Education, Education, Education*

The Nineties was a strange and fascinating time. Though I was only twelve when it ended, it is a decade I remember far more vividly than the two that followed. Perhaps this is the usual effect of growing older, or perhaps there really was such a thing as a twentieth-century fin de siècle; the sounds ringing louder and the colours becoming more saturated under the chaos of uncertainty as we entered a new millenium. We were going somewhere, and only time would tell if that was on to higher ground, or over the precipice of some great cliff.

Accompanying the excitement that seemed to fizz, both from the neck of a bottle of Panda Pop as I stomped home from school along the Bristol Road in south Birmingham, and between the pixels that jostled for space on the blizzard holding screen when my impatient fingers ventured beyond the five terrestrial channels, was the image of a man. Tony Blair’s frenzied grin was the soundtrack to a time period built on edifice. For all of the hatred that the industrial working classes felt towards Margaret Thatcher, it would be Blair who eventually put paid to many people’s participation in party politics, confirming all of their worst suspicions about the political class: that they were untrustworthy and governed more by PR strategy than meaningful policies. After all, Thatcher, for all her draconian horror, could hardly be accused of pretending to be something she wasn’t.

But what Blair continued under a more deceitful guise had nevertheless begun with her. Most obvious and damaging among Thatcher’s domestic plans was to undermine the systems that supported working-class people. Pulling the rug of social support out from under those at the greatest disadvantage in society was a technique devised to incentivise greater social mobility. This was Thatcher’s big plan for the economy, made most vivid by the controversial right-to-buy scheme that left councils understocked on social housing. Though Thatcher had not been in office since 1990, and her replacement, the less divisive John Major, had gone some way to pacifying some critics, the continuation of Tory rule was inescapable, and Major was still largely considered a Thatcherite puppet in the years that followed. Therefore, and on account of the sheer magnitude of her reforms, Thatcher’s presence was still being felt by the working classes when Tony Blair was elected Leader of the Opposition in 1994.

He arrived at a time of economic uncertainty following a damaging recession that took root in 1991 and marked the end of the Lawson boom of the 1980s, momentarily shattering any illusion of infinite growth and stress-testing Thatcher’s philosophy to dire effect. Unemployment levels spiked, and though this had started to be corrected by the time of the general election campaign of 1997, even parts of Thatcher’s most ardent support-base were beginning to question the credibility of her legacy. The people wanted something different. Or at least, something that smiled and gesticulated a lot.

Blair and New Labour would adapt Thatcher’s model of unabated free-market capitalism to try and better support some public services. But, as is explained in great detail by Owen Jones in his standout work on class consciousness, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, they would also go on to continue Thatcher’s legacy by making a false distinction between an aspiring and non-aspiring working class. The former would constitute that very narrow subsection of the working class with the ability and will to seize on the limited opportunities to “better” itself in the modern workplace, and the latter would constitute those who didn’t. This would cement the thinking that led to the rampant cult of the so-called benefit cheat and, more broadly, the demonization of anyone whose priority wasn’t the advancement of their salary or social status. But before all of this, it would stake its election hopes on an education platform that placed schooling front and centre — something few could disagree with.

At the Blackpool Labour Party conference in 1996, when I was eight, Tony Blair challenged his party to conceive of a radical new approach to politics, one that started by giving every child in Britain as close to an equal start in life as possible. Taking to the podium and with the emphatic delivery and overwrought emotion that would eventually become his trademark, he appealed to his audience: “Ask me my main three priorities for government, and I will tell you: education, education and education.”

Those three words — or rather that one word repeated for effect — would become shorthand for the New Labour agenda and one of the most effective campaigns of modern electoral history. Blair’s shadow frontbench gave their full support, with John Prescott and Gordon Brown looking on from the sidelines, clapping enthusiastically, while from another corner of the hall, whooping and cheering could be heard from other members of the wider PLP.

It was easy to see why the idea resonated. The education system had long been crying out for major reform, and the policies being proposed by Blair would radically improve working-class participation in compulsory, higher and further education. The only major initiative taken by the Tory government to redress education inequality had been the Assisted Places Scheme, which granted eligible children free or subsidised admission to public schools providing they scored within the top 10-15 percentile of admission test results. Between 1981 and 1997, 80,000 children had participated in the scheme, at a cost to the UK taxpayer of around £800 million.5 Standards in state school classrooms, meanwhile, were slipping. In Thatcher’s highly rigged version of a meritocracy, clearly only the academically gifted would win. And only a very few of them at that.

But Blair and New Labour wanted to go some way to putting this right. In the ten years that he was prime minister, Blair oversaw a reduction in the size of classrooms for five-, six- and seven-year-olds to no more than thirty pupils, funded by the money saved from scrapping the Assisted Places Scheme. He also saw a 48% increase in per-pupil funding; an 18% rise in teacher pay; and the creation of some 1106 new schools, 35,000 more teaching jobs and 172,000 teaching assistant jobs. This amounted to a 9% increase in the number of people achieving five good GCSEs with English and Maths.6

If there was one area where New Labour was resolute and stayed true to its word, it was education. Fewer children than ever before would be failed by an inadequate and unjust system, which, in addition to the work carried out in Northern Ireland, arguably remains Blair’s greatest legacy. But while many working-class parents lauded this proliferation in the opportunities afforded to their offspring, and by proxy, the man implementing it, Blair’s motivations weren’t as straightforwardly altruistic as they might have first seemed.

After all, the British economy under Thatcher had pivoted away from industry and towards services. The immediate returns from this resulted in the 1980s boom, but it was short-lived. Throughout the early 1990s, the British economy had begun to stall and unemployment figures started to creep back up as the former industrial heartlands failed to provide adequate alternatives for employment. Urgent measures were needed to kickstart the economy and to redress the paucity of qualified individuals to fill the kinds of industries that had emerged adjacent to the financial sector — accounting, IT, management consultancy and law. More people than ever before would need to develop the technical ability and academic skills afforded by further and higher education. If in the process thousands would forestall their job search by an extra three years, thereby skewing unemployment figures in the government’s favour, then that would just be a bonus.

A later speech delivered by Blair at the University of Birmingham in April 1997 hints at what was really happening:

“To those who say where is Labour’s passion for social justice,” Blair bellowed, “I say education is social justice. Education is liberty. Education is opportunity. Education is the key not just to how we as individuals succeed and prosper, but to the future of this country.”7

Education, in other words, was necessary for kick-starting the economy, and social justice had been used to justify a continuation of the Thatcherite project, reframing individualism and education for no other purpose than the advancement of one’s cultural capital as a collectivist idea. But social justice in any real sense would have equated to an improvement of the conditions faced by the whole of the working class, not just making concessions to the academically gifted in order for them to escape it.

Labour MP Stephen Pound sums up this whole phenomenon quite succinctly in Owen Jones’ Chavs, asserting that “the working classes have been sold the line that they shouldn’t be there.” To survive and prosper, your only option as a working-class person is to “somehow drag yourself up”.⁸

Blair hadn’t just tactically conflated individualism with social justice, either. He had also made a promise to the British electorate whose false premise would only be revealed years later. By incentivising everyone to pursue the road of academia, with no attention to the valuable opportunities afforded by apprenticeships, for example, certain manual industries and care roles would be left under-served and undervalued. The demand for these industries wouldn’t disappear, and the extent to which the service economy would be able to compensate for the job losses caused by the dismantling of industry had either been wildly overestimated or wilfully ignored. Crucially, Blair would not be in office when the reality of this situation began to sink in, as a generation of graduates, saddled with unprecedented levels of debt, found that its numbers far outstripped the number of available or relevant jobs. In 2008, on account of the financial crisis, graduate unemployment levels were at an all-time high, but in the years since, self-employment figures for those of working age (up to sixty-five) have also remained skewed towards the youngest in society. What’s more, according to the Office for National Statistics, between 2001 and 2016 the growth in self-employment was driven mainly by those who held a degree (or equivalent), with the overall share of self-employed people with a degree rising from 19.3% in 2001 to 32.6% in 2016.9 This corresponds with what I know far more anecdotally: that a generation of young people have had to develop the resilience and tenacity to define their own careers — patching together bits of paid work and unstable contracts. This of course excludes those who pursued public sector vocations such as teaching and medicine, whose own struggles at the hands of the Tory austerity programme are well-known.

Truthfully, what was being branded as an exercise in social justice, then, was an attempt to leverage the academic capabilities of some for the sake of meeting economic demand. And what might at first have seemed like a straightforwardly altruistic agenda, on closer inspection was revealed to be intimately tied to answering the economic necessities of life post-Thatcher, irrespective of whether or not it ultimately succeeded. Had the UK retained its status as an industrial power, this conversation was unlikely to have ever happened.

As a result, academic grades had never been so prized, and practical education was being steadily supplanted by the rising tide of new academic disciplines. One of the most vivid cases is that of design and technology, which stopped being a compulsory GCSE in 2000 and by 2017 was reported to have been axed from nearly half of all UK schools.10 Instead, wood and metal work, textiles, and home economics would be replaced by subjects that could furnish graduates with the skills needed to succeed in the modern workplace, such as business studies, ICT, media, law and psychology.

Meanwhile, those who were not academically inclined remained locked out of the conversation. In what is commonly referred to as the enduring academic-vocational divide, 25% of sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds were still not in education or training by 2007, suggesting a large contingent still disenfranchised by the formal systems of education.¹¹ Meanwhile, only 15% of employees were said to be receiving job-related training.¹² What became apparent was that vocational training, and specifically vocational training in public sector and manual disciplines, would not be included in the country’s overhauling of education. OfSTED criteria were altered accordingly, and as the pressure mounted on schools to turn out better academic results, emphasis shifted in favour of the more superficial and quantifiable outcomes of the school system.

The battle for the future of the British economy was being fought as much in the exchanges on parents evening as it was in the head offices of the Bank of England. After the plans were laid out in the government’s first white paper on the subject in 1997, the education system saw a marked increase in the number of tests, targets and annual league tables. Those of us experiencing this phenomenon first-hand can attest to a doubling down on awards for the academically, musically and athletically gifted — individualistic pursuits that had once scored lower on the school achievement rankings than communal endeavour and conscientiousness. Meanwhile, teachers became possessed by a need for their classes to score well in exams, focusing more on hammering home the assessment criteria than ensuring their pupils developed a thorough and meaningful understanding of a given subject. Talking points around the kinds of skills and extra-curricular activities that might make your CV stand out or score you more UCAS points began to proliferate in British classrooms.

Even in the playground of our humble state school in Northfield in south Birmingham, there emerged the kind of competitive parenting culture you might otherwise expect to find only in the termly meetings at Cheltenham Ladies College. While those parents who weren’t squarely focused on priming their children for eleven-plus exams — not because they didn’t care about their children’s livelihoods, but because they didn’t want to put their children under so much pressure, or because they fairly assumed that they might find greater happiness in a manual job that provided them with a fair work-life balance, or perhaps most importantly, because they believed that their children’s skills lay elsewhere, in a more nurturing or manual line of work — were commonly dismissed as failures, their children becoming the subject of playground whispers.

Classes became increasingly divided along strata of ability and performance too, with “smart” kids becoming separated from their “less smart” peers by teachers who often seemed to ignore how biased their judgements were by the economic status of their pupils. Under this new way of thinking, prejudices became more entrenched, with accents, clothing, hairstyles and postures all becoming signifiers of someone’s aspirational credentials. As journalist and academic Sally Tomlinson puts it:

While governments were encouraging more people to engage in competitive attempts to improve their human capital potential, large numbers were still excluded from entering the competition on equal terms and class structures were proving remarkably resilient.13

What was being driven by economic necessity would be presented at the level of teacher-student, or even teacher-parent, as a moral duty. The role of the parent and the teacher had changed from providing the necessary ingredients to furnish children with health, happiness and a basic education in order to make a meaningful contribution to society, to achieving the highest possible standards of academic attainment. Any parent or teacher who failed on this front would be judged more harshly by this new morality, which posited academic excellence as the only viable route to prosperity.

One of the gravest impacts of capitalism has been the confusion of market value with morality — for example solicitors not just being remunerated above, but being judged morally superior to, a host of other vocations from teaching assistants to plumbers — and imposing this false moral hierarchy onto the diversity of skills needed in order for a society to properly function. The judgement is implicit even in the labelling of “softer skills” required in care-giving or support roles, which, in addition to the manual skills required in industry, were always by their very nature remunerated far below the level of those skills required to perform the duties of the marketplace — strong management abilities, ruthless negotiating power, strategic thinking and a propensity for risk-taking. But New Labour’s education reforms exacerbated this tendency, ensuring that the value attached to these skills went beyond the straightforwardly economical to encroach on our most fundamental notions of righteousness and goodness.

During the 1990s, working-class people were perceived to face one of two choices: succeed in education and the professional services, or fail. The trajectory from school to university to white-collar job would become synonymous with that other core tenet of the New Labour strategy: the aspirational working class. Blair and his peers wielded the aspirational rhetoric liberally during the Nineties as a way of subtly castigating its other: the non-aspirational working class, on whose basis the profiteers of this new era of free-market capitalism were able to create their fictional bogeyman, “The Chav”.

Being a chav wasn’t just limited to financial status, but to the extent that it also encompassed a person’s adherence to the establishment’s rules of taste, it represented an expansion of Britain’s class prejudices. It was an attempt not just to police the earning potential of its working-class target, but the values and aesthetics of its cultural identity. This represented a stark contrast to the culture that had been presided over by Reagan and Thatcher, where the display of wealth in more overt and unapologetic terms had been permitted, if not actively encouraged. Its emergence would coincide with the renewed emphasis on education, sowing the seeds of a far quieter strain of judgement and castigation, as it characterised any deviance from the British establishment and its cultural reference points as tasteless, morally wanton and depraved. The cardinal sin of poverty had been replaced by something similar but crucially different: poor taste. It was no longer enough to have seized on the opportunities for financial advancement. Now the working class would also be required to erase its vernacular, its dress code, its aesthetic sensibilities. In other words, working-class people — of the upwardly mobile persuasion or otherwise — would only be tolerated by the establishment and permitted entry into its clubs and workspaces provided it remain inconspicuous. Hence why Danniella Westbrook could still be dubbed a “chav icon” in 2002 by the Daily Mail for wearing head-to-toe Burberry, despite at the time comfortably out-earning most middle-class people in Britain.14

The beliefs and values on which society was built were being steadily transformed in order to tally with the economic agenda. Mark Fisher dissects this phenomenon in Capitalist Realism, oftentimes pointing to tendencies so subtle we might have otherwise ignored their part in propping up a neoliberal value system. As he argues, capitalism isn’t just an organising principle of economies and governments, existing outside of and separate to the individual, but a slow and steady conquering of our philosophies, ideas and identities. This would build on the idea of “naturalization” first posited by Barthes, and on the earlier observation by Marx that the middle and upper classes find myriad ways of normalizing the systems of capital (see popular idioms such as, dog-eat-dog, it’s every man for himself, and perhaps most significantly, there’s no such thing as society, and later, class).

Parents had become the primary agents of Blair’s future vision for Britain, and the pressure mounted on them to raise their children according to the new individualistic value system necessitated by the marketplace. Of the many cardinal sins that accompanied this new economic belief system, truancy attracted the most press attention when in 1999 it became government policy to fine the parents of serial offenders by £2,500. The liberty and opportunity of education which Tony Blair had referred to in his earlier speech was now subject to a whole new level of law enforcement, and with that came the assertion that truancy wasn’t merely the result of children feeling disenfranchised, but rather connected to that fixation of playground gossip-hounds and radio call-in shows: bad parenting.

To raise this ultra-bright, ultra-ambitious generation, parents and teachers did away with the distant, authoritative styles of the past in order to prioritise the child’s self-determination, self-belief and academic prowess. Cue the widespread adoption of the more participatory “child-centred” approach, an idea popularised in the 1980s but which found fertile ground in the cultures that were borne of Blair’s softer aspirational rhetoric.15 This style of teaching, and parenting, gave greater precedence to the child’s own viewpoint, in favour of administering lessons from afar and by a series of direct instructions. Grades and extracurricular achievements became the hallmark of sound parenting; and those who lacked the time and resources to provide their children with music, drama lessons and additional tutoring — once a luxury, now common fare for working- and lower-middle-class households — were judged to be failing.

At the same time, wider trends in globalisation were making the world seem far smaller and far more accessible to everyone. The widespread availability of low-cost air travel, the dawn of the internet, and the huge advances being made in digital technologies created the impression of a world built for, and around, these aspirant young people. Increasingly, the world was judged not through the prism of local community, but as a wide and open playing field, whose opportunities could be mined by the intelligent and canny in order to achieve whatever it was they wanted.

The generation now broadly dubbed “millennial” came of age at a time when people took an almost obsessive interest in children’s education. We probably felt a greater sense of self-importance than previous generations, but were at the same time under an immense amount of pressure to perform and to make full use of this unprecedented degree of opportunity. I was one of the millions of working-class people who attended university, something that would have seemed unthinkable to mine and millions of people’s parents, and while there were many who used this opportunity to pursue the road of social mobility as intended, there would be many others who seized on it in other ways too.

On the podium at the University of Birmingham in 1997, Tony Blair described an opportunity for anyone to escape the class into which they were born. What he failed to realise was that members of this smart and somewhat precocious generation that he had created might also view this as an opportunity to immerse itself in the likes of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Naomi Klein and the many other spokespeople of a tradition(s) that stood diametrically opposed to both him and the Thatcherite legacy he preserved.

In setting out to create a generation of young professionals to carry out the duties of an increasingly service-based economy, what seemed to have escaped both Blair’s attention, and that of the political and media class more broadly, was the reality that they had also created something far scarier than the fictional mob of chavs they’d invented. They’d created a well-educated working and lower-middle class on a fact-finding mission to understand the forces that had so far acted against it.