Education and the Working Class

"This is one of the few books about education that you can recommend to the general reader – it is based on in-depth interviews with 88 working-class families after their children had been through the grammar school system after the Second World War, when free secondary education was really opened up. Again, I think what it captures is a combination of the eternal and an England that has completely vanished. But it also exposes the complexities and the reality of social mobility. The sorts of families these children came from, the sorts of people they became – it gives you far more of a real feeling both for what was achieved but also the human cost. There was a gulf that was often created between socially mobile kids and their families, a conflict within families about whether they wanted their children to succeed or not. Social mobility is such an issue in this country, it goes back to the fact that we have had this gigantic revolution in our education system several times over, which is more than almost anywhere else. And people who experienced one system are aware of what was lost, both bad and good, in a way that people in countries that have experienced much less dramatic change are not. I think with the grammar schools, what people remember, even though this wasn’t the predominant aspect of it, were the children for whom their lives were completely changed. I suppose if you look at English history there has always been – even if small and narrow – a path by which a certain number of very talented children could progress. Most social mobility happens very gradually: your parents get a bit further than your grandparents and you want your children to get a bit further than you. But there has always been this belief that some children should be identified and encouraged and helped up. And that was after all the origin of most of the public schools. I think that one of the reasons people do get so upset about grammar schools is that we feel we’ve lost this opportunity for the very bright and the very determined to make a leap. I’m not advocating a return to grammar schools because the 11-plus was brutal – it was a system that made the majority of 11-year-olds feel that their life was over in most respects. But I think we feel very strongly that we have lost something that was symbolically important and symbols matter in a society. I’m not against it in the sense of thinking it should be rolled back or should never have happened. University expansion is and was inevitable but we just have to recognise that it changes the whole nature of education as well as the labour market. And yes, symbolism about opportunity is tremendously important – think of the difference between how most British people feel about Britain and how most Americans feel about America. The objective differences are nothing like as great as we think but it’s to do with the symbols and what we believe. On the university expansion question there is no way we could not have done it – the whole world has done it. But we have to be aware of the downside as well as the upside, which is partly that now anyone who doesn’t go to university finds the door slammed in their faces, whereas in the past you could come up via the shop floor or other routes."