Who would have thought that 11 years of a Labour government would make Britain
more unequal? Yesterday's official statistics show that since 1997, the poor
have - in relative terms - got poorer and the rich richer. Inequality in
Britain is now at its highest level since it was first measured in 1961. And
that is bound to put a dampener on Gordon Brown's attempts to make our
society more mobile.
For the more unequal a nation is, the less social mobility it offers. David
Cameron likes to claim that Britain is now a genuine meritocracy in which
where we are going is more important than where we have come from. But
that's simply not true if you look at the underlying figures. Our society is
no more fluid now than it was a generation ago - and it is less fluid than
it was a generation before that.
They buck you up, your mum and dad, or they muck you up. Either way, in modern
Britain, what most determines where you will end up in life is your parents.
If they are high-earning, ambitious professionals, the chances are you will
be too. If they are poor and unemployed, you have only a small chance of
improving your prospects, whatever the talents you were born with.
Britain - along with America - is one of the most socially rigid nations in
the developed world. And that is not because it is uniquely difficult for a
poor child to do well here. It is because there is so little downward
mobility from the top. If your parents are in the top three social classes
(out of the seven defined by sociologists), there is a 74 per cent chance
that you will be too. It is only the fact that the middle classes have
expanded, thanks to the economy generating more white-collar jobs, that some
children born into the working class have been able to move up and join
them.
Well-off children have an enormous head start in Britain, and the influences
work on them long before they even begin school. The brightest poor children
drop from the 88th percentile at the age of 3 (meaning that only 12 per cent
of their contemporaries score more highly in tests) to the 65th by the age
of 5. The least able rich children, meanwhile, move up from the 15th
percentile at 3 to the 45th at 5. At that rate, the dim rich kids overtake
the bright poor ones in test scores by the time they are just 7.
So it is not just innate ability that determines your fate. While it may -
perhaps - be true that, on average, children of parents in intellectually
demanding jobs have a higher IQ than those whose parents are poor and
unemployed (as Bruce Charlton argued controversially in Times Higher
Education), that could not on its own explain the fact that rich youngsters
are more than four times more likely than poor ones to go to university.
Nurture seems to matter at least as much as nature. Children of poor parents
here don't tend to be given the same intellectual stimulation or the same
impetus to achieve. In a survey of 54 developed countries, England and
Scotland showed the highest correlation between children's test scores and
the number of books at home. Poor children are less likely to be read to,
less likely to be taken to museums or the theatre and less likely to display
the good behaviour and social skills that are also associated with success
in later life.
They are also more likely to have parents who don't particularly value
education. Attitudes to education are incredibly important - which is why
disadvantaged Indian and Chinese pupils do much better at school than their
white or Afro-Caribbean contemporaries from similar backgrounds.
Why are Britain and America (supposedly the land of opportunity) less mobile
than other countries? Economists put it down to our high levels of
inequality. The more unequal a society, the harder it is to move out of your
social class. The distances are greater, for a start. It is no accident that
the most socially mobile nations are Scandinavian.
How depressing, though, for Labour ministers that so much has been done to try
to increase social mobility here to so little effect. There has been a huge
redistribution of money from the middle classes to the poor. There has been
extra investment in inner-city schools. And there has been the introduction
of SureStart, a scheme aimed at improving the life chances of children from
an early age. Yet all Labour has managed to do is stabilise the decline in
mobility.
The trouble is that the countervailing forces have been so strong. The more
that we move to a knowledge economy, the more employers value educational
succ-ess. Jobs that used to be open to non-graduates now expect a degree,
and junior employees without one can no longer hope to be promoted into
them. Britain and the US have higher returns to education than most other
countries, meaning that graduates can expect to earn far more than those who
have not been to university.
This is something that middle-class parents understand, and all their efforts
are devoted to ensuring that their children go to university - preferably
one of the best ones - and end up in a good, graduate-only job. To this end,
they work single-mindedly to find a place for their offspring in the best
nursery school, the best primary and the best secondary. If they can't
afford to go private, they may employ a tutor to top up at home what their
children are taught at school. High educational achievement, for girls as
well as boys, has become even more of a spur in middle-class families than
it was a generation or two ago.
It is hard for poor parents to compete with these dedicated rivals. The
working classes on the whole have a smaller (though often closer) network of
friends. The middle classes tend to have a wider (if shallower) circle of
acquaintances from whom they can get the best advice on schools,
universities and jobs, and with whom they can place their children on work
experience. They can afford to buy houses in better catchment areas. They
have broadband internet access at home, shelves of books and quiet places
for their children to study. They can even “help” with coursework.
Then there is what economists call “assortative mating”. We tend to marry
others from the same social class. When girls were not so well educated and
mothers stayed at home, this made less difference. Now that high-achieving,
high-earning men marry high-achieving, high-earning women who often carry on
at work after they have children, the advantages for their offspring are
greater still - and so is the polarisation of society.
And finally, of course, there is the question of private schools. Yes, state
schools have improved in the past ten years. It would be a scandal if they
hadn't, given the amount of money that has been poured into them. But
private schools have improved at least as fast. They have upped their fees,
allowing them to recruit better teachers and build more facilities. The best
ones have become far more academically selective - witness the wails of Old
Etonians who can no longer get their sons into the school.
We all know the odd privately educated person who ends up as a
poverty-stricken failure. But that sort of downward mobility is almost
perversely difficult to achieve in Britain. Private schools give children
the social skills, the networks and the academic results that pretty much
guarantee them the same status that their parents have enjoyed. In many
private schools these days, every sixth-former goes on to higher education.
After that start in life, it is pretty unlikely that they will be stacking
supermarket shelves. As the Sutton Trust has shown, privately educated
people still take a disproportionate share of Britain's top jobs.
There is nothing wrong with middle-class parents wanting the best for their
children and going all out to achieve it. The left-wing response, led by Ed
Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, has been to
penalise these parents by introducing school lotteries and banning selection
by interview. Rather than dragging them down, though, would it not be better
to try to equalise the chances of less privileged children?
IntoUniversity, a charity with three centres in inner-city London, is trying
to do just that. It offers disadvantaged youngsters the sort of
opportunities and expectations that middle-class children take for granted.
From the age of 7, it not only hosts after-school study sessions with
tutors, books and computers, it also introduces the idea of university and
professional careers to children who might never have contemplated them.
They get taken to museums and theatres, take part in debates, do workshops
with bankers and lawyers and journalists, and spend a week hosted by a
university discovering how learning can be enjoyable.
Many are then paired with a mentor who is already an undergraduate, often from
a similar background, who not only helps them study, but also makes
university seem as normal an aspiration as it would be for a middle-class
child. And the charity also gives help and guidance that their parents can't
always offer: on GCSE and A-Level choices, filling in a UCAS form, choosing
a course and a college.
It is startlingly successful and has so far sent more than 80 students to
university. Ayisha Adedeji, now 19, started with IntoUniversity at primary
school. She won straight As in her A Levels and is now studying law and
sociology at Warwick. She remembers being taken on a trip to Belgium,
ostensibly to learn about the Second World War, but also to help her and her
fellow pupils raise their ambitions. “We stuck stickers on ourselves saying
‘I want to be a doctor' or ‘I want to be a lawyer'. IntoUniversity gave me
that extra push.”
Andrew Chaplin, a teacher at Walnut Tree Walk Primary School in inner-city
Lambeth, recently took his whole Year 6 class to a week run by
IntoUniversity. “Every child in the class now talks about going to
university and what course they would like to do,” he says. “It is something
many of them would never have even considered before.”
So these are the keys: early intervention to stop bright children tailing off
before they reach school; high expectations from teachers to keep them on
track when they get there; and initiatives such as IntoUniversity to
replicate the home environment that middle-class children enjoy.
These things can work wonders. The introduction of really good universal
childcare in Denmark in the 1970s doubled the odds of children with
ill-educated parents completing the equivalent of A Levels. And a US
programme, aimed at disadvantaged mothers while they are still pregnant and
sends a nurse to visit them for the first two years of their child's life,
has been shown to give the child a larger vocabulary and a higher IQ. A
similar scheme is being piloted here.
Gordon Brown and David Cameron can argue over whether the State or the
voluntary sector should be helping poor children to aim high. But they both
want to extend opportunity more widely. And they must agree that - while
they can't buy an Eton education for everyone - the great start in life that
they enjoyed as children is a boon that is still spread far too unevenly in
Britain.
www.maryannsieghart.com
