Thread: UK: 21st Century Class System Destroying 20th Century Meritocracy Gains - BBC

Does a narrow social elite run the country?
BBC : 26 January 2011
Last updated at 10:16 GMT

By Andrew Neil, BBC News



After a turbulent week in Westminster, it seems that British politicians from all parties are being drawn from an ever smaller social pool, says broadcaster Andrew Neil. It wasn't always thus, so what's changed?

The resignations of shadow chancellor Alan Johnson and Tory communications director Andy Coulson spell bad news for an already endangered species - political high-flyers from ordinary backgrounds.

Johnson and Coulson are council-house boys who never went to university, but dragged themselves to the top by sheer hard work, ability and ambition. Look at today's top politicians - both on the right and the left - and you won't find many of their kind remaining.

I too was brought up in a council house but was luckier than Johnson or Coulson. I made it to an elite 16th Century grammar school in Paisley and then Glasgow University, a world-class 15th Century institution.

I was part of the post-World War II meritocracy that slowly began to infiltrate the citadels of power, compete head-to-head against those with the "right" background and connections and - more often than not - win. Britain's class system seemed to be changing, a presumption tested in the BBC's new class test.

Of course, the public schoolboys still held on to a disproportionate share of the top jobs. But the meritocrats were making great inroads, nowhere more so than in politics - even at the very top.

The change was a social revolution. In the 50s and early 60s, Britain had one prime minister after another - Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home - who hadn't just gone to public school, they went to the same public school - Eton, naturally.

Then along came Labour's Harold Wilson in 1964, a Yorkshire grammar schoolboy and it looked as if things would never be the same again. For the next 33 years, every prime minister - Labour or Tory - was educated at a state school.

Nobody thought there would never be another public school prime minister, just that a privileged background would no longer matter so much in climbing the greasy pole of politics.

I was pretty sure the meritocracy was here to stay. It never dawned on me that by the start of the 21st Century, it would come to a grinding halt.

Tony Blair, educated at Fettes - Scotland's poshest private school, broke the run of state-educated PMs when he won the 1997 general election.

On the face of it, that was not necessarily significant, Blair presided over the most state-educated, least Oxbridge cabinet in British history. But behind the scenes, the meritocracy was in trouble.

With the demise of the grammar schools, a new, largely public school educated generation was taking over the Tories once more. And Labour was becoming much more middle-class and Oxbridge again.

Just a glance at today's political elite and it is clear the meritocracy is in trouble. Nobody can deny that our current crop of political leaders is bright. But the pipeline which produces them has become narrower and more privileged.

Cameron, Clegg and Osborne all went to private schools with fees now higher than the average annual wage. Half the cabinet went to fee-paying schools - versus only 7% of the country - as did a third of all MPs.

After falling steadily for decades, the number of public school MPs is on the rise once more, 20 of them from Eton alone - five more MPs than the previous Parliament.

Top Labour politicians are less posh than the Tories or the Lib Dems but they are increasingly middle-class, Oxbridge-educated and have done nothing but politics.
Labour Leader Ed Miliband graduated in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) from Oxford and was pretty quickly working for Gordon Brown. His brother David also did PPE at Oxford and was soon advising Tony Blair.

New shadow chancellor Ed Balls also went to Oxford after private school to do - you guessed it - PPE. It was there that he met his wife, the new shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, who also happened to be doing PPE as well.
So why has politics become the preserve of the privileged once more?

'Widening gap'

The decline of the unions has clearly cut off one working-class route to Westminster. So has the decline of an affluent, aspiring working class, which seemed to disappear with the end of the Industrial Age.

But our education system must have something to do with it as well. Almost uniquely, Britain has developed a largely egalitarian non-selective state school system alongside an aggressive highly-selective private system. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the top jobs are once again falling into the lap of the latter.

The gap between state and private schools is wide and possibly getting wider. Almost one third of private school pupils get at least three A-grade A-levels versus 7.5% of comprehensive pupils. It is a gap that has doubled since 1998, even though Labour doubled spending on schools.

Some think a return to selection by ability would give bright kids from ordinary backgrounds a leg up. But the 11-plus gave selection a bad name and neither Tory nor Labour politicians want to talk about it.

Maybe they're right but in the 21st Century, could it not be possible to come up with more sophisticated, more flexible forms of selection by ability which consign nobody to the educational dustbin? Could we not create, like the Germans, high quality vocational and technology schools every bit as good as academic hothouses?

Perhaps that's a pipedream, in which case prepare for our politics - already posh again - to become even posher.

Ah yes.... Andrew Neil.....





Pamela Singh:
This is one beauty queen who was dogged by the world media for all the wrong reasons. Pamela Singh was born in 1961. Her father was an officer in the Indian army. She won the Miss India and went on to participate in Miss Universe in 1982. Pamela became an overnight media sensation when her love affair with a leading Tory MP came out in the 1980s. It rocked the entire country. According to Pamela, had she told everything, it would have brought down the government. With the help of Tory MP, Henry Bellingham, Pamela also got into the House of Commons as a research assistant for David Shaw, MP of Dover. She also had relationships with Carlos Moynihan, the UK sports minister. For this reason many accused her of spying. However, it did not stop their. She went on to have sexual relations with many famous people. She had relationship with Ahmed Gadaff Al Daim, one of the closest aides of Libyan leader Colonel Gadffi. Then there was Henri Bordes, whom she got married and took up the title Bordes. Henri Bordes was a convicted arms dealer. Her relation with Andrew Neil, the then editor of Sunday Times made her the most wanted.

[QUOTE=Tom Sawyer;1666233][quote=taxexile;1666142]

Maybe they're right but in the 21st Century, could it not be possible to come up with more sophisticated, more flexible forms of selection by ability which consign nobody to the educational dustbin? Could we not create, like the Germans, high quality vocational and technology schools every bit as good as academic hothouses?

that would be one way.

Get rid of private education altogether, then re-implement both of the above scenarios. The rich families can use their money for extra tutoring if required.

I believe it would result in pulling the best and brightest of 100% of the population, rather than the 7% of students who may or may not be very smart - but were trained for uni admittance and obtaining the right A grades - and pass entrance interviews with the right posh accent.

Widen the talent pool and you are on the road to a better and more profitable society. Restrict it and wallow in mediocrity - as the UK has been doing for the last 20 years. There is no prize for coming 14th in everything - especially when you are a G8 country - someone needs to explain that to these twits.

They used to pull the brightest of the 100% it was called 11+. Also used to have the German style techno/vocational. They were called "Technical" Schools.
Leave private schools for those that wish to spend their money that way rather than buying huge houses, bling cars etc.

Sadly the decline is a factor of the "all are the same" policy when clearly we are NOT all the same. Yes give ALL equal opportunity but at some point there needs to be the realization that we are NOT all born equal. Some people, not including me, are smarter than others and need to be treated as such.

Up - a tale of education spending

GO FIGURE
Different ways of seeing stats

Public spending. It goes up. It goes down. Yet new figures show spending on education has gone up, up and up for more than 50 years - reflecting our growing expectations for children. Are we really ready to end that, asks Michael Blastland in his regular column.

All that I wanted was numbers… but no one was counting. In the laptop's dim glow, one thing was clear: I had stumbled on mystery.
This week's column - with apologies to detective fiction - is about missing numbers. We are sleuthing for stats. As we discover them, they will redefine the challenge facing whoever forms the next governments.
We'll confront that conclusion later. First, what is this data and in what way was it missing?

It is education spending, though the implications go wider. You might think the spending numbers for education would be bread and butter to politics, the 1, 2, 3 of debate. But finding out how much the UK spent on education over the lifetime of the modern welfare state is far from simple. There is no single, easily-available source. The online trail, for example, often goes cold in the early 1980s.
If you find that a surprise, I sympathise. In public argument, the basic stats, the simple context to present politics that every politician and voter should need, are not as common as they should be.

By ransacking different sources, you can eventually put together a series. But here's the next oddity. These seldom adjust for pupil numbers. Does that matter? You bet: in the 1960s there was a baby-boom, pupil numbers soared. From the late 1970s, boom turned to bust: the school age population fell sharply, by about 2.7 million children, nearly 25% in 15 years. Think of it another way: nearly one school-child in every four disappeared.

Ups and downs that wild make a difference. If the money has to stretch to far more kids, it isn't as much as it looks. If there are far fewer schools, it should go far further.
And these are not the only wrinkles in the data. No one I could find had worked out how much we really spent on our children's education.
The trail led at last to Paul Bolton. He works on education in the House of Commons library. Could he help? The underlying trends might be important, I said. Would he have a look, and, while he was about it, at both public and private spending?
"Interesting," he said. And went to work.
That work is enormously useful. As we study the charts and data, the results are fascinating. First, the obvious: the share of what we spend as a nation on education has risen dramatically since the war.



Adjusted for pupil numbers, this index of public and private spending multiplies by two or three times. That is not simply two or three times as much money. It is a bigger share of a growing pot, since GDP per head was itself also growing, by nearly four times since the end of the war. In all, a phenomenal growth, under both governing parties.

Second, periods known for cuts turn out less straightforward. The trend between 1979 to 1990, for example, under Margaret Thatcher, is less dramatic than often characterised, largely because of the steep fall in pupil numbers.
And the conclusions? Not Paul Bolton's, but my own, for what they are worth. For what strikes me about that line is a question: after 60 years of such prodigious growth, is this the moment that it will stop? Why?

Rising expectations
We have a powerful trend - with interruptions only around moments of economic crisis - which soon reasserts itself. What's more, this is a trend in private spending as well as public. For generations, people have devoted an ever-bigger share of what they have to their children's education, sometimes faster, sometimes slower but, after 60 years, vastly greater.

The tendency now is to talk of government finances as if short-term tightened belts are the answer. But if we are simply in the middle of another interruption what happens when the long-term trend reasserts itself.
In short: if the future is remotely like the past, nothing shot-term will stifle the return of rising expectations. No government managed this in the past.
If these pressures are to go away, then so must the expectations of a growing commitment to education. Not temporarily, but forever. Is that desirable? Is it likely?

If, on the other hand, the expectations are to be met, expectations that will in all probability long outlive the current crisis, then we need to say how: privately, or through taxation?
Either way, the spending dilemma is tougher than it seems. It is probably not temporary, but permanent. It is not a recession-induced hiccup, more likely a chronic condition induced by our own expectations. Critically, it will grow more acute with time, not less as commonly supposed. And that leads to questions of deep ideology far more than short-term housekeeping.
The one consolation is that it is a dilemma, with choices, if only our leaders would offer them, not a fait accompli one way or another.

The past is no certain guide to the future. But it can help us to a sense of proportion. My sense of the proportions here is that the present debate has scarcely begun to address the challenges. Does the missing data also help to show that we have been missing the argument?
Finally, for those who like their charts, a trickier one to navigate, what the team at the Magazine team have called the Brands Hatch graph, but worth it, also from Paul Bolton, this time for the wider age group that includes sixth formers, showing the real numbers rather than an index.



THE GEEKS' GRAPH AND HOW IT WORKS
<li class="bull"> The line starts bottom left in 1952 when we spent about 2.9% of the nation's income on the education of about 10.7 million children <li class="bull"> It goes up and down with total spending as a share of national income, and left and right with pupil numbers <li class="bull"> The gridlines help us to see when a rise is really a rise, for only if the line tends towards crossing a gridline is it really changing the amount of spending per pupil <li class="bull"> The gridlines show a constant ratio of GDP per head to school-age population

So what does this graph tell us?

• We see starkly the fall in school age children in the 1980s, from well above 13 million to well below 11 million, and how the fact that spending is popularly believed to have been cut at this time might not reflect reality
• We also see two periods of real upheaval: the 1970s, when a combination of inflation and recession made an all-round mess of the data as it did with planned levels of spending at the time, and the 1990s recession and recovery when pupil numbers also rose for the first time in a generation
• They also show a rise under New Labour of about one percentage point up to the current recession, similar to the rise during the Conservative governments of John Major and Margaret Thatcher

Caveats/problems...
There are problems with this series of data as a statement of the nation's commitment to education. To mention a few, it doesn't take account of the recent expansion of state nursery education to four year olds, for example. It measures the pupil-aged population, not the actual number of pupils. And money is not the only measure of how much we care.
But this is an improvement. And if we do care, if we are serious, ought we not to take more pains over the basics, to see where they might lead?


Story from BBC NEWS:
BBC News - Up - a tale of education spending

Published: 2010/03/11 13:19:50 GMT

© BBC 2011

The Conservative cuts in education really set UK society back as a whole, and those social consequences are still evident today, that's not political bias, it's first hand knowledge. While most EU nations were maintaining or improving their public education systems the Tories were dismantling the UK's. The current government has spent vast amounts improving the system, but when the starting point is so woefully retarded it is no wonder that the UK is still so far behind in educational standards.

Of course during the Tory reign there was a simple way to deal with the consequences, absolve themselves of all responsibility by denying that society even existed, there were no societal factors only genetic ones, a sentiment that still pervades to this day.