Equality of opportunity? Social mobility?

 Reading an article this morning about Faiza Shaheen, a young woman who stood (and lost but with a respectable number of people voting for her) against Iain Duncan Smith in 2019 for the Chingford and Woodford Green constituency, I was moved to think about social mobility and equality. 

“Losing in 2019 was, in the end, instructive. Shaheen lost by just 1,262 votes and Chingford and Woodford Green was one of only six seats in the country to see a swing to Labour. In the days, weeks and months that followed, she started to reassess what had happened. She found that while the odds of going to Oxford University – which she did – and then on to become an MP were one in 10m for her, they were closer to one in 10,000 for David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The question was less why she had lost, and more why she had ever thought she could win.” (My underlining.)

She’s a working-class, Muslim, British-Pakistani-Fijian daughter of a car mechanic who went to Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics - often seen as a a kind of entry ticket into politics. She’s written a book, “Know Your Place”, in which she analyses the social inequality she has experienced first-hand, and she writes that as she watched Smith give his victory speech, all she could say, over and over again, was: “There is no justice.”

Polly Toynbee also writes about knowing your place and being aware that coming from an upper-middle-class family gives you a privilege others might not have, even if your upper-middle-class family is staunchly anti-Conservative and probably disapproves of privilege. She wonders if she was given a second chance at education, having been fairly unsuccessful at her boarding school and being encouraged at sixth form college to try again, if her family background was “recognised” by the helpful teacher. Would he have encouraged a girl from a different background in the same way? It is to be hoped that he would. 

I wasn’t sent away to boarding school. Even though I read stories about girls’ boarding schools and thought they sounded like great fun: midnight feasts in the ‘dorm’, secret societies going around solving mysteries and righting wrongs. But now I can think of nothing worse than being sent away from home at age 7.

When I was 7, going on 8, I moved up from the local state infants’ school to the local state junior school on the same site. I still remember an occasion at the start of that school year when the headmaster came and spoke to our class. We were 1A, the top class, close on 50 of us who were expected to sit still and quiet. (Lower “ability” classes were smaller because they needed “controlling”.) The headmaster asked each of us what our fathers’ jobs were. I told him my father was a printer. “Are you sure?” He asked me, “ Is he not a gardener?” At some point I worked out that he had that impression because my older sister, two years ahead of me, had said he worked for The Guardian, which he did print when it was still the Manchester Guardian. I always wondered if I was somehow regarded differently because my father was an accepted professional. 

When I started teaching I really believed in comprehensive education and did see pupils progress from lower streams (this was before mixed ability teaching was the norm) and gradually move up into higher streams, do O-Levels and A-Levels and eventually even go to Oxford or Cambridge. 

Social mobility seemed more than possible. Now it seems less sure.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!