Education and social mobility - John Humphrys is coming on for a discussion, Fri 29 Jan, at 11.30am

[GeraldineMumsnet]

John Humphrys is filming a documentary about education for BBC2. He is embarking on a journey around Britain to meet parents, teachers and students.

His task is to examine the relationship between education and social mobility - why is it that education cannot close the attainment gap that exists between children from the poorest and wealthiest backgrounds?

Government education advisor David Woods has accused parents of being prejudiced against their local state secondary schools. Dr Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, calls the current independent sector an apartheid system. Professor Stephen Ball, from the Institute of Education, concludes that grammar schools, parental choice and faith schools have all been responses to middle-class concerns.

John is coming to Mumsnet this Friday (29 Jan) at 11.30am to hear your experiences. Are you benefiting from parental choice in education? Is it at the expense of others? Does the current system put too much responsibility on parents to make the right choices? Is it too stressful? Do you feel you have to top-up your children's education eg home-tutoring, learning an instrument, employing a lawyer? Are they worthwhile investments, or necessities that cause resentment?

Please post your thoughts here. Thanks in advance.

Which brings me back to the question "Do you feel you have to top-up your children's education". The answer to which is yes, because there's sod all SEN support for children with dyspraxia/dysgraphia in my area. There must be thousands of children out there who are being let down. Children from families who can't afford the OT fees are stuffed, basically.

I totally agree that the manual/trade jobs are seen as second class. It is very sad to see so many people being shoe-horned through an education pathway that is not right for them. I am totally against Universities being held up as the solution for everyone (and I work at one!).

My DH went to University, and has ended up in a job that he hates. He should never have gone to University, as he is practial rather than academic. He got a 2.2 in his mickey mouse degree, and hated every minute of writing the essays, sitting the exams, basically trying to conform to the image his school had of what a middle class, averagely intelligent student should do.

He wishes with all his heart that he had resisted the pressure to go down the University route, and instead trained to be an apprentice mechanic or plumber. Hopefully it will be something he can do in the future.

It needs to be realised that pigeon-holing someone because of the school they went to , the 'class' they are, even their intelligence is not the way to go. Just as there are people from poorer backgrounds/'bad' schools who can achieve great things academically, there are also those who are middle class, from a 'good' school, who would be better following a vocational route.

Neither the vocational nor the academic route should be deemed superior.

Otterinaskoda,
I'm not sure if I have understood correctly
"Perhaps within education there'd be opposition but the Daily Mail would love it, surely?"
yes I agree the opposition would come from education and the left-wing. The Daily Mail would probably support it. I like the Daily Mail but I don't agree with much of what they say. Just a bit off topic, I like the Daily Mail because it breaks important stories that none of the other papers will touch such as the leaked memos about Guillane-Barre syndrome and the swine flu jab. You don't see the whole truth with the Mail, but it often shows you a bit more than the others do.

I understand your objections to the 11+, it is by no means a perfect system.

Undercovamutha, agree with what you have said. It is much too simplistic to think there is just one path for everybody

What I should have said is that I don't imagine there'd be much support for re-introducing grammars from the teaching profession, but that a pretty large section of the middle classes would support it. Of course not all middle class people are DM readers. Nor are all DM readers middle class. Laziness on my part.

John - Coooooo eeeeeeee!
I know this isn't a webchat where we get to interview you, but I'm interested to know how you think you'd have fared had you not passed the 11+.

My husband and I are parents-to-be and are better educated than our parents were. But we do not have what our parents had at our age: our own home.

Somehow I fear that social mobility is an urban myth - in actual fact today's 20/30 something middle class demographic are struggling to find employemnt and buy their own home in an age of instability. Technically we should be progressing up that social ladder, but we have things even harder than our parents generation - for our group now leaves university with buckets of debt.

My husband and I are chronicling this phenomenon in our weekly blog, the American Baby Plan in London. We are trying to get our finances/life sorted in time to have our first child.

John Humphrys' team are welcome to read it and contact me:
leilalacrosse.livejournal.com/

My partner and I went to private boarding schools and have good educations and good jobs because of the people we know who could get us work experience. (Mostly because of our parents who also had good jobs)

Our daughter doesn't particularly need to go to private school because her dad and I already have a range of socially mobile contacts for her to utilise.

This is what is wrong with the country. If you haven't had the opportunity to start with you will never get it. It's pretty horrific actually. But I have no idea how you can break up old boys clubs, and it is massively hindered by the fact that they have the power and influence and they're certainly not going to deny their children the opportunities they have.

I do however think that if the proposal to give all children access to individual tutoring if they are struggling and smaller class sizes would help a lot. If you can improve children's abilities from an early age you can improve their confidence and if you've got enough confidence to keep trying it's a lot easier to be successful. Getting parents thinking positively and encouraging their children is important too I think, so more interaction in schools is important. Not voluntary! You will have to make most people.

More mixed housing. A better variation in wealth/ages living close together means children have a greater variety of influence on them. Variety = excellence.

Much as I dislike our obsession with qualifications, one would think that one could leave school with at least some evidence of being able to read/write/calculate/analyse.
"so why after 11 years - do ANY children leave without qualifications?". Indeed, custardo. Why the fuck.
[left school without any qualifications and is bitter emoticon]

I hope Mr. Humphrys? documentary on education will discuss the merits of alternative educational models including home education instead of downplaying or completely disregarding them. In addition perhaps Mr. Humphrys would consider highlighting the Government?s quiet transferral of our rights and responsibilities associated with our children?s education into the loving hands of the state.

i think the social mobility question is really interesting. Neither of my parents went to university, although my father became an engineering lecturer through studying at night school. I went to a large comp, got a degree, became a company director and now have 2 children in private education. I was bought up to understand the importance of education and wanted them to go to better schools than I did and not go to schools where you got picked on for being a swot (I am now also a single parent btw). It is somewhat ironic that my kids are now seen as having an unfair advantage in educational terms and the government is trying to address this, as they are only the second generation in our family who will have had a university education at all(assuming they get one). Is it a stressful choice, no not really, but it is an eye wateringly expensive one! Happy to talk if anyone is interested

I live in a grammar school county and I'd stongly advise people to think twice about moving here unless they could afford to pay a significant premium to get a house in a good primary catchment or, better still, go private. To be honest - both cost about the same here. We live in a really bad catchment (in UK top 200 worst schools) and the equivalent house (three streets away) is approx 120k more than ours. When we bought 10 years ago it was in a good catchment. Since then we've had FOUR changes of schools and ended up with one in the heart of a sink estate. Consequently no house on our street has sold in two years since it changed again The school in question is nowhere near us - and we have a school literally at the end of our street.

No decent primary - no grammar, unless you can afford the extra tutoring at £25 per hour.

You've only to go to see the school that we now have as a catchment school to see why the teachers must want to give up. Parents scream, swear, argue, fight each other. It's hostile, nervy and agressive. Is that just poverty? I don't know, but I came back from there recently and realised that there was no way I could let my children go there. I couldn't let them have less than I had as I child.

What I'd like to understand is this whole issue of 'choice' - where we are it's a con. No one escapes the sink estate schools once your home is marked in the catchment...we'd not sell, probably not be able to rent it even. We're trapped and stuck with a school that not in our wildest dreams did we think would be anything to do with us.

That is so sad, I would like to think that here there is a choice if only a choice for the very bright.

If I live in catchment for the school in which I teach, which I probably will do we have a choice of

OSTED Outstanding Comp
Grammar
State Boarding
Roman Catholic Secondary

You could add independent if you wish. My choice without a shadow of a doubt would be the comp.

You are tripping over outstanding primaries down here.

It should be like this everywhere, the inequality infuriates me.

laweaselmys has a good point. We live in a country driven by class apartheid. Everyone focuses on education as being the cause of the lack of social mobility, but it is actually the victim of a society that does not want to embrace social mobility.

30 years ago it felt a little as if there was a social mobility of a kind, because education was free and you could get to a top university if you were clever and aspirational. But after university there were barriers in place in terms of career progress - accents and 'well-placed uncles' and 'pupillage' maintained the social apartheid for a long time. Once this was tackled by legislation and international mobility, the apartheid was driven down to the education level, where it remains. It has become worse because previously the wealthy/connected did not need to utilise the educational system in the way they do now - it didn't matter if your child went to a good/bad/state/indy because their life was already mapped out anyway - in the same way, it didn't really matter what you studied - you could get a 2.2 in art history at a 2nd tier uni and still get that fab job at the end of it. But now the jobs market is much more open so the class divide comes at the education level.

It can only get driven out if the country embraces a more socialist approach (as the nods to the Dutch/German/Swedish models tesifty).

But that only works if the country wants it. And the people in the top have generally all benefitted from class apartheid, so are unlikley to vote for their own demise, wheras the voters are culturally so immersed in the aspirational blueprint of the country that they are spinning on their wheels too furiously to collectively stop. Besides, there is no socialist political party anyway in this country.

If you want social mobilty you have to start to deconstruct the current model, starting with education but also embracing the following:-

• simplify the tax system and share the tax burden more equally between 'earnings' and 'wealth', instead of loading up the former to protect the latter
• Reverse the higher education system back to the Poly/Uni vocational vs academic, and abandon the crazy 50% aspiration and to start developing vocational excellence instead of mickey mouse degrees
• require 'NEET' teenagers to work on social projects in return for a wage as opposed to a dole benefit, to begin to break the poverty cycle and start re-establishing a joint responsibility for the community.
• review our defence budgets and stop trying to punch above our weight

At the same time you could ban private education snd introduce a postcard lottery to cover the decade or so it would take to even out the schools. But it would also have to go hand in hand with re-establishing all the things that seem to be present in 'good' schools (strict discipline, zero tolerence for bullying, ability to remove bad teachers, sensible streaming without snobbery, vocational options, after-school clubs, links to the community, etc etc). And then the politicans need to leave it alone and forget the SATS and the other admin hoops that achieve nothing but stop the good teachers from just, well, teaching.

Education can't be fixed in isolation - the investment needed is too huge and the intervention is too great - it can only be tackled as part of a wider restructuring of how we fill and spend the public purse, and a re-evaluation of what we should value as a society.

If you read the papers about the Cadbury takeover, there were dozens of interviews with people who have been working for the firm for decades, who take pride in their factory jobs and the community. And that is the picture here, today, in that one small community. The only reason we don't embrace that spirit is because we have devalued it and put 'education' and 'attainment' and 'wealth' at the top of the pedastal. Yet we all sit and watch 'Grand Designs' and get really impressed by it all and never stop to ask ourselves why it is that the only house we actuslly want to live in is the woodmans' one.

All the time the system is stacked the way it is, people who can will take advantage. Those that can pay for something better will do so, because they can. Just as those whose children are bullied will move them to another school or home ed. We work with what we have, as best we can. But we seem to forget that we are the ones that support the status quo in our political choices and in our political apathy.

The system we have could have been designed to ensure social stasis.

Parents of primary school children are expected to have such intense involvement in the learning of the most basic subjects that only those with achieving and motivated parents will achieve.

Children without parents who are able and willing to read with them and listen to their times tables are left behind very early on and will never recover.

It's appalling.

The biggest problem has nothing to do with the differences between private, faith or state schools.

It's to do with the methodology of learning. Parents should be removed from the equation and the curriculum should not require teachers to depend on them.

I'm in agreement that the 50% target for university education wrecks havoc; it demeans vocations and trades that require a different sort of training (bring back apprenticeships!) and it also undermines the value of the university education.

I agree as well with upandrunning that the methodology of learning in the National Curriculum is a serious issue, and it needs to be reviewed. The current methodology, which is defined by the exams, rewards conformity and discourages creativity. That's not to say that we don't have fabulous teachers that inspire children to think beyond what's on the test, but I believe the cultural focus on test results sends a message to young people that conformity is valued over creativity.

By the way, what do we mean by social mobility? Earning more money? More satisfied with life?

upandrunning, fully agree. Putting the onus on parents is a cop out

Zazi -- sorry I can't reciprocate with agreement

I don't want teachers playing with pasta while the mothers have to teach the children to read. Creativity in school can take a running jump when the children can't read and add up.

So many complaints from teachers that they don't have time to listen one to one, or hammer in their times tables. How crappy does a curriculum have to be if there's no time for that.

Hopeless parents who were let down themselves are being relied upon to teach their own children what they never learned and what they possibly don't have the inclination, ability or time to learn.

It guarantees that underprivileged children stay underprivileged.

"inclination, ability or time to teach.

It's so obvious that this is the problem. Thanks claig. We have agreed on this before I think!

upandrunning - I've been thinking about your model for equalising educational opportunity on the school run LOL.

I can see that taking the parents out of the school equation would seem an obvious solution, but it's one that views education as only happening in school.

I just don't see it that way. I see my children's education as my resposibility and I use school as one small facet of that. I don't mean drilling them with tables but all the everyday learning that takes place for no other reason than we enjoy it.

If I look at my own education, what separated me from my equally disadvantaged peers was not that my parents taught me the curriculum - they wouldn't have known where to start to be honest, but that I lived in a house full of (second hand) books. That my Dad wouldn't allow The Sun in the house. That went for long walks along the disused rail track and looked out for wild flowers. That we discussed politics.

They both had a lot of time for me, and spent a lot of time with me.

That was my advantage.

Short of putting every child in a state institution, you cannot prevent some parents being more engaged than others.

Do you want the other children left behind who don't have parents to help?

What parents offer should be extra: the joy of more difficult books,the excitement of advanced puzzles, music lessons, extra sport, art opportunities: not the most basic requirements of primary education.

upandrunning,
you are exactly right that the issue that you have raised is "obvious", it is so obvious and so close up that it is staring us right in the face, so much so that we can't even see it.

There is a strange and worrying trend where parents have to sign a "contract" with the school which commits them to taking an active part in their children's education even to the extent that all homework must be handed in. What happens if the parents are unable to fulfil their obligations?, are they to be fined?, are they to be called in to explain themselves? What sort of pressure does this put on poor struggling single mums with large families?

Yes claig I've seen and signed a couple of those.

I feel so sorry for the children. School is be their one chance to be saved from an often chaotic life and we screw it up.

I'm not sure I agree with everything you've written, StillSquiffy (I want as many people as possible to enjoy university - as I did), but what a great post.