12 years of New Labour and Social Mobility

[Swedington]

is at its lowest levels since the 1950s.

I'm state educated and thanks to my schooling, all the professions were open to me. Doesn't anyone else find it disturbing that if I was to apply to medical school today, my chances of getting a place are lower than had I applied under Thatcher's government? This would be true for all of the years under Thatcher.

What on earth is going on?

media studies is frankly useless if you want to get a job in the media ... if you want to become a media studies lecturer it may be of more use, but even then I'd be doubtful!

At the moment ds1 wants to be a journalist - I've told him he could choose from English, History, Politics, Economics, Modern Languages, Sciences, Law, Classics, Psychology - any one of a number of subjects, which would/could actually help him in the future, but not media studies

I've never come across a media studies graduate in any of the newsrooms I've worked in ...

incidentally, ds1's school doesn't offer media studies as an A level (academically selective secondary)

On further reflection, I'm in agreement with much of what MillyR has said about the illusory nature of many of today's 'qualifications.'

We've got this idea that everyone should have access to a profession, and the assumption is that this can be accomplished by making university qualifications accessible to more people.

But it is an illusion that a university qualification will guarantee you a professional career. A society can only support so many professionals. (How many lawyers does one really want at large?)

However, I'm not convinced the issue is one of New Labour's making. Wasn't it the Tories under Thatcher that set us on this course?

The tragedy is that the government can no longer support the higher education of its populace, thus eradicating the social-leveling derived from a free university education, and substituting it with fluff.

Very recently the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported that in the UK only 39% of school leavers went on to gain a degree in 2007, putting the UK 11th of 26 developed nations. Numbers have remained static since 2000 - the first year in which a degree student would have graduated under Labour.

So please don't say it's not Labour's doing.

Because of grade inflation the universities asked the government for a means of discriminating between A grade students. The government tasks the awarding bodies with coming up with a tool. They come up with the A grade which looks like it will do the job very well. The government then warn the universities not to use the A grade in case it interferes with their widening access agenda.

Over 50% of A grades awarded at A level are awarded to the independent sector. Only 7% of the population are independently educated and a lot of those actually do the IB so the numbers are even more alarming than at first glance. Apparently an even greater percentage of the new A* grades awarded are likely to go to independently educated students.

Well done New Labour.

requies

Was chatting about this to a friend earlier on today and he said a lot of school careers counsellors are finding kids at 5th/6th form level saying they 'just wanna be famous' as a career option. Watch X factor, Britains got Talent and you see it in action. I agree with the whole 'dance school' phenomenon, especially among girls, but just as bad with boys and football academies though.

It is even quite prevalent among private school pupils in my experience.

I've been reading up on some of these issues on the Sutton Trust website. They provide all of their reports and summaries online.

There is a definite tendency to try and push the blame for lack of social mobility on to children and families, which doesn't seem to be reflected in the research.

One piece of research was looking at parental involvement in homework and extent to which children finished homework. It turned out that 40% of children with parents in unskilled jobs did not routinely complete homework in Secondary level Maths and English because they were rarely or never given any (as opposed to 10% of the children of graduates).

There are a lot of things that schools, universities and society in general can do about inequality, rather than always saying it is to do with the attitudes of the children.

I'm with Lenin. I wonder how much is just perception based on reality TV shows. I'm a teacher in a school in an area of deprivation, and I just don't see this "I just want to be famous" thing. Our students go on and train in proper, useful skills in the main. Or even go to university to study useless stuff Some don't of course, but they don't have misguided ambition. They have none at all

We put this information in our prospectus and our admissions officers give this advice.

I would say that I have other dream candidates as well - for example mature students with distinctions on their Access to HE courses. They do extremely well.

We also have one postgraduate student in the department with no qualifications at all - she went to a school where they don't sit them and it hasn't mattered. But she is very academic and probably a bit of a special case.

I think the introduction of parental choice in schools have had a major role in lack of social mobility if you are poor.
The majority of good schools are invariably in nice leafy suburbs where only the well off can buy into the catchment area leaving bright but poor children in challenging schools where often they don't achieve their full potential. But no government is brave enough to end this system for the common good.

Mumzy - how does removing parental choice of school help the bright but poor child avoid the bad school? You must have some other process for allocating places in mind. Before parental choice, children just went to their nearest school didn't they?

Ah, choice.

Up until 150 years ago you had several options in relation to educating your children: Sunday school, working class fee-paying dame school, middle class fee-paying dame school, tutor or governess, charitable grammar school, public (i.e. private boarding) school. Quality was variable but at least you had choice, albeit rather skewed by social class.

150 years ago the Church of England effectively did a bit of a land grab in relation to education, and developed a more or less monopoly position in relation to elementary schools (up to 12 or later 14). About seventy years later, the Government reinforced the C of E's position by successfully outlawing working class private schools in a particularly underhand way (details on request), leaving middle class and upper class private schools untouched. That was the beginning of the end as far as choice in schooling for working class children was concerned.

Whizz forward to 1944, and we see the Government making secondary education free, and most local authorities introducing the tripartite system of grammar schools, technical schools and secondary modern schools. This worked for some children and not others, as we know. A key factor in the apparent failure of technical and secondary modern schools is that they were underfunded in comparison to grammar schools, and the 11+ examination results were not necessrily a true reflection of children's abilities.

In the light of all this, the only way I can see of making schooling fair and equal is to make it illegal for families and local authorities to spend more than a certain amount on their children's education, so there isn't such a great disparity. However no Government in their right mind would ever suggest such a thing.

In the meantime there's an element of moving deckchairs on the Titanic, tbh. People in towns get choice, people in the country don't. People with girls get more choice than people with boys. Christians get more choice than anyone else. And you can only 'choose' from a government model for education that many regard as woefully defective.

We are frittering away the greatest asset this country has, namely the intellectual capability of its population.

And while I am at it, can I just say that I think it is disgusting that most of the charitable funding aimed at helping children attend independent schools seems to be aimed at allowing children who already attend them to continue there if their parents experience reduced circumstances, or aimed at those who have been carefully prepared for scholarships and bursaries at preparatory schools or by tutors. Independent schools should be needs blind on admission in this day and age, IMO, with everyone means tested on entry and no application or registration fee. If independent schools spent less money on the facilities arms race perhaps they would have more available for purposes such as this.

Jack, before parental choice most schools had a much better social economic mix as school allocations were designed to include rich and poor areas particulary secondary schools (uk cities invariably have areas where affluent areas border onto poorer areas ) and because there were no choice people could'nt opt out and find somewhere else as they do now. Research has shown that schools which have less than 30% of wellmotivated/supported children invariably become sink schools

What we now have are very good schools full of motivated well supported children getting good results which everyone is desperate to get their dc into and the sink schools full of social problems and academic failure and one of the main reasons for this extreme polarisation is because parents have choice.
But choice which have often been mentioned on this site is a fallacy for many families. The reality is unless they are wealthy or they can fulfil some very exacting requirements their dc will not beable to get into the school of their choice .
And before anyone talks about busing in children, the school I attended was social economically very diverse and no one had more than a 25 minute bus journey to get there

Mumzy - I went to one of those schools with a broad social mix in the 80's - unfortunately it was a crap school!! I suggest that the middleclasses are attracted to good schools rather than middleclass children create good schools by their presence - but await a link to your research to prove me wrong (I would love the answer to the profound problems in our education system to be that easy).

Snowy - Totally agree with yr penultimate post! Also agree with yr last post - but have some ideas why this happens, which I will share another time!!

The research I quoted is in this book available from Amazon:

The School Report: The Hidden Truth About Britain's Classrooms by Nick Davies (Paperback - 2 Nov 2000)

Nick Davies is a well respected investigative journalist and this story he reported on caused a furore amongst the education department and teachers when it was serialised in the Guardian 10 years ago. It discusses the problems in uk schools which sadly from reading the threads here are still encountered and have never been tackled by government.

Some of you might be interested in this David Puttnam film, which discusses how young people are being let down by a dated educated system. They gave DVDs away in the Guardian before Christmas, but you might be able to get them to send you a free copy if you register.

We Are The People We've Been Waiting For film website

mumzy - thanks for your reference. I have now read the original Nick Davies Guardian articles. They are a good piece of observational journalism and I'm sure, at the time, quite shocking.

I still find the conclusion, that low social mobility and poor schools are a direct result of parental choice of school, a gross over-simplification.

Other more recent articles such as Wasted The Betrayal of White Working Class and Black Caribbean Boys by Harriet Sergeant give a much more complex picture of the failure to educate the poorest in our society and how this impacts on social mobility.

Findings and recommendations include the need for longer school days and terms, vastly improved extra-curricular activities (especially sport), greater discipline and better pastoral care. In fact it's hard to see how an average 'bog standard comprehensive' can meet the needs of these children.