One month on from the election and with a Queen’s speech behind us, what do we know about the next five years? Much political capital is being invested in the sort of structural changes that have prevailed, with mixed results, for the past 15 years.
There is nothing wrong with the political themes of “one nation” and “aspiration” that bob around between the main parties – what’s not to like about a socially cohesive society in which people can have ambitions and hope? The trouble is we are being force-fed platitudes on these themes, and starved of concrete proposals.
Benjamin Disraeli’s 19th-century novel Sybil, out of which the original “one nation” philosophy emerged, described England as two nations, rich and poor, that were as “ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets”.
We have come a long way from the hungry 1840s. We no longer send children down mines or up chimneys. But we still have a divided society exacerbated by a school system that lavishes advantage on the privileged and divides children, often irreversibly, from a young age – in some cases into the education equivalent of a different planet.
I don’t consider this observation to be rooted in the politics of envy or class warfare. It is simply an inconvenient truth: the more affluent you are, the easier it will be to work the school hierarchy to your advantage, to exercise choice, to see your children achieve their dreams and to buy them a competitive advantage for life.
Meanwhile, the issue of realising aspirations is more vexed than many think. The public may well not want to hear much about inequality (that seems to be the conclusion from Labour’s doomed campaign), and of course poverty should never be used as an excuse for low expectations. But even after 25 years of supposed radical education “reform” a few other inconvenient facts keep popping up: a 19-month gap in cognitive development between the best- and worst-off children before they even start school; a gap in GCSE scores between children eligible for free school meals and those who are not stubbornly stuck at about 27%; almost a million 16- to 24-years-olds not in education, employment or training.
Children in the poorest families still face a higher risk of multiple deprivation in life – poor mental health, low-wage work, unemployment, inadequate housing. If we want all children to achieve their aspirations, how can we avoid looking beyond schools and at poverty, income inequality, poor housing, lack of adequate mental health provision and family support?
And if we haven’t got the stomach for that sort of genuinely radical social reform (and I suspect none of these will be tackled effectively in the next five years), we need to make sure schools have adequate resources to try to compensate for society’s inability to offer all children a decent start in life. This doesn’t just mean guaranteeing a supply of first-class teachers and high-quality early years education – which, incidentally, may be very different from simply offering more hours of childcare. It also means offering the practical support some children cannot count on at home: one-to-one tuition, a warm place to go at the beginning and end of the day, food, the enrichment activities (sport, trips and cultural activities) that some families cannot afford.
This is where the next five years starts to look shaky and the politicians’ warm words hollow. It isn’t hard to see which children will suffer most from the looming funding cuts and teacher shortages. It won’t be Eton and Harrow scrabbling around to find maths teachers; it will be schools in marginalised and deprived communities, thus jeopardising what progress has been made in recent years.
As heads and governing bodies start to manage unprecedented funding cuts it will be all those “extras” that get shaved off the budget, before teachers and less popular subjects face the axe, exacerbating the “two nation” state-private divide.
It is interesting to see the shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, today, after the election, calling for a more radical agenda. I agree that ideas of aspiration, equality and one nation are not mutually exclusive. One of the fundamental pillars of a socially cohesive society is surely the idea of mutual self-interest, reciprocity and concern for others less well off than us.
But in practical terms enabling aspiration for all almost certainly means chipping away at the extremely unequal school hierarchy and investing more money in the least well off, even if the rest of us have to pay for that. Anyone campaigning under these banners who hasn’t got the courage to say so should find another slogan.
