Does coming from a deprived background really seal your fate?

[Pinkjenny]

Just wondering, really, listening to Nick Clegg on R5 live. I come from Anfield in Liverpool, not deprived really, but certainly not affluent. My mum worked in a shop, and my dad was (and still is) an engineer.

I credit all of my success (relatively speaking, of course) to the way in which I was brought up, and the attitude of my parents, who told me I could be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I put my mind to it.

Does giving children money for their first shoes and first suit really help break that poverty cycle?

Or does it depend on the attitude of their parents and their general upbringing?

More people who think aspiration is undesirable and will instil that in their children.

CoinOperatedGirl - I understand where you are coming from about lack of confidence and assuming that people from more privileged backgrounds with automatically be superior to you. But it is just an assumption that they will know more about (for example) opera and serious literature. Only if they come from a very 'artsy' high-brow, fairly intellectual family, and have had schooling to match will they necessarily know about these things. I promise you there are ex-public school pony-club types up and down the country who know no more than you do!

Sakura - what do you think can realistically be done then, to even up the score and remove the supposed inequality in education? It had to be about more than penalising or handicapping children who have been to private school, or taxing their parents more for the privilege, or just banning them altogether.

After all, the only ones who could truly be said to have a huge advantage are those who have been to top public schools - and they account for maybe only 2% or 3%. I can assure you that apart from benefiting from a more cosy ethos, smaller class sizes and better discipline, my children are not gaining any huge social or psychological advantage by going to their relatively cheapskate and very non-elitist local independent!

And as I said before, for the children at the bottom of the heap, competition from the top-end privately educated kids is the least of their worries. The people who lose out in the race against kids with VERY expensive educations are the ones just beneath them in terms of social advantage and intelligence and attainment.

So what can we do to even up the score amongst the other 93%?

People will always want to do the best for their children with whatever intellectual and financial means they have. And that includes many poor children. How do you decide how (and which) parents should be thwarted in their bid to advance their own child's chances?

What difference would extra funding make? What would you spend it on? Money has been thrown at schools full of disadvantaged children like it grows on trees over the last 13 years. But what does it actually DO to advance those children's chances?

If sociologists and psychologists can accurately map out a child's chances by agaed three can anything that happens in school chance that, and how?

It all very well banging your drum about inequality but how do you start to cure it?

And if the answer is tax the rich, I need to know what you do with the extra taxes that will make a difference!

Yes, mamatomamy,
The labour government made it very easy for teenagers to go to university.

The British government has been relatively okay in that respect.
The problem was that the system itself chategorized kids from grammar school upwards and allocated them a lot in life that was simply undeserved. IT just perpetuated the notion that some children are more deserving than others.

Case in point, my mother was the only one of seven children to pass the 11 plus in the seventies. She went from grammar school to uni. Her brothers were set to go in the army and down the coal mine. One of them emigrated to Australia instead and got his degree there, paid for by the Australian government. He had been written off at 11 in the UK!!

Nothing to do with education and nothing to do with the parents?

Thank heaven you are not running the country, with such a weak grasp on reality.

Horseman, it's not about penalising the privileged. It's about giving opportunities to the underprivileged.

I meant can anything in school change that.

Yes, I agree with you there Appletrees. An inability to accept the status quo has always been one of my failings

Horseman, I will have a think about your last post. I have to put DD to bed. Will get back to you.

Sakura - this supposed 23% of funding on education going on the 7% of privately edcucated children - how is this broken down? Surely they don't mean government funding? Unless you count tax breaks for charity status the independent sector receives no funding.

Does it include ALL spending across education? So all money from taxes put into education, PLUS whatever individuals choose to spend on top of paying their share into state education?

Because if so, it's a fairly irrelevent figure to bandy about. It means nothing. The people paying for private ed are also still funding state ed, and as it is likely many of them will be very very high earners they are funding it rather nicely!

I still think we need to accept that a two-tier system only exists in terms of private v. state. And of course that is two-tier - otherwise what would be the point?

But I really don't see how having bees in our collective bonnets about a mere 7% of prvileged children is going to make any great impact on the the enormous problem of social and educational inequalities within the other 93%.

It's not irrelevant when you are coming from the POV that such rampant inequalities in society are unjust, that a large section of underclasses have to end up in prison, pregnant or just to get by, so that a tiny minority can become successful.
Wealth distribution in any society has to be fairer than the way it currently is.

In Japan, the CEO of a company cannot earn more than six times the lowest earner in the same company. IT is also the safest country in the world, or one of the safest. (I think Saudi might be safer, but they do cut your hands off there for thieving IIRC)
IN the US it is over 240 times, hence the crime rates and social problems.

I bring this argument up to counteract the delusional notion that the status quo exists due to childrens' innate capabilities

How odd that you admit that you have a weak grasp of the realities of social mobility yet claim to understand it.

that a large section of underclasses have to end up in prison, pregnant or just to get by, so that a tiny minority can become successful

What ? None of those things happen without some poor choices being made along the way.
How many times do we read on mumsnet somebody has found themselves unexpectedly pregnant and the advice 9/10 is that babies are cheap and lovely and you'd never forgive yourself for getting rid.
Successful people from what i have seen rarely have unplanned anything at all.
Nobody has to go to prison or even just get by, I saved £250 a month when I lived on £24,000 as a single mum with nursery fee's of £400 and rent of £250.
Not saying it's easy but then it never is, but worth it yes of course.

"have to end up in prison or pregant"?

There is some seriously flawed thinking here. It's one of the very profound problems we have right now that anybody who makes a poor choice, anyone for whom life does not turn out a picnic, needs to blame someone else -- a complete lack of personal responsibility, encouraged by educated people who think they may be being sympathetic but in fact are doing no one any favours.

However, blaming "the rich" for a poor person becoming pregnant is not quite a non-sequitur: I am sure that many young girls have made a choice favouring pregnancy because "the rich" have chosen to make pregnancy a paying and rewarding option.

Well, Japan has one of the world's highest suicide rates, and Japanese women have a traditionally more subservient role to men. Social mobility is Having a CEO 6x worker rate is not a panacea. Maybe you'd like to make a connection with those too? Or perhaps not.

This post has taken me ages, on and off, so sorry if it's crossed with loads of others, but:

'It is not about penalising the privileged - it's about giving opportunities to the under-privileged'.

Well, yes, easy to say, not so easy to do.

We already have almost 50% of young people going to university - many on A level grades of D and below, or with other 'alternatives' to A levels, that are taken by people not capable of passing A levels at all. And poor children have their fees paid for them, whilst others (who are very far from rich) do not. So we now have a truly two-tier system in higher education. This has been as a result of trying to 'open up' higher education to all, and trying to give educational and social mobility to working class and disadvantaged children.

It's like when GSCES were invented to do away with the two-tier GCE and CSE which disavantaged poorer children by showing them up in comparison tables. And what happened? They didn't achieve at GCSE compared to their middle class counterparts, and they made the government attainment targets look bad.

So then Foundation level GCSE's were invented, where it is much easier to achieve a C grade than in the higher level GCSE, but your certificate just says 'C' grade, not 'C' at Foundation level.

So now, teachers could work on getting non-academic children to C grade Foundation level in 5 subjects, so they could say they had hit the target of 5 A-C grades at GCSE. (And then it became necessary to bring in A* grades to distinguish between levels of brightness.)

But that still didn't work, so they invented other vocational courses at school that took up more curriculum time, and thus could be counted as 3 C grades (in things like Dance, and Beauty therapy, car maintenance) so the children who couldn't even manage a foundation level C grade could still say they had 5 A-C 'equivalents'.

So one boy I know is fond of saying he has 11 GCSEs at A-C grade. He doesn't. He has 3 or 4 foundation level grade Cs and a bunch of other stuff that has nothing to do with education, but that may or may not help him in securing skilled manual employment one day, or being able to do a 'street dance' turn at a Christmas party.

Meanwhile, thousands of children from poor and disadvantaged homes are still leaving the state education system unable to read and write properly....

But nothing really changes. The people taking 'good' degrees at 'good' universities will still get the 'good' jobs at the end of it all. And I'll bet most of them will be perceived to be from 'advantaged' backgrounds.

At least we knew that 25 years ago, if a child from a poor background went to uni, it was on a full grant, and in the knowledge that they were intellectually equal to the other students, even if they didn't feel socially 'equal'.

We have no hope of giving full grants to anyone ever again, because of the sheer numbers involved now. And we are giving false hope to thousands of mediocre students, year on year. But hey - so long as poor children are going, it's all fine.

mamatomany you are so right about the planning that successful self-sufficient people do, and the lack of it in evidence in low-attaining people.

I once had a boyfriend who I jokingly teased about his life being like painting by numbers. No room for spontenaiety or fate. He had it all mapped out - even down to what age he would marry and when he would have his first child. And he did it, all in the order he said he would. He was always highly focused and disciplined, and I saw him featured in an article in a broadsheet newpaper, so I googled him. I found out he is now the CEO of a very large and very high-profile company with offices all over the world. I am not in the least surprised.

Either you believe the current status quo is fair and just, or you do not.

Either you believe people are poor because of their own doing, or you do not.

These are simple ideological values that we differ on.

Yes: I know people who have planned their figure and age at which they would retire, and have done so.

HOWEVER there is a very large caveat to that. There are many less well off, less well educated people who have planned very well indeed but unfortunately have seen pensions and careers swept from under them.

This is part of what makes me very angry and I suspect why the "squeezed middle" feels particularly put upon. Having planned, saved and prepared, one seems less well off than people who have never done any of these things.

It seems for many people right now that it DOESN'T pay to plan. If you teach people that it doesn't pay to be self-reliant and plan, they are less likely to. If you teach them that it does in fact pay NOT to be self reliant and plan, then they are certain not too.

"certain not to", not too

Quite often people ARE poor because of their own doing. Do you really deny this? It might be an ideology of yours but it bears little relation to reality.

And quite often people are poor due to sheer bad luck. And people are rich because they had good luck. If only the good luck to be healthy enough to make their money.

I deny people are poor because of their own doing in a society that is structured in the elitist, classist way British society is.

Although I can totally understand why it makes people with privilege feel better to blame poor people for their lack of privilege.
It justifies the unfairness in their minds.

Most people on this thread, and most of society in general, through not ever having been exposed to the realities of daily life for the most excluded families in the UK, are ignorant/oblivious to the barriers they/their children face.

Someone said 'parents can read to their children' but in communities I've worked in 25% of parents can't even read well enough to read signs let alone help with homework. Basic numeracy levels are just as bad. Where I worked we couldn't walk from our office to the newsagent without being offered drugs so I don't blame parents who live there for keeping their children indoors except to go to school. Even if you are brave enough to venture too the local park it is littered with profanity-laden graffiti, smashed buckfast bottles and used condoms. I hate to say it but the DCs are better off in front of the TV/playstation than playing there.

As for the person who said 'healthy food is cheap', well it only is if you have access to shops that sell it. Some communities dont have supermarkets/fruit and veg shops so a mother and her 2 DCs would have to pay for a £4 bus journey to get to one.

And yes, of course DCs should be getting enough sleep at night but if you are in a flat with paper thin walls and neighbours who have endless parties/get raided by the police and your young DCs are having to share a bedroom with you/their teenage siblings because of overcrowding/roms unusable because of damp they aren't going to get a good night's sleep or have peace to do their homework.

Living like this it is almost inevitable that the parents are going to become depressed/anxious and focus their efforts on just getting through each day rather than thinking long term.

Children brough up like this (and there are plenty of them)IN TODAY'S SOCIETY (NOT 20/30 years ago) probably have more chance of winning the lottery than becoming a consultant/barrister/professor/CEO.

The answer can't just be schools or parents or housing or health or childcare or social work or throwing money at it. Lots of 'regeneration' money has been put into these communities, with only minor effects. A holistic approach is needed, tailored to each familiy's specific problems.