To think that this government wants to prevent social mobility?

[lottieandmia22]

They peddle sound bites about hardworking people and then close all the children's centres. Therefore stopping disadvantaged children from starting out on a more level playing field. Of all the things I hate about the Tories this issue makes me the most angry.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/feb/20/childrens-centres-closed-austerity-council-cuts-tracy-brabin?CMP=sharebtnn_fb

Thats a good point mellongoose.
Social mobility means people moving up and down the social scale. But it doesn't tend to happen because middle class people leverage all their advantages to ensure that their kids arent the ones to move down. They operate something thats been called the "glass floor".
Working class people tend to become middle class in periods when the middle class is growing. Or when the difference in living standards between the middle and workign class is shrinking.
Social mobility without social equality doesn't tend to happen.

Cuboidal I was not arguing that the socialists fucked up grammar schools (we are all allowed typos are we not?).
I was arguing the socialists fucked up a collaboration between workers, owners and providers of finance which would have shared things more evenly. They continue to do so in this country by driving a wedge between people, claiming the rich are evil and appealing to victimhood. Successful countries with a left wing bent do not do this.

I have the slightly contradictory urge to defend sure start even though I wouldn't have enjoyed it. Better a flawed service than no service at all.

Please don't take the linked thread as reflective of children's centres when they were open access. I went a lot in 2009/10 (before we moved to an area without one) and any advice was kindly given in a conversational way. Maybe we were exceptionally lucky with staff.

They asked if I wanted to go to the young parents group (I was 21) and I said no, they didn't ask again. Just happily said hi and a chat when I turned up to the general groups, sensory play, see the HV etc that I wanted to do. At the baby group it was all set up in a circle so you could talk to the other mums and the staff would just chat to you about your baby. Really welcoming and kind.

If the only way to go would have been to rock up and say 'hi I'm a target group young mum' I honestly would not have gone at all and would have been really lonely. I was already struggling, just not with the kind of things the young parents group was aimed at (weaning, sleep advice blah blah) just feeling a bit depressed and anxious and lonely. The company of other mums who'd been working ten years in interesting jobs but still had non-sleeping babies was honestly such a leveler and gave me so much confidence about my abilities.

There weren't any snacks though usually, so maybe that's how they got around raw broccoli edicts from on high! Except the dad's group... they got bacon sandwiches...

Social mobility doesn't mean everyone should jump up a class. Imo it should mean that everyone has the same chance on an individual level, and that quality of life improves for those in the bottom half.

At the moment it's the other way. The working class are no longer bottom because we now have the ultimately disadvantaged underclass beneath them. Families that imo are more top end of working class get to consider themselves mc, because compared to the nmw incomes and lifestyles of the wc they are one above. The traditional mc, Drs, barristers etc now appear to be upper mc by comparison to the new mc. And so on. Nobody has actually moved upwards, but by pushing everyone down in living standards/ opportunity it gives the illusion people are upwardly mobile.

(Just to add, by class I am referring to job/ lifestyle etc, not how they speak or what they call their meals!)

whirlwind Nearly all the sure start staff I've met are lovely and genuine. The problem is that the patronising clueless one is nearly always the one to go round loudly interfering.

Imo the main general problem with them not serving full purpose was that the services were insufficient for those who really need help. And for those needing minor help/ support the services are often at least a little patronising and not always fit for purpose.

I'd love to set up classes showing not just how to manage a budget, but how to stretch it as far as possible. Cookery courses for simple, cheap family meals, with lots of info on what alternatives to use if you don't have x in the cupboard.

Yeah, I didn't need advice tbh though. I had Google.

I needed people, and a free place to go to meet them. At the time we were so skint. And I could not afford even £3 a week for a church baby group.

I don't think people who haven't been in that situation understand what that feels like and how isolated it makes you. If I'd just been at home with my milk tokens going shit, my baby is in child poverty... And I had moments where I panicked about that, but instead I had somewhere free to go from birth to just Talk to other parents about night waking and nappies and normal things that made me feel like I knew what I was doing.

It was a big deal.

I'm really gutted there are so few open sessions like that left across the country.

With regard to cc's, I live in one of the most deprived boroughs in England.

When my dd was born 7 years ago I went out and looked for groups, none of it was recommended to me it advertised.

I went to a brilliant baby group but it only lasted for 8 weeks.
I asked if we could set up our own one as it was a lovely bunch of people ( would class all as struggling financially to some degree )
and that's what we did.

Me and a couple of friends who I had met at the group set up the group, went on courses to satisfy red tape etc and kept it going until our own dc were at nursery or school and it was too difficult to maintain.

There is nothing there at all now like that.

I have no direct experience of the middle class mummy demographic and think it's sad that this centre exists in the middle of a deprived area and is mainly empty.

Children centre matters very little compared to parents involvement in their children's education. What I see in the UK is the lower class people most of them have no interest in their children education hence generations in the family staying in the same social class. In another country I used to live in parents put education first, sit with their kids to do homework and there is no benefit for safety net. Here Labour wants to give people the fish instead of the fishing rod.

Natural aptitude occurs in a similar percentage of children from all backgrounds

As Wikipedia would say, "citation needed". There's no worthwhile evidence that's true. Such evidence as there might be involved inter- and immediately post-war twins studies, back when there were a lot more infant adoptions and a rather more callous attitude to families being kept together. Unfortunately, because Cyril Burt was a charlatan with a bee in his bonnet, his evidence is utterly untrustworthy. He contaminated the evidence base, and we can't do the experiments again because it would be wildly, wildly unethical.

We aren't surprised that Liz McColgan's daughter is an Olympic-standard athlete, that Nigel Clough and Frank Lampard are quite good at footy, or that Teddy and Kami Thompson can hold a tune; that the latter is in a band with her husband shows a great deal of bravery given how it ended up for mum and dad. We aren't puzzled that Carrie Fisher or Melanie Griffiths or Jane Fonda or (after a fashion) Keifer Sutherland can act, either. And for a greater concentration, I think there's been at least one son of a former F1 driver on the F1 grid for the past 26 years, at peak I think three or maybe even four, and most of them have been at least as quick as their fathers (Max Verstappen's mother was very quick too). Nature, nurture or opportunity? Ah, if only there were an ethical way to find out.

But quite why we express no surprise when athletes, musicians and actors have children who follow in their footsteps, but cling to the idea that intelligence isn't hereditary, I don't know. Even if it's all nurture, since we aren't proposing to put children in orphanages or have them randomly fostered, it's hard to untangle. What we do about this, and how we extend opportunity more widely, is a political question, and one where I suspect we are on the same page. But just asserting that intelligence, unlike almost every other human attribute, is a priori non-heritable because it suits our political ends, is just crazy. Lysenko shows us what happens when we subsume reality to ideology. And if intelligence is heritable, which I think on balance is more likely that not, we now live in a society with a lot of assortive mating, which is going to make the issue progressively more pressing.

Indians predominantly come from a variety of low income to middle income backgrounds but the majority of the Non-Muslim Indian community has managed to educate themselves into prosperous middle class jobs and are now wanting to benefit from being able to afford the middle class.

If you look at the situation with Indians in Canada, Europe and Australia, or East Asians in Canada, Australia, and USA, then it's almost identical to that of Non-Muslim South Asians in the UK.