Is the UK education system a racket for the middle-classes?

 

Not very long ago, I got into a conversation with a young Asian lad in my local library. He told me that he was a pupil at Stockport Grammar School, which I understand is a fee-paying independent school. He told me that he was at the school on a scholarship which greatly impressed me. I said to him that he'd obviously secured a place at the school on his wits and abilities and not on his parents' ability to pay the fees.

I knew one young girl who was the daughter of a friend, who attended Oldham Hulme Grammar School. She told her father that many of her contemporaries struggled with the academic work and were only at the school because their parents could afford the fees. She thought many of them weren't really grammar school material at all. Her father told me that this was probably correct but the school needed the money. I then said to him but what if you're an intelligent child and your parents can't afford the fees? He said to me, that if that was the case, you shouldn't apply in the first place. I thought this a strange comment coming from a man who professed to believe in something called the 'meritocracy', which I think is a complete fallacy.

The comprehensive system of education was a failed attempt to introduce a form of egalitarianism into the British state education system and to increase social mobility. Many middle-class parents are prepared to sell their homes and to relocate to other areas where there are better performing schools for their children. This not only drives up house prices but increases demand for school places in better state schools and limits access to less affluent families.

Bridget Philipson, Labour's education minister, said recently that the state education system had failed "white working-class children", but I've been  hearing this for most of my life. When I was at primary school, we all seemed to know which of our contemporaries  were likely to go to the grammar school. Yet, if you read 'The Uses of Literacy' by Richard Hoggart, it is clear that for some working-class children from poor backgrounds, like Hoggart, selection by the 11+ examination and education grants, did lead to upward social mobility.

A man that I know who was at primary school with me in the early 1960s, said to me only recently, that if your father wore overalls, you weren't going anywhere in those days. I would caution anyone against being too fatalistic. I think we should always use our best endeavours, but he obviously saw the education system has one huge con-trick and a racket for the middle-classes. He might well have a point. A student that I met at Manchester University, who was from Wakefield, once said to me that he'd been there a week and that I was the first person that he'd spoken to who had a northern accent. I know of one female student who spoke with a Geordie accent, who was interviewed for a place at Oxford University, and was asked what made someone like her think she could come to place like this. I was told of another female student that attended an interview at Oxford, who was asked how many bedrooms her father's house had.