the natural order, whereas of course, I will contest such things as giving up human dignity. Once again with the years of New Labour, the employers feel we have become too cocky, slack and lazy and certainly not cheap enough employees. Back in July 2008 I talked about how employers felt they had insufficient unemployment to be the necessary 'whip' for their workers and of course now they have it back.

The legacy of the 1980s was enduring and I feel it has damaged British society. For a start people seek scapegoats and there are already warnings of rising tensions, often ethnically focused, on the UK's housing estates. People forget that the 1980s was renowned for rioting right across the UK and only some of it was directed at government policy, the rest of it was directed at people's neighbours. Now we have immigrants again who no doubt will form the focus of such attacks. In return the police gets heavy armament and restricts our civil society even further. The authoritarian state that Tony Blair so loved, ironically will come a step closer through the failure of New Labour's economic plans.

The other thing is that people stop taking risks. This means that they do not travel, they do not learn other languages, they do not set up businesses, they stay at home as a meek pool of labour. The wealthy do not want the masses to travel and to be educated because then they might start challenging their position. The whole thing about expanding university entry, lifelong learning, staying in education until 18, is now being undermined by the whip of unemployment. It smacks down people but it smashes their dreams far more. The reason why immigrants come to the UK, and increasingly from places like Eastern Europe and South Asia where they have been well educated and instilled with an enthusiasm to better themselves, is because so many people born in the UK have had all desire to take risks or get ahead, beaten out of them. It was beaten out of their parents in the 1980s and it is being beaten out of young people today.

Recession sees the redistribution of opportunity back to the wealthy and privileged who have always had the greatest opportunities and yet seem loath to even share them. This week I came across the trend of the 'New Olympians' as outlined by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in 'The Gods That Failed' (2008). They argue that the current situation is not some error or mishap of the global economy, but is in fact engineered by the powerful who feel that it is right that they should be serviced by the bulk of the population and that any movement away from that is wrong. This suggests that the post-1945 consensus or even the post-1848 perspective, that privilege should be challenged and that those in privilege should accept responsibility for their actions has been overthrown. In its place we have returned to some kind of medieval attitude, shorn of any Victorian philanthropic or even simply Christian elements, back to the anointment by God of certain individuals who it is wrong to even attempt to constrain in the slightest. King Charles I would feel very much at home as a vulture fund head, but people, he was a 17th century monarch, not someone of the 21st century. Are the gains of the past four centuries not worth struggling for.

Recession creates the passive UK society that so many with money and influence have been creating and seeking to maintain for so long. People now talk of 1945-73 as an aberration, instead we should have the hierarchical society in which everyone knows their place. Interestingly privilege is already receiving a boost. Even among universities employers are now only going to Oxford, Cambridge and the three colleges of London University: University College (UCL), Imperial and London School of Economics (which has the worst organised library I have ever seen). Attempts to widen access into the legal profession (only 10% of barristers have gone to a comprehensive school), the civil service, the military, are being attacked openly as 'class war'. People are no longer afraid to protect privilege even though it means that the top people in most of our state arms are from select private schools (and private schools in their entirety only educate 7% of children). Everyone especially in the middle classes, somehow thinks they are exempt, that they and their children will have opportunity. This is a massive delusion. Those who have opportunity are probably less than 7%, probably less than 1% of the population of any country. Yes, you might be able to get your child a job when others are out of work, but in fact they have no more chance of improving themselves and in fact no greater security than an orphan from a poor housing estate. There is the elite and there are the bulk of us, in-fighting in order to get the scraps the ultra-rich toss down. Of course they might not even select to distribute any scraps in your country they might all go to Poland or India or somewhere else. Do not delude yourself it is ever different.

The recession, as in the 1980s is being used in the UK to close down social mobility once again. No-one seems to have learnt the lesson that in the long-run this will damage the UK, because the bulk of successful new businesses in the UK are created not by those in the Establishment (they have no incentive to labour or innovate) but by 'outsiders' whether socially, ethnically or in terms of nationality. The UK is increasingly like China at the end of the 19th century more eager to cling to its out-dated structure than to move with the times to actually help the state to survive. The UK needs a social mobile, educated, confident population not a restricted and fearful one.

The current recession has come about through greed and game playing by the very rich. However, they are far from averse to it and its consequences as they recognise that twenty years on it allows them to jolt the bulk of society back into servile manners. States have found, that in contrast to the mid-20th century (and even then it was tough if you look at how governments were powerless to restrain oil companies) states have found that they cannot even get utility companies to behave in a decent, humane let alone altruistic manner. The ultra-rich are beyond government control and now they are effecting the kinds of society they want, totally unchallenging to them and enabling them to squeeze yet more profit.

I have seen cartoons recently in which Karl Marx is adopting an 'I told you so' manner. What Marx missed entirely is that even hiccoughs in capitalism let alone any steps towards seeming 'collapse' so terrifies the bulk of people, so divides them, so gives the justification to repression that no-one with revolutionary sentiments can come forward. Even in the 1980s I never anticipated that these circumstances of restricted mobility and economic hardship would persist so long, yet, now I know that whenever I die I will feel that I have lived through bad times and any periods when that was not the case were brief aberrations in the sustained period, through economic means, of fear and restriction of the bulk of the population of the UK.

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.

The Privileged Strike Back

I have often commented that the UK seems to becoming a more divided society. In the period after the Second World War, there was a sense that the strict social hierarchy of the 19th and early 20th centuries was beginning to be shaken off. Access to free education at all levels and a free health care system combined with a prosperity around 1956-73 that increased social mobility. In the 1960s people began to talk of a 'meritocracy' (though this term was originally a derogative term it was captured to be used in a more positive way) that people could get on it life due to their abilities rather than which social class they had been born into. The hope that was that in contrast to the 19th century and pre-1945 era the UK would never suffer deaths and failure as a result of stupid rich people being in charge as they seemed to have been on so many occasions in British history. You just have to think of the Crimean War, the Boer War and the First World War for starters, in fact most of the Napoleonic Wars before Wellington was put in charge in Portugal in 1808.

In the 1960s and into the 1970s I think we probably got as close to a meritocracy as we ever will in the UK. Of course most senior politicians, government officials, leading military personnel, church leaders, many business people, all still came from very privileged backgrounds and were unmolested by the increase of more ordinary people in positions. In some sectors like the police, hospitals and certainly in the media, popular music, writing, etc., though there were greater opportunities for people to 'get on' than ever before. There was a sense of this in other countries like West Germany, France and the USA too. Of course the privileged remained unthreatened but there was more space and opportunity for people to rise from humble origins. I would argue that despite Bush seeing the wealthiest as his core support, in fact partly due to the public education system, you can still rise in the USA in a way you no longer can in the UK. Financial pressures are making it harder of course right across the Western world.

John Major, the UK prime minister 1991-97, who worked his way up from bank clerk to head of the government despite his nostalgia for the 1950s, would often speak of working towards a 'classless society'. In fact his period of office marked the end of the greatest assault on opportunities for ordinary people. The years of Margaret Thatcher 1979-91 had seen the selling off of council housing, the ending of grants to attend higher education, the smashing of trades unions who were both a voice for ordinary people and a way for individuals to advance, plus she had tried to even end the concept of 'society' denying it existed, to quote, she said: "There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Searching for quotes from her, I have just found so many in which she revelled in a divided society: "If your only opportunity is to be equal then it is not opportunity." Yet interestingly she also said: "Object to merit and distinction, and you're setting your face against quality, independence, originality, genius; against all the richness and variety of life." Of course the merit for her did not come from ability but from societal status.

Thatcher engineered a society which actually would have prevented her a woman who only went to grammar school, not public school, ever reaching the position she did. This is represented by the current leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron and the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, both who come from a public school background more like the Conservatives of the past like Sir Anthony Eden or Lord Douglas-Home; even Sir Winston Churchill for all his popular touch was from the family of a duke. Thatcher did ridicule the concept of social class saying "I'm working class, I work jolly hard". For her it was about individuals rather than structures, but she actually barred access to so many opportunities for so many individuals through her policies, that in spite of the superficially inclusive nature of her rhetoric in fact she was dividing society even further.

Blair, of course, more Conservative than Socialist or even Liberal, added to the divisiveness of British society. In this education, which famously was his watchword, has played a huge role. He tirelessly promoted divisive schooling through encouraging grant-maintained schools, grammar schools, faith schools, foundation schools and city academies. All of these were free to put up barriers to universal entry. They received better funding too, meaning those children left to go to what were increasingly demeaned as 'bog-standard comprehensives' had to be taught under tighter budgets. In theory the Blair regime sought to expand access to higher education, but as in my posting last month, in fact the financial arrangements have meant no increase in working class children going to university since 2002 and in fact even middle class families are being priced out of sending their children to higher education. In addition graduates are saddled with £20,000 debt and so are shackled into working in the UK in any job they can get to pay off these debts before they are in their 40s. I was speaking to a man last week who looks at the employment of graduates and he told me that my estimates of what a graduate earns when they leave university, apparently it is not the average national salary of £24,000 (€30,200; US$47,000), but more like £17,000 (€21,400; US$33,200) that they earn in their first jobs no matter what subject area they have studied, though people who have not done business studies courses have a more realistic impression of what they will earn. Those who have done business studies apparently expect to walk into high-paying jobs and are disappointed.

What is now interesting to note is that given the increasing restrictions on social mobility brought about by a combination of sustained government policies over the past thirty years, those in privileged positions are now beginning to voice attitudes that would have seemed a little improper even in 1908 and outrageous in 1968 or even 1978. I am grateful for the BBC Education website for alerting me to these. Education is not the full extent of the issues around privilege and social mobility, but it is clearly a central aspect. The new head of the Independent Schools Council (independent schools are fee-paying schools that educate 6% of the school aged population), Rear Admiral Chris Parry, told a select committee of Parliament that he was angered by attempts to make independent schools more open to access by people from poorer backgrounds that received attention earlier this year. In fact the Blair government gave greater power to independent schools by allowing them to back city academies and create new kinds of independent schools in the form of foundation schools. Yet, this does not seem enough for the independent sector and they clearly now feel strong enough to try to force back initiatives to open their doors wider and share facilities with poorer children. This is a re-assertion of divisive education and also embraces strengthening of the sector in terms of resources and its status in society, so turning away from the egalitarian education approaches of the past. Of course such schools have never been under threat, but what is interesting is now rather than staying quiet and sometimes defensive, they are now being aggressive and clearly feel that the government has created an environment that permits that to happen without them being criticised. Even in the 1980s with Thatcher at her peak there were sufficient old left-wingers and strong liberals who would have contested such attitudes, but they are now generally extinct, especially in political terms.

More alarming than the rear admiral's comments were those that came from Dr Bruce Charlton of the University of Newcastle. He stated last week that the reason why working class students were not getting into university had nothing to do with lack of opportunity, it was simply because they lacked the intelligence. This is a shocking return to the attitudes of the 19th century and is a eugenic attitude that would have been out of place in the 1950s let alone the 2000s. Again, such attitudes seem to be increasingly expressed, if you think back to Dr James Watson one of the investigators of DNA. He was banned from speaking at the Science Museum in October 2007 because he argued that Black people will always be less intelligent than White people because of their genetic make up. This is Social Darwinism and racism on a level that I hoped had died with the Nazi regime or at the latest with the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. These attitudes began as distortions of Darwin's theories in the 1860s and evolved into eugenics. This was an attitude towards race and class that underlay the Nazis' slaughter of millions of people on racial, sexuality and disability grounds. The whole Nazi legal system became founded on people being guilty not by what they did but simply by what kind of person they were.

What these disgraceful men are effectively saying is: if you are Black or come from a working class background there is no point the state even making provision for you to go to university because you will never be intelligent enough to take up your place. That is the ultimate divisiveness in society. Already the government is saying: 'we will make it financially hard for you to get an education' and universities are admitting 'we will make it hard by having all these unwritten codes and social rules that will exclude you and even if you get there you will not understand what we are doing or expect because you cannot know these codes it says now'. Yet the next stage is coming upon us very quickly. The privileged, now freed from what they saw as the shackles of equality are saying openly now 'we are simply going to bar you as we do not like your kind soiling our universities and you have nothing to offer to education or our society and you should just stay in the low-paid jobs we feel you are suitable for'. It seems criminal that all the improvements which people worked and died for over the past two hundred years are being swept aside so quickly. Can it be long before we have the stamp on our foreheads at birth designating which opportunities we are permitted? Brave New World, we are on our way, very quickly.

P.P. This is on 12th June, interesting news that Rear Admiral Chris Parry has been forced to step down from his position in representing 1200 private schools. I doubt those private schools actually think any differently from what he said, but they just want to be more devious about their feelings rather than the head-on approach he adopted.

Charity Begins At School 2: Some Additional Points

Further to my post of last week, I came across some more interesting figures on private schools and the damage they are doing to education in the UK. This comes from the BBC News website where they point out that whilst private schools take 7% of pupils, they employ 14% of the teachers in the UK, so are 'creaming off' the best teachers from the education system that 93% of the population will go through. These teachers have been trained by the state and increasingly have been given generous bursaries for subjects like mathematics and modern languages. The staff to student ratio in private schools is 1 teacher: 9 pupils, in the state sector it is apparently 1 teacher: 18 pupils, though in fact that usually translates into 1:30 in most classes. In addition more male teachers (and more of them who have more than one degree qualification, i.e. an MA/MSc or a PhD) go into private schools, which you may argue allows women to progress better in the state sector (female teachers earn 7%-22% less than men if they teach in the private sector, depending on the subject area they teach), but at a time when the lack of positive male role models for boys in schools is a clear problem, it might be healthier to keep more of them in the state sector.

Apparently parents who send their children to private schools are complaining they pay twice, once in taxes to the state school system they do not use and once again to the schools directly, so they seem to be expecting some rebate. On the same basis I expect a rebate for the nuclear weapons I do not use or the health care system in Scotland or troops sent to Iraq, none of which I have use for. The arrogance of these parents is stunning, but possibly not surprising.

The only solution I see to the parasitic nature of private schools is to close them down. You need to wipe out their charitable status immediately as they are profit-making businesses. You need to stop them recruiting any more pupils and feed the money saved from the end of their tax breaks improving state schools. With parents who have previously exempted themselves from caring about their local communities by sending their children private, actually now having to pay attention to local state schools we can expect an improvement in the support and resources they receive, though unfortunately in the already prosperous parts of the UK. Scrap private schools now and help the future of the UK and its people.

Charity Begins at School

One recent government announcement I welcomed is the review of the charitable status granted to private schools. It seems odd that profit-making bodies which charge fees so hight that only wealthy people can afford to send their children to them get charitable status in the UK which means they get tax breaks which saves them millions of pounds per year. They trumpet their academic success, but it is unsurprising when they have such high staff to student ratios; most children would benefit from having greater time in class with their teacher. In the average school lesson of 45 minutes, with the common class of 30 pupils, each pupil will have an equivalent of 1.3 minutes with the teacher, if you take out the time it takes for them to come in and settle down. Every time another pupil is disruptive they effectively steal this time from their fellow pupils as the teacher has to take out time from teaching to deal with it. Of course typically pupils are taught together, but with smaller class sizes in private schools each pupil is far more liable to get individual attention and their education will benefit. As I have noted in previous postings pupils from richer families benefit educationally even when they are in the public sector let alone when in schools with a selected intake.

Whilst I sympathise with the argument that the UK should have no private schools and certainly no 'public' schools (as in the weird UK definition, i.e. elite private schools, as opposed to state schools which are free and open to the public), you can argue that if someone wants to set up a business teaching people they should be free to do so. The difficulty for private schools is the buying power of the middle class has fallen. If civil servants and teachers had as much buying power as they did in the 1950s they would be annually earning over £80,000 (US$157,600; €111,200) whereas they earn around £25-30,000 per year. This means it is difficult for private schools to charge high enough fees to fund the number of staff they want because otherwise they would lose many of their middle class clients who in many cases are the bulk of the parents using some of these schools. This is why financially they have to retain charitable status. Many grant scholarships and open up their facilities to neighbouring communities, but that is the least that should be expected, as the bulk of us pay for state schools through our taxes and are also paying for private schools through charitable status tax breaks even though our children will never get the chance to go to the school let alone be a pupil at it.

Allowing the private school sector to contract from its current standing (2500 private schools in the UK taking 6-7% of school-aged children) would benefit education as a whole across the UK. The schools do not have to teach the National Curriculum which means that the pupils often miss out on in particular the social education which is important in making the pupils tolerant and open-minded, something which is important to have among the people who will make up our elites in the decades to come. Secondly, money saved from not granting all these tax breaks could be channelled into improving schools and their buildings and paying state sector teachers decent salaries. Many schools are suffering from decaying buildings and over-crowded classrooms, partly because money is being siphoned off to grant tax breaks to private schools. A third benefit is that it would make comparatively well-off middle class parents send their children into the state sector and with it bring funds and support for many ordinary schools which will benefit them. The top echelons of the middle class do not care about ordinary state schools or how far they decay because they exempt themselves from that system; they are rich and articulate so can turn their strengths into these ordinary schools. In addition, their children will mix with ordinary people which hopefully will begin to break down the barriers in our society which are painfully harsh; maybe the rich children will despise the ordinary ones, but the ordinary pupils will see that the elites are in fact just human like themselves. It would also provide a more level playing field for ordinary pupils as those pupils who otherwise would have gone to private schools would have to work for their education and their qualifications rather than being led through it by one-on-one tuition in their small classes.

Thus, I urge the government to strip all private schools and certainly all public schools, of charitable status immediately. The collapse of the private education sector cannot come about fast enough (I imagine many private schools will find ways of wriggling out of it, but even if we lose 30-40% it will begin to help change occur) if we are going to achieve a truly well-educated and less socially-divided UK.