I don't know what to think about this - Some parents need to be nannied by the state

I completely agree. What needs to change is the British mindset that university professional is the definition of success.

We need more tradies in this country and it’s only seen as a route for kids who didn’t pass their GCSEs. The irony being that most of them fail their course/not being able to get up to standard as being a plumber/electrician/mechanic/carpenter means having to become skilled.

For a country to be successful we need gardeners, bus drivers, piano tuners, nursery nurses, graphic designers, physiotherapists, accountants and finance analysts. Is the goal for every child in this country to earn six-figures?

I thought the article was going to be based upon some parents do not know what a healthy meal is, or encouraging healthy habits within their children. As PP said upthread, there’s always kids that start school who don’t know how a book ‘works’. These are the parents that need nannying. Not parents who aren’t going to push their kids into studying Classics at Cambridge.

@Another2Cats none of this will ever fix the many parents who do not work, do not want to work, expect the government to give them everything they need, eg housing, clothing, money, food! everything that many of us workour guts off for. then there are the parents who spend most of their money on booze, drugs, tattoos, fake lashes, botox, duck enhancers etc etc rather than their kids! really just the parents or single mothers who cant be arsed with their kids once the romanticised view of babyhood has worn off!

I think schools need to ensure that DCs from disadvantaged backgrounds are encouraged to aim high. As someone who grew up on a council estate, with parents who had left school at 14-16, I wasn't behind educationally when I started school (I was reading fluently and could do basic maths well before then) but I was totally reliant on information from school discover what career possibilities could be open to me and how to navigate further / higher education.

The article seems to believe there's only one route to success - study Maths and go to Cambridge.

For the young person who struggles with maths but wants to run their own business, Business Studies is a much more valuable A Level.

Oxbridge isn't the be-all and end-all. If you're studying art, you want to be at the Royal College of Art. For Economics, you want LSE. Nursing at KCL, music at the Royal College of Music, sports at Loughborough, and so on. Choosing the most prestigious uni is very subjective depending on which subject you're aiming to study.

The whole article has a very narrow view of what is considered success. "Wealthy people = good parents, poor people = bad parents".

Thing is though it starts early and it’s very difficult to catch up. Money undoubtedly helps but it doesn’t have to be expensive to help educationally. There are lots of free resources etc. But, you’ve got to have the education to access them in the first place.

I was looking around secondary schools recently and was really struck by one of the other parents in the group pointing to the maths on the board and saying he couldn’t understand it, maths was too hard and boring etc. His child obviously isn’t going to be getting help in that area at home. There is nothing really a school can do to bridge the gap between a child at home with a parent who isn’t number age and one doing maths with a child from a young age, one that will use it in cooking with them etc.

It's not really about money though, it's about attitude.
My parents weren't rich, dont have an O level between them, couldn't help with homework but they valued education and family time. Regular trips to the library, watching lots of documentaries and high expectations on behaviour. University was never mentioned at home as it was the great unknown but they were cautiously supportive although concerned about the money.

After uni following various life circumstances I became a single parent in a council flat in a disadvantaged area, have what I consider a good job now although certainly not by MN standards and have instilled in DD the importance of education. Most of the things we do that have the most impact are free. Seeking out museum, art gallery exhibits, science fairs, poetry readings, local theatre shows are all low cost or free. A week's geology trip to Dorset with Rock Watch was under £300 with everything included - most of the parents there had PhDs or Masters. The only thing I've done that cost quite a bit was buy her the text books and accompanying workbooks for her GCSE subjects but even those could have been borrowed from the library.

It's about seeking out the opportunities and feeling like you belong and that it is for the likes of you (something my mum still struggles with) not the cost. It's a parental self esteem issue rather than a parenting or educational one really.

I can see where the 50% policy came from.

A deindustrialised economy needs a lot of well educated people to work in it. There aren't the same number of opportunities to walk out of school at 16 and straight onto the tools. University was seen as the route to that. This has been reviewed subsequently and seen as a very narrow approach, so routes such as T-level and degree apprenticeships have been added.

Widening participation so that university wasn't the preserve of the wealthy and advantaged. The possibilities were to open up university to a lot more people to dilute the privilege (the 50% route), or to keep numbers low and quota/positive discriminate based on academic achievement moderated by academic opportunity. And if you think the private school parents are squealing because of VAT, imagine what their reaction would be if their children were taking a 20% penalty on their UCAS points to handicap the private school privilege and put them on an even playing field with the comprehensive kids.

I think Wes Streeting has previously made quite a lot of noise about the social benefits middle class children have that are often not fully appreciated - travel, visits to museums/art galleries, theatre, new experiences etc. Again, I fully agree with this and I wish that if the parents can't provide these, we could find better ways for schools to. Around here the "better" schools do some of this, but not at a high level. And schools like the ones my DS is at are vey focused on in-school currently so there's just little or no spare resources for this. Which is a pity.

I teach in a very deprived area of the country and to be perfectly frank, people need help. Unless support is put in from birth then the cycle will never break. Child support services are desperately oversubscribed, thresholds for intervention are incredibly high and some people either do not know or do not have the capacity to parent their children.

I have to agree - you don't need to attend Cambridge or do Maths A Level to be successful and socially mobile so they are ridiculous examples of what's important to know. Also what age children were surveyed? I doubt most younger children would even know what A Levels were!

But there is something in having a broad, wide ranging knowledge and exposure to culture that tends to sit firmly among middle + classes.

Oracy, leadership, confidence - the difference I see between classes here is significant and what I think I would focus on at schools.

On the flip side, children from poorer backgrounds seem to typically "play out" from a younger age and be more responsible for their own well-being, which can lead to good resilience and problem solving.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104

Intelligence — the ability to learn, reason and solve problems — is at the forefront of behavioural genetic research. Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait.

This comes back to averages doesn't it.

Wasn't there an education Minister a few years ago who said his aim was for all kids to be "above average" and displaying a ridiculous understanding that to be above average, you have to have an average, and people below average.

The challenge is how to help those children who are academically below average still have thriving opportunities. And that's where we come back to the need to prioritise vocational skills and careers.

It's mad to think that Covid lockdowns really highlighted the essential careers - e.g. nursing, care, retail,- even hairdressing - those stuff that we all desperately needed. Yet nothing has changed, its still looked down if someone wants to work in those careers. We need to find ways to show that even in manual or low paid jobs there are opportunities for career progression and that nothing is ever truly a "dead end" job.

There is strong evidence to suggest nurture, especially in the earliest years is more of a factor in terms of intelligence than genetics and certainly genetics is not a factor in attainment.

From my experience as a new mum in 2000s, that was true to a degree. I do remember at the one nearest us in North London that there were classes ringfenced for mums identified as needing more support and I think they were picked up from home by helpers or social workers. There was definitely a pro-active approach to supporting all mums in the community.

I totally understand why SureStart was popular and why it would work well today too- Health Visitors and GPs are hard to get hold of and the former used to run on vague timings like “sometime on Tuesday afternoon” when mine were kids.

The worst parents wouldn’t be seen anywhere like that but the ones who’d say like a chat about weaning with a professional would be able to have someone discuss it with them.

It’s very simplistic to assume that the worst parents are poor ones. There will be many kids of rich parents under SS radar because of middle class parent privilege.

have you got peer reviewed research to back that up? Because it reads like bollocks to me. What does ‘wealthier’ mean in your context?

He’s not saying the universities are not for everyone. He’s saying the answer to the question is not obvious to everyone.

I'm obviously not saying don't help them, but expecting (and then being surprised when it's not achieved) academic success from the entire population is ridiculous.

There needs to be more focus on vocational skills and careers.

If you want to make a difference for future children in your position, can I recommend volunteering as an Enterprise Adviser? The role is a lot more flexible that it might appear.

I've been one for a couple of years. It's not been as rewarding as it could have been, the biggest issues being that schools don't fully appreciate what an EA can offer, and the careers role in schools is sadly often still too junior, too part-time, and too focussed on ticking the Gatsby checkmarks. But it's improving.

I read about a pilot project, it was before covid and I can’t find the details on it again. Each support worker had a case load of two families whose children were at risk of being taking into care. They had enough time to help plan bedtime routines and be there to help them establish them, they could teach financial planning, helping them meal plan and go with them to the shops. Lots of hand holding through basic skills. The parents had to sign a parenting contract. It contains things like if your children are not in bed by certain time then they will be taken into care. The project was a last chance saloon for many families to stay together. Fewer children were taken into care than the in the control group. I’ve often wondered what the long term outcomes for those children were. Did the children in the project fair better than those who didn’t?

Where I work, they have received government funding for a new programme called Start for Life - aimed at first-time parents who also have mental health problems, English as a second language etc. My job has been to refer people in and the uptake I think has been good. Only funded until March, but fingers crossed it’s extended. I’m too young to have interacted with the Sure Start centres, but SFL will do home visits, 1:1, and support parents from 16/40 until the child is 2.

I’ve yet to see this play out in some of the families I now know through my DH. Grandfathers went to oxbridge, parents did and I’ve never encountered a case where one of their adult children is just stupid and as a direct result struggles with life and their career. Unsurprisingly they still manage to get into successful careers even if they aren’t the most academically bright.
Some of these include people who have all but failed at uni and are still in £400k salaried jobs in their 30s!
Family matters a lot more than ability.

I agree with this.

Even as a teenager at the time, I could tell that Tony Blair's mantra of "50% going to university" was an awful policy.

Tbh that started the whole mess we're now in with the financial disaster around university finances.

Unfortunately many children do not have the encouragement from their families to continue with education. There are many clever children who are let down by low expectations. I grew up in a working class area and many kids despite getting good GCSEs would never have considered continuing to A levels as the expectation was to leave school at 16 and work.

I live in a very deprived town. We have Family hubs, similar to sure start. They are busy, with poor parents, because they have been placed in the right places and have been advertised in a way that appeals to poor parents, not those well off.

They offer groups that are research based interventions to give the best start. Such as baby massage, art at the start, speech and language groups, dad's groups, school readiness, workshops on feeding baby, being a better parent, cost of living, special needs.

It is all free and open to all. The town is doing so much better in the last 10 years since a lottery funded project was granted.

If anyone wants to know more about what is going on, Google Blackpool betterstart