If John Bercow discovered sex and New Labour at the same time, as some Tory wags wouold have it, New Labour is now discovering class and elections at the same time, though it’s almost certainly too late. But Alan Milburn’s thesis on reversing Britain’s declining social mobility, published today, is still interesting in highlighting one of this country’s major problems, namely the widening abyss in aspiration and performance between the classes. Pity is however that New Labour, with its emphasis on unbridled markets and ballooning inequality, has played a large part in creating the problem in the first place, and is not exactly best placed to resolve the problem now. Even so, Milburn’s strictures deserve attention: would they create a more open and fairer channel for talent from whatever provenance it comes?

He suggests that universities, particularly the top 13, should give more preference to bright pupils from lower-income homes, not on the basis of positive discrimination which he rejects, but taking account of the context of a school student’s educational performance, i.e. s/he will probably have had to work harder than a competitor from a better-off home. Fair point, but in practice very subjective, and if applied widely and robustly it could well lead to challenges in court from better-off parents. He proposes no-fee degrees for students who stay at home, though that perversely may divert bright but poor students from travelling to better universities. He calls for a child education credit (voucher) so that poorer students in under-performing schools can attend more popular schools, but that would be at the expense of less-performing schools being stripped of whatever talent they have. He inveighs against unpaid internships as the new exclusive step pushing the well-off up the career ladder, and proposes instead a benchmark (Kitemark) obtained either paid (wages) or unpaid (by grants).
All these are are useful, at a price, but they really don’t get to the heart of the matter. The British class system will not be fundamentally changed by mechanistic tweakings here and there, valuable in some cases though they might be. Milburn’s report is called ‘Unleashing Aspirations’, but the central problem is that while most middle-class families instinctively do have aspirations for their children to get to university and beyond, far too many working-class families still regard the educational system as a barrier to be traversed rather than as an opportunity to be grasped. Yes, they have aspirations for their children, but of a very different kind. Milburn admits “there are some people who don’t even aspire to a professional job”, as though that were a revelation. It’s been a fact of life ever since the modern educational system was established, even after the great reforming 1944 Education Act.
So how is this tackled more fundamentally than Milburn envisages? It means changing the perceptions, attitudes and ambitions of a large proportion of families, particularly in poorer neighbourhoods. One way to do this would be to make it part of a teacher’s job to make contact at their own homes with the parents of all the children for whom they are responsible (or at least those who never attend school evenings) and to talk with them about their child’s experience and performance at school, why it is important, and what opportunities it opens up. This may come as a revelation to many parents, but their cooperation (which may not come easily and may require difficult and sensitive handling) may well be more crucial to ‘unleashing aspirations’ than anything the school can do by itself. Class stereotypes learnt at home, as Denis Marsden found in his ground-breaking book in 1962 about working-class children at grammar schools, are often the biggest inhibitor of engagement and commitment without which aspirations will never take root.
The other central problem, which New Labour and the Tories may well find it impossible to overcome, is that a profoundly unequal society will never offer equal opportunity to those at the bottom of the pile. Scandinavia offers the most equal countries in Europe and achieves most social mobility. The US is the most unequal of all and has least mobility, despite the absurd fantasy that anybody can get to the top. The UK is, tragically, getting closer to the US pattern, and until that changes drastically any talk of unleashing aspirations is just rhetoric.

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