Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class

by Owen Jones

  As Johnson underlines, private schools are one of the most obvious ways the wealthy can buy their offspring a guaranteed place at the top table. They are the training grounds of the British ruling class. Only seven out of every hundred Britons is educated privately, but they are--to say the least--disproportionately represented in every major profession. Nearly half of top civil servants were privately educated, as were 70 per cent of finance directors, over half the top journalists and close to seven out of ten top barristers. l The same goes for top universities, According to the Sutton Trust, one hundred elite schools--out of 3,700 total schools in the UK-accounted for a third of admissions to Oxbridge over the last few years. Overall, over half of Oxbridge students went to fee-paying schools.

  But class can dictate people's life chances in rather more subtle ways than effectively buying your kids better grades. Only 15 per cent of poor white boys and 20 per cent of poor white girls leave state schools with basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic.This is way behind middle-class kids. Why is the link between education and class so strong? If you believe the former chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, itis because middle-class children have 'better genes'. This perverse Social Darwinism led him to criticize ministers for thinking that they could make children 'brighter than God made [them] ... Life isn't fair. We're never going to make it fair.'

  Of course, this theory is as ludicrous as it is offensive. It is the cards stacked against working-class kids that are to blame, not their genetic make-up. 'It's largely because the gap opens up so early on and then it never gets closed again,' says leading educational campaigner Fiona Millar. Having the luck to be bom into a comfortable background has a huge impact. A 2005 study showed that a five-year-old whose parents earn more than £67,500 has reading skills four months more advanced than those of her peers in families with combined incomes of between £15,000 and £30,000. For those in households getting between £2,500 and £15,000, the difference is more than five months.' Once established, this disparity follows children all the way through school. A fifth of all boys eligible for free school meals do not obtain five or more GCSEs, compared to around 8 per cent for everybody else.

  Why is there such a disparity, from infancy on? A lot of it is down to what Fiona Millar calls a 'horrible phrase': 'cultural capital' . This means having parents who, thanks to their own middle-class background, themselves enjoyed a better education, probably to degree level; being exposed to their wider vocabulary, being surrounded by books when you are growing up, in an environment where going to university is the 'done thing' and the logical first step to a seemingly inevitable professional career-those sorts of things.

  As former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short puts it, there 'used to be many more routes to a dignified life with a decent income for children who were not particularly academic in school.' Or, in the words of a report published by the National ago a fourteenor fifteen-year-old

  Union of Teachers: 'Thirty years working-class young person could walk out of school and into a decent working-class job. That is no longer the case.' The demise of the old manufacturing industries means that having good educational qualifications is more important than ever, even in getting a modestly paid job. And, of course, middle-class people, with their abundance of cultural capital, are in a much better position to achieve that.

  For insight into how class impacts on a child's education, I spoke to Helena Button. Miss Button-as I knew her-was one of my teachers at Cale Green Primary School in Stockport, in the early 1990's. As an Ofsted report noted a few years after I left, the school 'is located in an area of high economic deprivation in Stockport ... The percentage of pupils who are eligible for free school meals is well above the national average: Cale Green was in the bottom 5 per cent for national test results.

  'Most of the parents tended to have some kind of work, but it was very low paid-like shops, local industry, or whatever was about,' Helena recalls. '1 remember that a lot of these kids, they had no aspiration ... But you'd have to be pretty amazing, to come from a workingclass background like Daniel [one of my former classmates] and aspire to something different. I don't know if I ever reached those kinds of people.' Try as they might, she feels, many of the parents of workingclass kids with learning difficulties struggled to help them. 'The fathers often had learning difficulties themselves, so they weren't able to help their kids. People from educated, middle-class backgrounds have parents who can help and encourage them with their homework.'

  Helena was, in fact, an extremely good and inspiring teacher, despite the difficulties she faced in what she described as an under-resourced, 'rough school'. But in the end, I was the only boy in the class to go to a sixth-form college, let alone a university. Why? Because I was born into a middle-class family-my mother was a lecturer at Salford University, my father an economic regeneration officer for Sheffield Council. I grew up in an educated milieu and was simply following in the footsteps of well-paid, professional people who went to university. I did not suffer from the instability and stresses that scraping by in life can cause a family. I lived in a decent house. These are things denied to huge numbers of working-class people.

  Contrast the opportunities that I had to those of Liam Cranley, who grew up in Urmston, on the edges of Greater Manchester, in the 1980's and 1990's. His dad worked in a factory that once employed hundreds of workers in Trafford Park but, along with several others in the area, has since closed; his mother went through various low-paid jobs. 'All of my friends were pretty similar to me, they had pretty similar backgrounds,' he says. 'Everybody else was in the same position, in that the parents said: "Get a trade behind youl Maybe do an apprenticeship--but make sure you get a trade behind you." Ifwe had aspirations, it would be to get an apprenticeship, if you were smart.'

  The trouble was that these trades were vanishing fast, as large swathes of British industry collapsed. His nieces, for example, ended up working in shops at the Trafford Centre complex-as he says: 'There's nothing else on offer! Most of us didn't have a plan at all: it was just a case of, you were at school because you had to be, then you finished:

  For parents who had grown up in hardship, the priority was making sure that their children could stand on their own two feet. 'Our parents' biggest aspiration for us was that we had a job, that we could provide, because that really was something to aspire to. When my dad grew up, they had nothing.'

  The idea of going to university was not even within the realms of imagination. 'I'm not exaggerating here: I literally didn't know what university was, aged sixteen,' Liam recalls. 'University, to be honest, was kind of where posh people go! It wasn't a case of aspiration; it was almost, "you know your place". That's what posh people do; it's just not an option. It's just not what we do, it's just not on the radar. The aspiration thing is bullshit, it really is. You can only ever really aspire to something if you know itand understand it.'

  With the exception of photography, Liam failed all of his GCSEs. 'I didn't even go back to school to get my results,' he says. For six years, he worked as a printer in a factory. 'It was horrible. 1 hated it, every minute of it, because it was just monotonous and soul-destroying and boring. I came very close to having a breakdown. Eventually I just walked out.'

  But Liam is an exceptional case. Aged twenty-three, he started an Access course specially designed for mature students with ambitions to go to university. 'Itwas a confidence-building exercise,' he explains, recalling how he initially struggled with basic spelling and grammar. Yet his ability was such that he ended up studying at the University of Sheffield, one of the best in the country. Surrounded by middle-class students for the first time, he suffered from constant 'impostor syndrome': a sense that he did not deserve to be there and would be found out at any moment. Itmeant sometimes dealing with patronizing or even outright classist sentiments, even if meant in jest: for example, he recalls one friend introducing him as 'my scally friend from Manchester' .

  It is difficult not to be impressed by Liam's
achievement. But the reality is that very few children with his background ever make it to university, let alone somewhere like Sheffield: indeed, nobody he grew up with took that path.

  Politicians and media commentators who focus on an alleged lack of aspiration among working-class kids often miss the point. Aspire to what? The disappearance of so many good, well-paid working-class jobs in communities across the country means it is difficult to see what lies at the end of school-s-other than supermarkets or call centres.

  What has struck Fiona Millar in her interviews with schoolchildren from more disadvantaged backgrounds is that they often 'don't know why they're there, because they don't see the benefit from it. The parents don't really understand if there's a benefit from it, or they can't convey it to them necessarily ... their expectations are dampened down.' This is particularly true for communities that were badly hit by the collapse of industry. 'The areas that have the biggest problems and the most demoralized schools are very often the areas where a lot of people were thrown out of work in the 1980s. Whether itwas steel, coal '" There are no male role models, men haven't worked, kids don't see any future for themselves, they don't see the point in education, because you can't see aiob at the end of it. Why would you bother with it?'

  To huge numbers of working-class kids, education simply does not seem relevant. No wonder they are far more likely to truant. There are 300 schools in Britain in which one in ten pupils skip school for at least one day a week. In some schools, the figure is as high as one in four.6 One estimate has around half a million young people on unauthorized absence from school each week.' Working-class students are far more likely to truant than their better-off peers. Itrepresents a tragic lack of confidence on their part in the ability of education to be even remotely relevant to their lives.

  The problem is that parents and children who are cynical about education have something of a point. More and more university graduates are forced to take relatively humble jobs--never mind those teenagers who stay on to do A-levels and leave it at that. Newcastle supermarket worker Mary Cunningham told me about the growing numbers of graduates working on the checkout. 'There's people who've gone to university, got their degrees, and can't find anything else,' she says. Government advice published in 2009 recommended graduates look at 'entry-level positions in retail or hospitality', or call centres.'

  'you could have more and more people with higher-level qualifications in relatively low-level jobs, and with relatively low-level earnings,' says sociologist John Goldthorpe. One senior Tory politician has spoken to him about his fears of 'a kind of underemployed intelligentsia who could get very radicalized'. Things are looking even bleaker as the axe falls on the public sector. For years, it has been the most popular choice for students fresh from graduation ceremonies. The fundamental issue is: if you are unlikely to obtain a secure, well-paid job even after years of studying, why bother at all? If you are going to end up working in a shop regardless, it is understandable that slaving away at school for years seems like a waste of time. If we want kids with 'aspiration', we need to give them something to aspire to.

  Separating children by class also has an impact on their learning. Fiona Millar points out that there is a highly segregated education system in large swathes of the country, particularly by the time pupils finish primary school. Many better-off children go on to attend grammar or private schools. 'If you go to the independent sector they get totally different experiences, like small class sizes and more resources,' she says. 'In fact, they're the ones who need itleast in a way.' Millar points out that this is damaging because having a balanced intake is crucial when it comes to educational attainment and successful schools. 'The real double whammy is if you come from a disadvantaged background and you live in a very disadvantaged community, where there is no social mix at all. I think that can be a very negative and downward spiral.' And the problem then is that schools that cater exclusively for poor, working-class kids end up being-as she puts it-'demonized'.

  Middle-class parents have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves to get their kids into the best schools. I have an acquaintance whose landlord pretended to live at the address, so that their child would be in the catchment area of a good local comprehensive. Other parents pretend to find God as a blandishment to a high-performing faith schooL And the privileged can pay to top up their children's education by hiring private tutors. As Rachel Johnson says, when it comes to looking after their own, there are no lengths the sharp-elbowed middle classes will not go to.

  Millar believes that segregation at such a young age facilitates the development of hostility to working-class individuals and communities. It sounds so trite that whenever Isay itpublicly people start booing and hissing from the audience, because they think it's a sort of hearts and flowers point and it isn't a point about hard educational qualifications. But if you've beentoa school with lots of different kids, and you've got your friends from a huge circle, then all that demonization of poor children, or children from different races, is broken down.

  This segregation is set to get worse. The Conservative government is building on New Labour's introduction of competition and market principles into education. 'There is this stupid assumption by people who think of themselves as New Labour,' says former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, 'that if they put schools in competition with each other, the result will be a better product. Now that might apply to baked beans or even fur coats, certainly cars and telephone design, but bullshit when it's applied to schools! Because no one starts from the same place.' Kinnock, who after all paved the way for New Labour, finds thistobe 'worse than idiotic. It's wrong,it's fundamentally had.'

  The Tories are taking this principle further. One of their flagship policies is to launch 'free schools' set up and managed by parents and private institutions, but funded by the state. Not only will these new independent institutions drain money away from other schools; we already have a good idea where the project will end, because it has been tried in Sweden where itfailed with disastrous consequences.

  As right-wing Swedish Education Minister Bertil Ostberg admitted: 'We have actually seen a fall in the quality of Swedish schools since the free schools were introduced.' All they achieved was more segregation. 'The free schools are generally attended by children of better educated and wealthy families, making things even more difficult for children attending ordinary schools in poor areas ... Most of our free schools have ended up being run by companies for profit.' Instead, he urged politicians to focus on improving teaching quality across the board.

  But, as Fiona Millar strongly insists, school is merely one factor. 'The best estimate I have ever seen of the school effect is 20 per cent of the outcome in children.' For her, factors like 'residential geography and housing, peer pressure, educational attainment of the parents, ability of the parents to support their learning' are, taken together, far more important to a child's educational success. Education expert Dr Gillian Evans agrees, arguing that the prospects of a working-class child are dramatically increased by things like safe streets to play in; good schools and housing; supportive families, whatever structure they may take; good local services; and a strong local economy with a wide range of decent working-class jobs.

  This is why the calls of some Tory right-wingers for the reintroduction of academic selection are so misguided. The Tory MP David Davis takes 'the view that the demise of the grammar school did massive damage to the levels of social mobility in the country'. The argument is that grammar schools gave bright working-class kids the opportunity to thrive. John Goldthorpe disputes the perception that social mobility has, overall, declined: for men ithas stagnated, but for women ithas increased. But Davis also argues that' nearly every education system in the world except ours selects on academic ability one way or another,' overlooking the fact that 164 grammar schools remain, and the Finnish education system-generally ranked the world's best-has no element of selection. In any case, the old British grammar schools (like those remaining today) were
overwhelmingly middle class, and huge numbers of working-class children were written off as failures in the old secondary moderns.

  The truth is that because of the other important factors that condition a child's educational achievement, the old grammar schools did not even necessarily help the working-class kids who got in. A government report in 1954 showed that, of around 16,000 grammar school pupils from semi-skilled and unskilled families, around 9,000 failed to get three passes at a-level. Out of these children, around 5,000 left school before the end of their fifth year. Only one in twenty got two A-levels. Conversely, recent research has shown that middle-class kids who attend struggling inner-city comprehensives do much, much better than their fellow students. This is because the school you attend is one factor among in a class-divided society, many. The decisive issue is class.

  All of us end up paying for an education system segregated by class. According to a report by a world-leading management consultancy, the whole of society foots the bill for 'Britain's rigid class system', due to the 'loss of economic potential caused by children born into poorly educated, low-income families ... ' The price they put on it was more than

  £50 billion a year.

  With so many advantages from birth, it is no wonder that the middle classes go on to dominate top universities. According to a report by the Office for Fair Access, intelligent children from England's richest fifth are seven times more likely to go to university than intelligent children from the poorest 40 per cent. This is up from six times as likely in the mid 1990s. As you move up the rankings toward Oxbridge at the summit, the imbalance grows. In 2002-03, 5.4 per cent of Cambridge and 5.8 per cent of Oxford students came from 'low participation neigh- bourhoods'. By 2008-09, it had fallen back to 3.7 and 2.7 per cent respectively." Or consider the fact that, in the academic year 2006--07, only forty-five children claiming free school meals made it to Oxbridge---out of around 6,000 successful applicants."