Should England’s schools become ‘engines of social mobility’?

Whilst sociologists and statisticians have continued to argue over the facts of social mobility, a political consensus has emerged as to the solutions. Understandably, perhaps, education has come to be seen as the primary mechanism by which a more mobile society might be created. Politicians might dispute the particulars, but few question education secretary Michael Gove when he argues that schools are ‘the means by which we liberate every child to become the adult they aspire to be’.

It is of course true that schools can inflate one’s aspirations and that academic success makes it easier to progress in life. For these reasons every teacher worthy of that title promotes achievement and seeks to broaden the horizons of the young. In doing so, students grapple with foreign ideas, experiences and sentiments and intellectual mobility is promoted. Cultural vistas are widened, great minds are encountered and pupils learn to expect more from themselves and life. You are a brighter and perhaps better person after you have studied Jane Eyre.

But when Gove suggests that schools should become ‘engines of social mobility’, this is quite a different matter, as it implies that schools exist to serve an economic purpose beyond education itself. Approaching education in this instrumental fashion encourages us to ask the wrong questions. Instead of considering what it is that all students need to know, it directs us to a far narrower set of concerns. And let us be clear about these. A socially mobile society as the government defines it is one in which the labour market is functioning efficiently and fairly. A reasonable policy objective perhaps, but hardly a great motive force for education.

To me, it seems likely that positioning schools as a means of addressing our economic concerns can only result in distorted curriculum priorities. This is perhaps best illustrated by the government’s education white paper The Importance of Teaching. One of the most significant changes it announced was the introduction of the English Baccalaureate, a new way of measuring secondary school success at GCSE level. This quite correctly pushes academic subjects and suggests that curriculum breadth is important, but it also argues that priority should be given to ‘strategic subjects’. This results in an unwelcome bias, as those disciplines that are most typically favoured by employers, such as maths and sciences, are rightly given a heavy weighting, but those that have a more ambiguous relationship to UK Plc are given far shorter shrift. Students have the option, for example, of studying either geography or history, but are not required to do both, while English literature, as a discrete subject, and all of the wider arts, count for nothing.

In the recent period, politicians have asked schools to address a very long list of policy objectives. New Labour, for example, required teachers to improve civic participation, social inclusion and community cohesion, while the Coalition, which shares and has re-badged many of these concerns, has given a particular emphasis to tacking crime, disorder and political extremism. It is perhaps unsurprising that there is little evidence of any of this working, as these are all problems of the adult world which have been outsourced to schools.

The government’s social mobility strategy should be set in this context. Its key document Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers suggests that amongst other initiatives a  renewed focus on academic subjects, extra funding for disadvantaged pupils and better careers advice, will help make England a more mobile society. Personally, I have my doubts, even if these initiatives are laudable in their own terms. Most particularly, I am unclear as to how changes within education can reform the labour market outside of it. If we want to promote mobility, then surely more radical and comprehensive action would be required, which is why it is curious that Opening Doors says so little about what happens to us in the world of work itself, or in terms of strategies for economic growth, where surely the main drivers of mobility are to be found.

There is a really rather fine paragraph on page 41 of The Importance of Teaching. It states that the National Curriculum is important for students and must ‘embody their cultural and scientific inheritance’ and ‘the best that our past and present generations have to pass on to the next’. It warns us that it should not ‘try to cover every conceivable area of human learning or endeavour’ or ‘become a vehicle for imposing passing political fads on our children’. Social mobility is today’s major political fad and it’s simply wrong to position schools as the solution to the problems of the labour market. This undermines the integrity of education and seems unlikely to achieve the outcomes intended. I think that Mr Gove would do well to read this paragraph again.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Toby Marshall teaches communications, film and philosophy and is the Programme Development Secretary for the Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teachers (SCETT). He has produced the Battle of Ideas Satellite session Should England’s schools become ‘engines of social mobility’, organised in partnership with SCETT, which takes place on Thursday 6 October.

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• http://twitter.com/byrnsweord Byrnsweord

  Tired, prescriptive drivel. Why are you a better person for having read Jane Eyre? Why is not the case that some might be, but equally, some may be ‘better people’ (whatever that hackneyed cliche actually means) for having learned a trade or honed a skill to the level of proficiency? It is telling that the latter two are much harder to do in the present school system than the former.

  If you want ‘engines of social mobility’, bring back selection by academic ability (and propensity to work in a trade) rather than the present system of selection by parents’ wallets.

• Guest

  perhaps toby needs a bit more history to top up his ‘communications, film and philosophy’ CV?
  after all, wasnt  uk universal education initiated by church and industry as the strictly functional means of promoting bible-reading and clerical employment for the illiterate masses?; so why not continue to promote it for  practical ends, for the benefit of the individual and of society at large? ( and for that i’d put ‘communications, film and philosophy’, and ‘jane eyre’, fairly low down in the school curriculum priority stakes – perhaps, along with ever-popular family planning, for those dreadful wet friday afternoons with the backward boys and forward girls?; but, seriously, especially for the increasingly neglected sphere of life-long adult recreational learning, when time and experience have opened up the mind to the joys of wider,life-enhancing,fields of study?)

• Guest

  trouble is that for every farm labourer’s child who went to the grammar school, there were perhaps 8 who went to a hopelessly dud technical or secondary mod ( and 1 who went to an excellent technical or secondary mod); 
  the grammar schools were engines of social mobility for the academically inclined, and to hell with the rest; they took me on to oxford, but dumped my peers to look after themselves as best they could; they simply bred a new layer of privilege with new forms of social snobbery, where academic ability was the great god of personal social and financial mobility – and look where thats left us, a country almost entirely devoid of any means of wealth creation except via financial jiggery-pokery in the city…

• Guest

  i have an african background too – but in mine class was primarily determined by the colour of your skin, secondarily by your home language; and of course it was  the engineers who were the real wealth-creators…

• Guest

  what a poor idea of education simply as a road to (personal) advancement; 

  how about education as a life-long road to personal enlightenment, to a fairer society etc etc; with basic compulsory schooling simply providing the vital starting point: ie the means of supporting yourself and your family in ‘affordable’ comfort, plus the means of helping less fortunate folk unable to support themselves?

• http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6PJKFFYWUVWWG6ATRERADJS7RM Helena

  Where I come from, and this is what makes it difficult and perhaps wrong for me to be commenting here, is Scotland. Many of us see ourselves as working class, regardless of where we may be regarded on the social scale. I hope one day that there will be no classes here, because for centuries we lived cheek by jowl with all classes. If you lived in Edinburgh you could have in one tenement, poor, rich and richer, all classes lived within the same building an just got on with it. 
  I live in a nice house, in a nice area, but I remember my roots, I lived in a tenement flat, one room,one bedroom and toilet. My people were very definitely working class, my Father delivered coal all his working life, after losing his apprenticeship to papermakers as a very young man during the last depression. My Mother was a Laundry maid. I managed through my education to go higher, worked in offices all my life, but I am still a working class woman. My Husband has similar roots, slightly higher than mine, his Dad was a crystal cutter who made it to Head of Personnel, my Mother in Law was a secretary, but they were still working class.
  My point here is that education should be the road to success and out of dependency but whether you can actually lose your place in which ever class you start in, that I doubt. My Husband, when I mentioned what I replied here, says the class structure is similar to that of India, if your Dad is a street sweeper, there is a very good chance you will be one too. That is maybe a little harsh because some people do make it out, but having heard members of parliament talking about taking advice from their grocer regarding the Managing Director of Sainsbury, says it all.

• http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6PJKFFYWUVWWG6ATRERADJS7RM Helena

  Gyp, I think we are in agreement if you re-read what I said. I am absolutely fed up with education which is so narrow that all people learn is to how to do a job. How many people even those who have been University educated know any more than what they need for their job, indeed some do not even know that. 
  Knowing what you said about your background, you seem to value education, so many who are now in receipt of it, do not, but making it ‘tailored’ seems to me that they lose the love of learning, something which should be sought for all of your life.
  I loved school, many do not, teachers should be instilling in their pupils love of learning, not something to endure.

• tartanarse

  All schools are, by their very existence, engines of social mobility. The question is, as some posters here quite rightly ask is “How is it quantified”

  We see ourselves as subservient and are deferential to the ruling/upper classes. We have been fed this for centuries and it still exists today. You are a nobody until you have money and even then in some cases you have to have been descended from monied peoples. You don’t have to be intelligent. Yes you may have to have gone to a good school, if only to prove that your parents could afford it. You could be a complete clown (see Boris Johnson for details) but it doesn’t matter. 

  On the flip side of this, take for example Wayne Rooney. By the time that boy retires he will be a multi millionaire. He will always be a chavvy wee guy from a housing estate. His children will be known as the offsrping from the chavvy guy from the housing estate. Ditto Katie Price etc.

  The people I dislike the most are the middle class ones who aspire to be like the toffee nosed Tories and their ilk. Gove is a prime example of all that is wrong with our country. A pure tube who will do and say whatever gets him up the ladder whether he agrees with it or not.

• JohnBEllis

  Ideally, education is its own reward – got right, it builds on the natural curiosity every small child has, when s/he starts to crawl and explore the world by poking and grotting about. And which human beings have had, presumably from the beginning, or we’d still be hunters and gatherers.

  But it surely has also long been an engine for social mobility, simply because, for many centuries, it gave people attainments, and therefore advantages, which other people didn’t possess. As it still does in less developed parts of the world.

  Even in my time this was apparent. I went to a grammar school in a working class northern city. Overwhelmingly I and my peers had parents who hadn’t had similar educational advantages and certainly hadn’t gone to university. My dad was a salesman in office equipment; one friend’s dad was a plate-layer on the railway; another’s worked in an estate agency, and yet another’s ran an off-licence; another’s, as they used to say at the time, “travelled” in ladies’ underwear! Yet all of us went on to university, and some to second degrees; and all into professions which would have been totally beyond the reach of our parents.

  Sure, if you “failed” the 11+ you could all too easily become trapped in an environment of low aspiration and low expectation; not everyone could reveal their potential by the age of 10 or 11, though in our area at any rate some kids (“late developers”, as the term was) could and did move across to grammar school at 13 or 14.

  But we seem, in the quest for equal opportunity, to have simply created a situation where too many state comprehensives, in aspiration and expectation alike, replicate the sec. mods. of old. Thus the window, limited though it was, for social mobility provided by state grammar schools in my day is now closed.