In June the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission published a report on ‘social mobility’, ‘Elitist Britain 2019’, which found that high-powered jobs in the media, politics, law and public sector ‘remain dominated by a narrow section of the population: the 7% who attend independent [private] schools and the roughly 1% who graduated from just two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.’ The study comes as Boris Johnson has just become the 20th Eton-educated British Prime Minister, and no one better epitomises this privileged ruling class minority than this chauvinistic self-serving career politician.
The commission found that those in ‘elite’ jobs were more than five times as likely to have been privately educated than the rest of the population. The privately educated accounted for 65% of senior judges, 57% of the House of Lords, and 44% of newspaper columnists; and the 1 % of the population with an Oxbridge education for 71% of senior judges, 57% of cabinet ministers and 56% of permanent secretaries. This tiny minority of extremely powerful and privileged people are educated to rule over the working class.
The myth of social mobility
The Sutton Trust is a charity set up in 1997 by multi-millionaire former private equity CEO Sir Peter Lampl, who was born of working-class Viennese immigrant parents but was educated at selective grammar schools. The trust runs free summer schools for state-educated young people to help them get into elite universities. The Social Mobility Commission is a non-departmental advisory government body to ‘assess progress in improving social mobility in the UK and to promote social mobility.’
In May this year, the UN Human Rights Council report into extreme poverty and human rights gave a detailed account of how years of systematic cuts to public spending on welfare, housing, health services and state schooling have decimated the welfare system which was massively expanded after the Second World War.
While during the post-war boom, a handful of individuals such as Lampl were able to ascend into the gilded ranks of the ruling elite, their increasingly unattainable example is employed as an ideological tool to obfuscate and excuse the extreme inequality which is a reality of capitalist society. After all, what kind of ‘social mobility’ exists today for the one third of children living in poverty, the one fifth of children who leave school unable to properly read or write, or the tenth of girls in Britain who have missed school due to being unable to afford menstrual products? (See FRFI 270 ‘Hard Times: UN report on poverty in Britain’.)
Academies: working class pay the price
What is education like for those who cannot afford Eton’s £42,000 per year price tag? For the 93% of children in Britain, who could only dream of attending a school with its own pool, concert halls and art studios? The state school funding crisis is driving the worst affected schools to close early, and forcing parents to provide basics like pens, paper and books, while thousands of children with special educational needs are excluded.
On 22 July, when most schools had already broken up for the summer, the Department for Education (DfE) tightened the screw and announced a 2.75% pay rise for teachers, but while the DfE boasted of ‘investing an additional £105m into the existing Teachers’ Pay Grant’ this only covers 0.75% of the total cost. This will leave struggling schools to fund the first 2% of the pay increase from existing budgets, which head teachers are warning can only lead to further support staff cuts.
In his first speech as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson ludicrously proclaimed: ‘My job is to make sure your kids get a superb education wherever they are in the country …that’s why we have already announced that we are going to level up per-pupil funding in primary and secondary schools.’ In fact the £4.6bn by 2022-23 which Johnson announced during his campaign ‘is an £8bn shortfall in what is needed’ (Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of NEU quoted in Tes online, 24 July 2019).
Working class pupils, teachers and parents are also up against academisation, a process where state schools are handed over to unaccountable for-profit academy trusts. Academisation began under Tony Blair’s Labour government, and today the majority of secondary and a third of primary schools are academies. Billions have been spent by the DfE to force ‘inadequate’ schools to become academies, handing over all control to trusts which can set their own salaries, pay teaching staff less and head teachers more on average, and undermine sick pay and working hour agreements.
There have been several high profile closures of multi-academy trusts such as the Perry Beeches Trust, which was found in 2016 to have ‘funnelled £1.3m to a private company owned by its accounting officer and “superhead” Liam Nolan’ (Schools Week online, 11 January 2018). Closures like this lead to schools being bounced around between trusts, causing major disruption for students and staff, at a cost of £31m in grants paid to academies for the 935 schools transferred between them since 2015. This is a scandalous waste of public money.
Labour: mealy-mouthed promises
In June Angela Rayner, shadow education secretary, claimed that a future Labour government would replace the Social Mobility Commission with a ‘Social Justice Commission’ and instead of the Tories’ ‘mealy-mouthed promises’ they will ‘aim to abolish poverty completely and create a more equal society’ (New Statesman online, 8 June 2019). Clearly, nothing other than scrapping the parasitic process of academisation, and integrating the socially segregated education system would begin to ‘create a more equal’ educational system. The Labour Against Private Schools campaign is pushing for the party to adopt a motion at the September conference which would deliver the oft-promised removal of the charitable status of private schools, which allows them to save millions on business rates, and would reintegrate private schools into the state sector. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has a more anaemic proposal on private schools – to charge VAT on fees to fund free school meals for all primary school children. Rayner claimed in 2018 that Labour would stop ‘forced conversion of local schools to academies’ but they have refused to commit to scrapping them completely. Labour’s promises are no less mealy-mouthed than the Tories, and will do nothing to fight the fundamental class division at the root of the education crisis.
Ruby Most
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 271, June/July 2019
