Will the middle class ever commit to social mobility?
Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility will lead to lots of hand wringing about how hard it is to break down privilege. But will anything change?
On Sunday I went to see Reginald D Hunter perform on the South Bank. His mixture of superficial social commentary and utter obscenity was pretty hit or miss. But there was one point he made that struck a chord. His father has defended himself from attack saying that he only carried some or other sexual misdemeanour ‘for the sake of the family’. As Hunter says this is the ‘universal father defence’; almost any action however crass, cruel or greedy can be justified on the grounds that it was taken in the interests of the family.
So it is with the middle classes, particularly in the pursuit of a place in a ‘good school’. Even though the evidence suggests that it is better aggregately for society to have mixed intake schools, and even though other evidence shows that 80 – 90% of a child’s performance is down to home influences, still the middle classes do everything they can to monopolise these ‘good’ schools. Presumably the most sought are among the ‘top 100 schools’ that the Conservative front bench say every school should be expected to copy.
But research published by the ESRC puts into question the whole idea of ‘good’ schools. Using value added data, Professor Harvey Goldstein and George Leckie show that there is little or no correlation between the past performance and the future prospects of a school. Indeed basing your school choice on past results is about as clever as basing your investments on the past performance of an investment fund (not that it stops people doing it.
The dynamic of a school becoming sought after is more to do with property than performance. A school may start off with an advantage such as being in a largely middle class area or having a good head. As soon as the school gets a good name, middle class people start moving into the area (the ESRC research shows there is a much stronger correlation between past school performance and property prices than with future school performance). As a consequence the intake to the school becomes more privileged, driving up further its raw league table results (which is what parents tend to look at) and so it goes on.
As I have said in the past, the barrier to social mobility in the UK is less about the lack of desire of the poor to move up and more about the utter tenacity of the upper middle classes in making sure their offspring never move down. And as the hostility people show to any tax on inheritance underlines, the vast majority of the well off are determined to make sure they pass on privilege down the generations.
Milburn’s report deserves serious debate. I am sure most of his 80 recommendations make sense. But unless the middle classes are willing to let their children stand or fall on their merit, or voters are willing to countenance a more profound redistribution of income and assets, it is difficult to see the UK becoming a more socially mobile country.
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14 Comments on Will the middle class ever commit to social mobility?
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Liam Murray on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 10:36 am
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dan on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 10:54 am
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jestyn on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 1:16 pm
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Joe Nutt on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 1:27 pm
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Liam Murray on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 2:16 pm
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Susmita on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 2:53 pm
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Liz Coleman on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 2:53 pm
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Liam Murray on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 3:13 pm
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matthewtaylor on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 4:15 pm
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roy bland on
Wed, 22nd Jul 2009 5:57 pm
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Matt Grist on
Thu, 23rd Jul 2009 9:35 am
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Social mobility - some clarification : Matthew Taylor’s blog on
Thu, 23rd Jul 2009 1:22 pm
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Neil O'Brien on
Thu, 30th Jul 2009 9:30 am
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matthewtaylor on
Fri, 31st Jul 2009 9:05 pm
I should highlight upfront that I haven’t yet read / sourced the full Millburn report, just the various stories about it. If anyone could add a link to the report itself that would be very useful.
One of the dangers when talking about social mobility is that objections to proposals aimed at increasing it are framed as objections to the outcome itself. ‘Ever greater’ social mobility is assumed to be an immutable good such that no matter what substance there may to those objections (in terms of fairness etc.), because they ‘threaten’ that outcome of more social mobility they’re dismissed on that basis rather than considered on their merits. Common sense tells you that even when you remove all the barriers to success that social background erects you will still have a spread of success; you’ll still have people constrained by nothing other than their own talent & ability (or lack thereof) and those who go onto success after success. I can’t recall the source but I’ve heard this referred to as the ‘we can’t all be astronauts’ argument. The logic of this suggests there’s level of social mobility that reflects this natural (you could say ‘fair’) state but nobody ever articulates that.
hi, Matthew,
interesting & thought-provoking. Here are the 2 bits I think need work:
“basing your school choice on past results is about as clever as basing your investments on the past performance of an investment fund”
There’s a positive mutual attraction effect in schools that doesn’t exist in investment funds. A ‘good’ school (whether it starts from property patterns or otherwise) attracts good teachers, a good headteacher, etc. It also attracts parents who actively work to achieve a ‘good’ education for their kids & are therefore more likely to push for improvement in the school & to help educate their kids at home. The peer learning effect kicks in & everyone benefits.
There is no similarity there with investment funds.
“unless the middle classes are willing to let their children stand or fall on their merit”
This implies that childrens learning & results may be artificially ‘dragged up’ on the merit of outside factors. ie… educated.
Any thoughts?
dan
Hi Matthew
Mostly I enjoy reading your posts – they make me think! But this time, aren’t you a little incoherent?
Are some schools “good ” or not? You argue “not” – you say that ESRC research shows that past performance doesn’t drive future prospects, and 80-90% of results are down to home influences. In which case, does it matter that the middle class (foolishly) pay for expensive houses near “good schools” – let them waste their money. Then later you say being in a middle class area and having good teachers makes a school good… I don’t think I understand.
Shouldn’t the emphasis be on how to ensure that every school is doing the best it can with the intake it happens to get. This might involve finding a way to ensure a truly comprehensive intake (bussing anybody?). But it might also involve some effort to get the best teachers into schools with more underpriviledged children – paying good teachers more? (or incentivising them in some other way?). Or it might involve mechanisms that help schools themselves know when they are succeeding or not. This could be properly designed and interpreted league tables (although the exams they are based on seem to be being cancelled). Or it might be vouchers, which would at least allow schools to know which ones parents THINK are the best, even if it doesn’t relate to reality.
Whatever the solution, moaning about “the middle classes” wanting to do the best for their children (whether or not those children actually “deserve” it) is unlikely to lead to a more successful outcome – nobody with kids wants anything but the very best for them.
Jestyn
I’ve only just finished reading the summary and recommendations but it left me open mouthed in disbelief. As Liam requests, The summary is available here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_09_fair_access_summary.pdf
When will they grasp that equality is simply incompatible with the very things that fuel educational aspiration: competition and variety?
Thank you Joe.
I’ve expanded on my comment above here:
“unless the middle classes are willing to let their children stand or fall on their merit”
Could you expand on how this would be done? I’m guessing that not sending kids to private school would be one thing, but do you have other ideas that might be considered as having children stand or fall on “merit”?
I went to a local planning development committee last night at which planners were quoting your report, whilst at the same time suggesting that a permanent public open space be carved up by developers with a road to serve a rapid transit bus route from a new housing development which has not yet been finally located to a railway station which has not been built, the location of which has not yet been decided, and which there is no money for in the foreseeable future (say 40 years or so). Clearly developers want to build this road from and to nowhere as a platform for further housing in an area which is agreed to be already over-developed. How do we fight this silly proposal before it is too late?
“unless the middle classes are willing to let their children stand or fall on their merit”
The real life scenario at the core of this statement is as follows:
- Middle class parent knows their child is of average (at best) intellectual ability.
- They know that tremendous parental pressure & support will be needed to secure, say, a place at university.
- They also ‘know’ that applying such pressure might result in a child with more innate ability but from a less supportive home life would ‘lose’ that place at uni.
- Consequently they decide not to ‘push’ their child.
It shouldn’t need saying how proposterous an idea that is….
Liz
Do you have the right Matthew Taylor – are you looking for the MP (this blog is Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA)? Thanks, Barbara
I’m middle class by most definitions. I live next to some terrible state schools. Just dreadful. Right now, I live in a (very) working class neighborhood.
This blog post almost makes it sound like concern for you child’s education is solely a middle class concern, but of course many working class parents would like to get their kids into a good school, and some of those I’ve spoken to very much wish they didn’t have to send their kids to the local schools round us. (Some other parents of course couldn’t give two shits).
I really don’t want my children to attend the schools they are likely to if I stay where I am, and much as I don’t want to, I’ll probably move to a better catchment area. Sadly this option isn’t available to other parents in the neighbourhood, who are skint (although I was talking to a plumber in the pub the other week – no suspicion of middle classness about him – who is saving to send his kids to private school, the local ones being so bad).
According to you, this makes me the enemy of social mobility – guilty of a crass, cruel and greedy action – wanting to “pass on privilege”.
Other things I do to transmit advantages to my children include encouraging them to read, I talk to them about the world around them and try to interest them in things, don’t let them watch too much telly, feed them healthy food, and try to encourage good behavior. There “home influences” are OK in your book, even though they do most of the work in “passing on privilege” (80 to 90% of it) and presumably inhibit social mobility a great deal, shrinking the chance that my children will “move down”, as you’d like to see. I don’t really understand why conferring advantage via home influences is not crass & cruel too.
(I wonder what neighborhood the chief executive of the RSA lives in?)
I have to say I think the whole idea of social mobility is pretty pernicious. What it really means is a few more kids getting into the top 20 per cent of earnings/esteem endowing professions. A better approach would be to view the non-elite occupations as esteem-endowing and to make them better paid as a result (pay a lot of professionals less to re-balance – why should a mediocre technocrat earn 60-70k a year with fantastic benefits, have we had a debate about why this has occurred?). We should have much more respect for vocational training as they do in Germany, rather than try to get everybody going to University chasing the same narrow range of jobs.
[...] I angered a few people with my comments about social mobility earlier this week. In particular, people objected to the implication that I dissaproved of the [...]
The report you reference doesn’t necessarily cast doubt on whether there are good school or not – it just tells you that CVA does not identify good schools. That might be because of statistical weaknesses in CVA, which wouldn’t necessarily mean that some are not consistently more or less value adding *in reality*.
eg. http://www.education2.bham.ac.uk/documents/staff/gorard_s/School_effectiveness_paper3.pdf
“If the VA residuals were actually only error, how would the results behave? We would expect CVA results to be volatile and inconsistent over years and between key stages in the same schools. This is what we generally find (Hoyle and Robinson 2003, Tymms and Dean 2004, Kelly and Monczunski 2007).”
Fair point Neil. I’m on holiday and lacking the energy to explore this in depth. But I’ll make sure to read deeper if i come back to the subject. Thank you
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