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Rachel Wolf, a former education adviser at 10 Downing Street, said: ‘Journalists did not usually go to FE [further education] colleges, and neither do their children. Politicians – even Labour ones – are more and more likely to have gone through traditional, elite education routes; therefore their understanding and instinctive desire to protect FE is low.’ According to Wolf, Government ministers and civil servants are unlikely to notice if things go wrong ‘because the elite will not have friends who are experiencing disaster’.52
The proliferation of short-term and temporary contracts in the economy harks back to the poor work conditions suffered in Victorian times.
Automation’s advance is likely to increase the importance of apprenticeships. The interpersonal and technical skills that machines cannot master will be learned on the job. The status of the ‘learn while you earn’ route has been lost despite evidence that some degree-level apprenticeships can produce higher earnings than many ‘academic’ degrees. A key challenge is how to change the hearts and minds of British employers so that they embrace the Germanic culture of valuing quality training in the workplace.
‘Memorizing formulas, essays, quotes and all that is required by exam boards for twenty-eight exams in four weeks is not preparing us for the future,’ complained one sixteen-year-old pupil after completing her examinations in 2017.
Academic success is increasingly a measure of how much support children receive, not how much talent or potential they have.
Britain is consistently average in global league rankings based on academic tests.20 But when comparing how well young people apply knowledge to solve problems in the real world it comes bottom of the heap.21
Academic snobbery is the main obstacle to change – a misguided belief that technical education is about ‘shabby premises and dirty jobs down in the town’.26
Opportunity hoarding is the term first coined by American sociologist Charles Tilly to describe the tactics deployed by better-off families to prevent their children sliding down the social ladder and being overtaken by upstarts from below.
Poorer pupils with high marks have a 25 per cent chance of attending a grammar compared with the 70 per cent chance for similarly high-achieving better-off pupils.40
Improving relative social mobility is never going to be easy. Powerful but pragmatic measures are needed to smash through glass floors and class ceilings. Randomly allocating equally deserving candidates to over-subscribed schools and universities is the only way of levelling the education playing field.
Norman conquerors recorded as property owners in the Domesday Book, for example, were 16 times more likely than other names to enter Oxford or Cambridge universities in 1170. A millennium on, they were still 25 per cent more likely to do so.57
In 2018 an OECD study estimated it would take descendents from low income families five generations to reach average income in the UK.69
Failure to improve social mobility will leave a legacy for not just one or two but many generations to come. The problem will only magnify. On the other hand, one life transformed today can create a ripple effect that will enhance the lives of relatives far into the future.
Britain needs a new model of social mobility: one that develops all talents, not just academic, but vocational and creative – and one that encourages people to fulfil their potential wherever they happen to be born.
Around 1.5 million children in state schools in England meet the eligibility criteria for free school meals. G. Whitty and J. Anders (2013), ‘Narrowing the Achievement Gap: Policy and practice in England 1997–2010’ in J. Clark (ed.) Closing the Achievement Gap from an International Perspective, Springer.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11789390/Boris-Johnson-Tories-must-smash-down-barriers-to-social-mobility.html.
