Further to your editorial on class becoming a legally protected characteristic (30 January), I note a letter from an unnamed solicitor (Letters, 5 February) who says she is “definitely working class”, but does not explain how she knows that. She admits there is a problem in defining what it is so, I assume, she has her own personalised definition.
And therein lies the problem. Everyone has their own idea of what they mean by class. Accent, postcode, housing tenure, income, job type – all relating either to oneself or to one’s parents. I have even been told it relates to grandparents’ jobs.
It is so meaningless that picking out one variable for the purpose of legislation is a non-starter. And if this solicitor’s son’s prospects could be limited by virtue of his schooling and postcode, it is also immoral.
People are just people with varying abilities. A change in the law would not affect me. In my 80-plus years of life, I have always considered myself classless and I’m very happy to continue to do so.
Michael Chapman
Heathfield, East Sussex
• Regarding David Bell’s letter(Letters, 5 February), he is misinformed if he thinks comprehensive education was introduced in the 1970s. A movement for “common” schools began before the second world war, and about a hundred comprehensive schools were open by the end of the 1950s. There were 10 times as many by the end of the next decade, following the Labour government’s 1965 request to all England’s local authorities to plan to “go comprehensive”. Even so, in areas retaining selective education, some four out of five students attended secondary modern schools.
These young people learned in larger classes and were taught by less well-qualified staff than was the case for the small minority who went to grammar schools. Nor could they aim at university, being generally denied the opportunity to take O-level (let alone A-level) exams. As is the case today, the grammar schools of the 1960s taught very few children from impoverished families. Comprehensive schools, not grammar schools, have been the great enablers of opportunity, as the chancellor, the home secretary, the great majority of the cabinet, and the new archbishop of Canterbury, all comprehensive school students in their youth, could perhaps attest.
Patrick Yarker
Dereham, Norfolk
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