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.
Milburn’s report means schools should look outwards
I’m picking up on a couple of recent themes today.
The first is the peculiar phenomenon of an apparently doomed Government producing some very worthwhile policy material. Last week there was the Social Care Green Paper and the Low Carbon Transition Plan. This week we will see the conclusions of Alan Milburn’s review of how to improve social mobility in to the professions. Yet the weekend polls confirm that, politically, Labour is in dire straits.
To give Milburn his due he has been making social mobility his personal crusade ever since 2003 when he moved from being Secretary of State for Health. As he is standing down next year this report is his swan song, and, as the good media operator he is, he has been busy stoking up interest in the report.
One statistic in particular caught my eye from the pre-briefing. Parental attitudes to learning are, we are told, four times as important as financial status in influencing children’s educational outcomes.
This was a point I made a few days ago in the content of a post about the RSA’s forthcoming ‘Schools without Boundaries’ report. I pointed out that school pupils spend 80% of their waking hours outside school and that if, in this time, there is little or nothing to reinforce a disposition to learn, schools face a steep uphill task in their 20%.
I haven’t had a reply yet to my open letter to Michael Gove, although there has been a fascinating exchange about it on my comment pages. But I have been reflecting that Michael and I agree about something even if we draw diametrically opposite conclusions. I agree with the Conservative Education spokesperson that schools are being expected to do too much with the time they have available to influence children.
Schools working in communities that lack commitment and confidence about learning are like factory workers trying to make a great product when they only control a fifth of the conveyor belt. Not only do they have to do great work in their segment but they end up desperately trying to make up for the shoddy work that was done before, and trying to protect the product from what is likely to happen when the line moves on. Trying to get every young person to be a successful and rounded student, schools end up taking on ever more responsibilities and having to develop a whole range of strategies to engage pupils who are not emotionally receptive to learning.
But while I suspect Michael’s response to this is to emphasise the boundary between the responsibilities of schools – to transfer knowledge – and the community, ours is to bridge that boundary, encouraging schools to explore how they can foster a culture of learning in the wider community.
Milburn’s report underlines that without cultural change among those communities whose children tend to under perform, most schools will only be able to make a difference at the margins.
Why did I have to be so Frank?
I need a holiday. I keep making mistakes. I did it again today.
Michael Gove spoke here this morning. In a typically robust and engaging performance he repeated his scepticism about competence based curricula like our own Opening Minds. Gove is highly rated by just about everyone and is very likely to be running our schools this time next year. I need to keep on the right side of him to try to persuade him and his team to be a bit more open minded about Opening Minds. So, this morning I politely asked Michael if he would have an on-line debate with me so we could go into the issues in more depth than was possible in a ten minute Q and A session. He kindly agreed.
So far so good. But then this afternoon I was at a Conservative Home conference organised to brief various public affairs types on the Tory Party as it prepares for power.
In response to a question about whether the Conservatives could have a positive message for the next election I contrasted Conservative health spokesman Andrew Lansley (who was here last night) with Michael Gove.
I recalled the difference between Labour’s education strategy pre-1997 and their health strategy. In the former case, David Blunkett battled with his own Party to make clear he would keep most of the framework created by Kenneth Baker in the 1988 Education Reform Bill but with some changes at the margins, acceleration of elements like the literacy strategy and also using money from abolishing assisted places to reduce primary class sizes. In health, by contrast, Labour said the Tories were totally wrong and pledged to dismantle the Conservative internal market, which they subsequently did, only to later rebuild it under Alan Milburn at huge cost.
Approaching the next election Lansley is in the Blunkett position, broadly endorsing Labour’s approach but emphasising areas he would change, things he would stop and new offers he would make. But Gove sounds more like Labour on health in 1997 suggesting that the whole school system is in a mess and that only the practice he likes from the very best schools is worth emulating. Gove is also arguing for some profound changes in funding and structure. Indeed his agenda was described by Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home as ‘a school revolution’.
The contrast was underlined in the audience reaction to the speeches. Both got warm applause, with many people clearly agreeing. But while no one seemed to want to disagree loudly with Lansley, with Michael Gove I have never known an event where so many people came up to me at the end to express concern about what they had heard, including two head teachers. (Not that this will worry Michael too much as cocking a snook at the educational establishment is, I suspect, part of his strategy)
Not everyone will agree with me so far, but it’s not that which is the problem. You see, the minister in charge of health policy for Labour in 1997 was Frank Dobson and so, in front of lots and lots of Conservatives, I said ‘in his tendency to condemn the schools system wholesale Michael Gove reminds me a bit of Frank Dobson’.
It is a toss up which of these two eminent politicians of different generations would be most appalled by my comparison. But when Michael is told – which he most certainly will be – that could be our bridges burnt.
I suppose it’s too late to say sorry?
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