Education’s Dark Side

The victors and victims of the education arms race are all around us: the tiger mums, super tutors and school-admission cheats. The foot soldiers are the weary children and their teachers, wilting under the unrelenting pressure to perform better each year. Even the winners in this race pay a heavy price for their apparent success.

Tanith Carey, a self-proclaimed tiger mum, has documented the damage done by hyper-competitive parenting to family life. Maximizing your children’s talents is a full-time obsession: ferrying them from sports practice to musical renditions, scheduling tutoring sessions and extra classes over weekends. Tiger mums (and dads) are driven by a neurotic fear that no matter what they have done, it is never quite enough.

‘Neurosis underpinned every conversation, as most of us had the same goal of getting our children into the same selective schools,’ Carey told the Daily Telegraph. ‘Then there was the depressing cloak-and-dagger secrecy and paranoia because we all lived with the constant fear that other mothers were doing more than we were.’1 You can spot a tiger parent immediately: they inflate their child’s achievements to anyone who will listen.

The Asian American academic Amy Chua first advocated a disciplinarian parenting style in her book Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother (2011).2 Grounded in East Asian culture, Chua’s methods have spread to the West, lauded and loathed in equal measure. The British species is more panther-like, going to great lengths to conceal the extra coaching their children receive. The aim is to leave the impression that their sons and daughters are naturally brilliant. ‘It’s uncool to be a tiger mother,’ Carey says. She claims to have tamed her tigerish instincts.³

There are no official estimates of tiger mum numbers in Britain. But we know there has been an explosion in private tutoring outside normal schooling hours. The percentage of children aged between 11 and 16 in England receiving private or home tuition rose by over a third in a decade, increasing from 18 per cent in 2005 to 25 per cent by 2016.⁴ For teenagers in their GCSE years, the percentages are higher, reaching a third by 2016.

Within this upward trend, London has become the capital of private tuition: 42 per cent of young people in 2016 said they had received some form of tutoring, with tutors charging on average £29 an hour.⁵ Conservative estimates put Britain’s private tuition market at £1–2 billion a year.

The shadow education sector is a vast enterprise, purchased mostly by the elites. Pupils at private schools are twice as likely as state-educated pupils to receive private tuition.⁶ Nearly half (43 per cent) of state school teachers had worked as private tutors outside the standard school day.

In this booming tuition industry, a new academic breed of supertutors are glorified as glamorous, globe-trotting stars.⁸ It’s a life of teaching on yachts and planes, earning hundreds of pounds an hour. Yet it’s also education’s dark side. Oxbridge graduates are making a Faustian pact: serving the wealthy to pay their post-graduation debts.

Figure 4.1
Private tutoring of secondary school children, 2005-2016.7

‘In my darker moments, I felt the only thing Oxford had prepared me for was to train other people to go to Oxford,’ confided recent graduate Ruby Robson in one article. ‘Perpetuating the system of privilege really stuck in my throat. After all, you’re just helping the kids who’ve got the most money.’ Tellingly, ‘Ruby’ was a made-up name, a pseudonym to protect her real identity. Tutoring had become a necessary evil to make ends meet as she tried to forge a career in the media.⁹ But as with so many graduates, particularly those working in the poorly paid world of the creative industries, helping rich kids had become essential work.

The most exclusive tutoring services operate in the shadows, prospering through powerful personal networks: a discreet word from one banker to another. Only the elite of the elite send their children to the agencies who promise complete secrecy. The service is not just about exam results. Tutors will also equip children with the essential life skills needed to prosper in (and rule) the world – confidence, articulacy and resilience, as well as a certain charm. It is why overseas clients demand the most prestigious super tutor them of all: an Eton-educated Oxbridge graduate.¹⁰

The Great Social Leveller Myth

Many of us cling onto the hope that education can act as the great social leveller, enabling children from poorer backgrounds to overcome the circumstances they are born into. But evidence, gathered over a number of decades and for a range of countries, shows that for most children education has failed to live up to these expectations.

In no developed country for which we have data is there evidence that early-years centres, schools or colleges consistently reduce attainment gaps, and life prospects, between the rich and poor.11 The education system at best acts as a counter-balance to the powerful forces outside the school gates driving bigger education gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged.

The pattern observed is an ever-escalating educational arms race in which the poorest children are hopelessly ill-equipped to fight, and where the increasingly rich rewards go to the offspring of the social elites. Far from acting as a leveller, the education system has been exploited to retain advantage from one generation to the next. Individuals from wealthy backgrounds acquire higher qualifications that pave the way for higher earnings. Existing inequalities are transmitted and magnified across the generations. Social mobility falls.

The education system was expanded and upgraded with the aim of widening opportunities and developing talent from all backgrounds. Yet at every turn the privileged have found new ways to distinguish their offspring in the academic stakes.

In the past the middle-class advantage was found through A levels and university degrees; today it is achieved through postgraduate degrees and exclusive internships. A degree is no longer the automatic passport to a well-paid job it once was; now a particularly exclusive degree plus a master’s qualification is required. Just as the education system expands to equalize opportunities, so a new frontier emerges enabling the well-off to climb one step up again.

The sociologist John Goldthorpe observes that ‘parental – and, perhaps, grandparental – resources, even if not sufficient to allow for children to be educated in the private sector, are still widely deployed to buy houses in areas served by high-performing state schools, to pay for individual tutoring, to help manage student debt, to support entry into postgraduate courses for which no loans are available, or, in the case of educational failure, to fund “second chances”.’12

With each passing generation the arms race becomes a more one-sided affair. Parents with more money and support are able to commandeer more powerful education weaponry for their offspring. Widening inequalities in income and inequalities in education reinforce each other in an endless feedback loop from one generation to the next.

In this race the biggest losers are the school leavers with no qualifications or skills at all. In recent decades, wage differentials between workers with more education and workers with less education have risen. An Oxbridge degree confers a much bigger advantage than a ‘bog standard’ degree. Failing to get basic GCSEs at age 16 incurs a bigger penalty in working life than for previous generations. It is why those leaving school without basic numeracy and literacy skills – the lost souls we describe in the next chapter – are at an increasing disadvantage.

The signs of this arms race are all around us: tiger parents, super tutors, escalating levels of private tuition and private school fees, and inflated house prices in the neighbourhoods of the most sought-after state schools.

Sharp-elbowed Warriors

Some of the fiercest battles are fought at the gates of sought-after schools. Oversubscribed schools select children using a range of criteria: how near they live to the school, how much they have attended a particular local church, or how well they do in academic entrance tests. Whatever the method, the result is the same: too many anxious parents fighting over limited places. And the winners are the offspring of the sharp-elbowed chattering classes.

‘Nothing causes parents, particularly middle-class parents, so much angst as secondary school admissions. Drugs, crime, underage sex, foul language, truancy, rap music, acne and smart answers, plus exam results that don’t allow entry to a decent university – all these, it is feared, are the potential results of a bad secondary school,’ observed the journalist Peter Wilby.13 ‘Go to a dinner party in Islington or Edgbaston, and they will talk of little else.’

One way to get ahead is to pay the inflated prices of houses in the vicinity of the ‘best’ schools. Poorer pupils have been priced out of the catchment areas of popular comprehensives in England because local houses cost £45,700 more than elsewhere.¹⁴ Meanwhile a school at the top of the education rankings attracts a house price premium of around 12 per cent relative to a school ranked at the bottom.15

It is an investment worth making. Paying for a good education by taking out a mortgage is a cheaper option than paying the fees for a private school if you have two children (and much the same deal for one). The children’s improved results make it a sound investment. Researchers concluded school selection by mortgage ‘reinforces school segregation and inequalities in performance and achievement, and reduces social mobility across the generations’.¹⁶

Surveys of parents confirm these middle-class manoeuvres. One in three (32 per cent) professional parents with school-aged children had moved to an area they thought had good schools, while one in five (18 per cent) had moved to the catchment area of a specific school.¹⁷ Those from higher social classes are more likely to deploy strategies that cost money, including moving home or hiring a private tutor to help their children. A significant minority of parents admitted to cheating in school admissions: buying a second home, or renting a property nearby. These admissions over admissions are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

Such underhand tactics explode the illusion of an orderly and respectful British society where everyone plays by the rules. Much to everyone’s embarrassment, admissions cheats are occasionally outed into full public glare. ‘You are doing poor kids out of school places and homes. You are making local schools selective on income by the back door,’ complained the journalist Giles Coren, in his column for The Times. ‘You are destroying the very notion of a local school by coring out catchment areas and then abandoning them.’ Coren was attacking his ‘lying, cheating, hypocritical’ new neighbours.18 His daughter Kitty had failed to get a place at her local outstanding primary school, just 200 yards away from the home where Coren had lived for twenty years. Sharp-elbowed parents had exploited a loophole in the admissions rules by renting a place nearer the school, pretending this was their permanent home. Teachers had only noticed the scam when a stream of new families notified the school office of ‘a change in home address’ soon after their children had started at the school. ‘It is very well known that this is going on,’ one peeved parent told the local newspaper.¹⁹

Council officials vowed to tackle ‘abuses’ of the school admissions system and to investigate ‘fraud’ where parents were being dishonest, tightening up its rules to not accept temporary addresses. But the middle classes had already identified a new deceit: paying private doctors to provide evidence for ‘exceptional medical or social reasons’ to catapult their children to the front of the school queue. Ailments, just like addresses, could mysteriously disappear once term had begun. Coren’s daughter ended up leaving the state system and going to a private school. The real losers, he acknowledged, were children from poorer homes who had been pushed out of their local school and had no other option but to attend a state school much further away. Like many aspects of the education arms race, it seems school admissions are just not fair.

An Early Start: The ‘Rug Rat Race’

The academic race is over for many children when they have barely started primary school. For his PhD project Leon Feinstein was interested in the earliest education trajectories of children growing up in Britain: how do the gaps in cognitive development widen between poorer children and their more privileged peers? He summarized his findings in one simple and now famous graph, reproduced in Figure 4.2.²⁰

Feinstein’s ‘crossover’ graph charts the trajectories of children with known levels of initial achievement at 22 months, indicated by their scores in standard psychological tests. It shows how strongly their subsequent development depends on their socio-economic status (SES). High-SES children who started with low levels of achievement overcome their early difficulties by mid-childhood; their high-SES counterparts who started as high-performers maintain their position in tests at age ten. The opposite holds true for low-SES children. Initial low-performers remain rooted at the bottom of the class as they grow older; initial high-performers from similarly poor (low-SES) backgrounds fall back down to the average by age ten.

The Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee put it more baldly, contrasting the trajectories of the bright child from a poor home and ‘a dim but rich baby’: ‘The two children are already on a steep trajectory in opposite directions: the poor/bright one travelling fast downwards; the rich/dim one moving up, as their social backgrounds counteract their inborn abilities.’²¹

Figure 4.2
Cognitive development of young children and their parents’ socio-economic status.

Other researchers have questioned the reliability of test scores undertaken by children as early as age two, suggesting these patterns may reflect the ‘regression to the mean’ effect that sees many characteristics naturally drift back to their average value.22 But Feinstein’s graph remains a powerful portrayal of how early in life talent can apparently decline for children from poorer backgrounds who may not be receiving the support and encouragement their better-off peers benefit from at home. Feinstein also found a close correlation between doing well in tests taken at 22 months and attending university later in life.

The most powerful analysis to date on academic trajectories through the school years shows around 60 per cent of achievement gaps at the age of 14 are already present at the start at school.²³ The school-readiness gap between the poorest and richest children is already 19 months before they have stepped into a classroom. About half this gap is linked to the ‘home learning environment’ – indicating how much parents support the learning of their children.

Britain, alongside the US, also has an education gap between poorer children and their richer peers that widens as children age. In the UK this widening occurs at age 11, at the start of secondary school. The link between family income and test scores is found to be strongest in the UK, signalling that levels of educational inequality are higher than in more socially mobile countries.²⁴

The evidence also suggests those from poorer backgrounds have to work harder to compete and get the same academic grades as their more privileged peers. The link between earlier cognitive tests and exam performance weakened for children born in 1970 compared with those born in 1958. This suggests school tests are as much a signal of how much support children receive as their natural ability. Although researchers point out that cognitive tests taken at younger ages are themselves the product of the environments shaping children in their early years.25 Untapped academic potential is likely to be one of the reasons why state school pupils with similar A levels are more likely than their equally qualified private school peers to secure top degrees at university.

The firing gun of the educational arms race begins well before children’s first day at school: whatever solutions we have for improving social mobility will need to act outside as well as inside the school gates and before school has even started. There are parallels with the patterns observed in the United States. American economists have come up with a term for the extra investments made by middle-class families to enable their children to get ahead during the early years: the ‘the rug rat race’.²⁶

Higher Frontiers

As Winston Churchill’s former wartime economic adviser, Lionel Robbins was used to fighting his corner. But when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan tasked the economist with looking into expanding the country’s universities in 1961, he came up against unexpected opposition. An enraged representative of the Left-leaning Association of University Teachers claimed universities were ‘already scraping the barrel’; any more people allowed in would damage academic standards.27 The prospect of more degrees ‘would be absolutely appalling’. If this was the reaction from the trade unionists responding to the Labour Party’s own parallel inquiry, one can only imagine the social snobbery expressed elsewhere.

Lord Robbins waved away the objections. He was convinced the country needed graduates from all backgrounds to supply an expanding professional workforce. IQ tests demonstrated that young people from working-class homes were intellectually capable, despite performing badly in their 11-plus examinations. His final report established the ‘Robbins principle’: this declared university places ‘should be available to all who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so’. This aspiration has remained at the heart of higher education policy ever since.

Yet following the Second World War, the slow march of Britain’s universities from a tiny elite to an expanded higher education system remained a highly exclusive endeavour. In 1940, 50,000 students attended a small clutch of institutions including the ancient seats of learning, Oxford and Cambridge. Just 1.5 per cent of 18–19 year olds from working-class groups enrolled on degree courses in 1940 compared with 8.4 per cent from the professional classes; in 1990 the equivalent figures were 10 per cent and 37 per cent. It took fifty years before the proportion of working-class students surpassed the enrolment rate of their more privileged counterparts in 1940. And by that time the university access gap had widened.²⁸

The next three decades experienced the mad rush to a mass higher education system. Few countries in the world have expanded universities at such breakneck speed. In Figure 4.3 we document the growth using our own data. In 1980, 9 per cent of 26–30-year-olds were university graduates; by 2015, 39 per cent of 26–30-year-olds had a degree. The official figures show there were over 2.2 million young full-time students enrolled at British universities.²⁹

For all this expansion, our analysis of the data reveals that the graduation gap between rich and poor has widened. Figure 4.4 records the percentage of young people who graduate from university by age 23, comparing those from the poorest fifth of families with those from the richest fifth. The proportion of young people from the poorest fifth of homes graduating from university increased by 12 percentage points between 1981 and 2013, growing from 6 to 18 per cent over the period. The graduation rate for young people from the richest fifth of homes meanwhile went up from 20 per cent to 55 per cent. Nearly twenty-five years on, the graduation rate for those from the poorest families has still to exceed the rate for those from the richest families in 1981.

Robbins’s vision of a university system accessible to all has yet to materialize. A study tracking the entry (rather than graduation) rates on to university degrees from the mid-1990s until 2011–12 suggested the enrolment gap at least had begun to narrow.³⁰ But the bad news was that it had widened at the country’s most prestigious universities. The participation of the most advantaged fifth of young people at highly selective universities rose from 15.4 per cent to 18.1 per cent during the period. The participation of the most disadvantaged two-fifths of young people in contrast rose by just half a percentage point, from 2.4 per cent to 2.9 per cent. By 2011, the most advantaged fifth of young people were 6.3 times more likely to enter one of the elite universities.

Figure 4.3
Highest educational qualification: percentage of 26-30-year-olds.31

Figure 4.4
Educational inequality, 1981 to 2013.³²

In the ever-escalating educational race, the middle classes had clocked that a bog standard degree no longer counted enough; now what was required to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack was an elite degree from a prestigious university.

Postgraduate Premium

In recent years the educational arms race has established a new frontier: postgraduate degrees.³³ Students from middle-class homes are investing in a master’s degree or a PhD to stand out in the workplace, and when switching careers. The prohibitive costs of fees and loans mean they are out of reach for many graduates – despite having the academic grades to undertake postgraduate study. A graduate with a master’s will earn on average over £200,000 more over a forty-year working life than a graduate with a plain old bachelor’s degree.³⁴ It pays to be a postgraduate.

In 1996, just 1 per cent of 26–60-year-olds in the workforce held a postgraduate degree; in 2015 this had risen to 13 per cent. Over 2 million working adults had a master’s degree or PhD. But this ‘educational upgrading’ was generated almost exclusively by extra numbers of postgraduates from the richest homes.

In 1991, 2 per cent of 23-year-olds from the poorest fifth of homes had postgraduate degrees compared with 8 per cent from the richest fifth of homes – a gap of 6 per cent. In 2004, 3 per cent of 24-year-olds from the poorest fifth of homes had postgraduate degrees compared with 13 per cent from the richest fifth of homes – a gap of 10 per cent. Inequality in postgraduate education had nearly doubled in thirteen years.35

Paying Education’s Price

Perennial scare stories of graduates having to settle for low-paid work remain unfounded. A good degree remains a smart investment. The wage returns for degrees have held up remarkably well despite the bulging numbers of graduates now competing for jobs.³⁶ The opposite side of the coin is an increasingly high penalty for not going on to higher education and for leaving school without qualifications.

The education haves and have-nots are creating the earnings haves and have-nots, one of the reasons why labour market inequality has become higher in Britain. What jobs people get and how much they earn after they finish their education is often the forgotten half of the social mobility equation. Policy makers are caught by the allure of trying to address educational inequalities. Yet any successful efforts to improve social mobility levels are likely to have to narrow gaps both in education and in the workplace.

Economists have charted how technological advances are making many middle-tier jobs redundant – the so-called hollowing out of the labour market.³⁷ In the knowledge-based economy, a university education will matter even more. Not only this, many new jobs in the future will require the essential life skills – articulacy, resilience, confidence and people skills – which the right education helps to nurture.³⁸

Our own analysis of the latest data from the Labour Force Survey reveals a significant and growing wage premium for graduates compared to people without degrees. In 1980, male graduates earned on average 46 per cent more than their non-graduate counterparts. In 2017 this earnings uplift was 66 per cent. This continuing advantage from higher study was by no means a certainty given the growing numbers of graduates.

Figure 4.5 documents the differences in wages for increasing levels of education for successive generations. Wage returns for degrees (compared to just having school qualifications) have held up: graduates remain highly valued in the workplace. At the same time the average relative wage boost for having a degree has declined for the most recent generations. This is a sign of the increasing variation of the wage returns for different types of degrees.

The wage returns from gaining a postgraduate degree (compared with just having an undergraduate degree) have continued to rise. A master’s degree is now equivalent to what a plain university degree meant a few generations ago. It is no surprise that some academic research has pitched postgraduate education as ‘the new frontier of social mobility’.³⁹

Sociologists have depicted this as more of a rearguard action by the middle classes: ‘defensive expenditure’ aimed at preserving their children’s competitive edge. Parents are aware education, in relation to employment, operates primarily as a ‘positional good’, argues John Goldthorpe. What matters is not how much education you acquire but how much more and superior education you acquire compared with others you are competing with in the jobs market.41

Figure 4.5
Wage differentials by highest education qualification, 26-30-year-olds.⁴⁰

Variation That Lies Beneath

These average figures conceal increasing variation in the earnings returns to different types of degrees – distinctions middle-class parents are acutely aware of. With more graduates in the jobs market, employers have become more discerning: it matters which subject you studied your degree in and at which university.

The most detailed picture yet of the variations in graduate earnings has been produced by researchers from the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Cambridge and Harvard universities. They studied English graduates a decade after finishing their degrees, using tax and student loan records. More than 10 per cent of male graduates from the London School of Economics, Oxford and Cambridge were already earning more than £100,000 in the tax year 2012–13. But the median earnings of graduates from some universities were less than those for non-graduates. Overall median earnings for male graduates ten years after graduation were found to be £30,000, compared with £21,000 for non-graduates. Non-graduates were twice as likely to have no earnings at all.

Subjects such as medicine, economics, law, maths and business delivered substantial wage premiums compared with typical graduates. The creative arts produced earnings more typical of non-graduates. These variations in earnings were attributable to other factors over and above the differences in student intakes to begin with. Students with higher A-level grades and higher earning potential would be expected to enrol onto highly selective degree courses. But this study demonstrated that the university degree you take does make an extra difference to your future wage packet.

Most disturbingly from a social mobility perspective, universities fail to level the playing field. Graduates from richer family backgrounds were found to earn 10 per cent more after graduation than their poorer counterparts. This was the case even though they had completed the same degrees at the same universities. The gap doubled for the highest earners.42

The Baffling World of University Admissions

The small gains in numbers of disadvantaged students enrolling at universities have come despite the introduction of university fees in England of £9,000 a year. Graduates pay back Government loans when they start earning a decent salary – £25,000 a year.⁴³ But the extra charges for degrees, required to fund the continuing expansion of universities, have coincided with a worrying fall in numbers of part-time and mature students.⁴⁴

Fears over fees remain. A Government report revealed a falling proportion of state-educated students entering higher education in the year the £9,000 fees were introduced.⁴⁵ This was in contrast to their privately educated counterparts, prompting renewed concerns that the higher fees (and the replacement of maintenance grants with student loans) will be detrimental to social mobility. Students across the UK also have to grapple with the complexity of different fees, loans and grants systems in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In England moreover the student finance system is prone to constant Government tampering and review.46

But these debates have overshadowed what is arguably a bigger concern: poorer students investing in degree courses with low or even negative returns in earnings. In the educational arms race this is harming your prospects through self-inflicted wounds. For first-generation students without the tacit knowledge of the middle classes, choosing the right degree has become one of life’s most important investment decisions – at a time when the market is increasingly complex and confusing.

Quite apart from the dizzying array of bursaries, scholarships and fee remissions on offer for 50,000-plus degree courses,⁴⁷ and information on the likely employment prospects they may lead to,⁴⁸ there are an array of admissions criteria deployed by universities as they try to distinguish between equally well-qualified candidates. These include personal statements, teacher recommendations, school exam grades, university admissions tests, interviews, ‘contextual offers’ and much more.⁴⁹

At Oxford and Cambridge, the most sought-after of all the academic elites, this complexity goes to new levels: the applications and admissions process involves earlier deadlines, interviews with specialist tutors at one of the sixty-nine independent colleges (with their own preferences and traditions) that make up the universities, as well as an increasing battery of bespoke subject tests.⁵⁰

There is evidence that talented students in state schools suffer from the ‘not the likes of me’ attitude which precludes them from applying to the most prestigious universities in the first place.51 This can be made worse by well-meaning but risk-averse teachers.⁵²

An analysis of personal statements, intended for students to sell themselves to prospective universities, revealed a chasm in quality and style between independent and state school applicants.⁵³ Independent school applicants were more likely to have well-written statements, with fewer grammatical errors, ‘filled with high-status and relevant activities’. One privately educated 18-year-old shared how they had been working ‘for a designer in London; as a model; on the trading floor of a London broker’s firm; with my local BBC radio station; events planning with a corporate five-star country hotel; in the marketing team of a leading City law firm … and most recently managing a small gastro pub’. This was contrasted with statements from state school pupils who struggled to draw on suitable work and life experiences.

Good quality information, advice and guidance for school pupils are essential in such a complex world of admissions. Yet the research suggests at least half of the advice currently given in schools is inadequate, and can be poorly timed and partial.⁵⁴ If you ever wanted to create a higher education system that acts to confuse, baffle and alienate the non-privileged outsiders trying to get a good education and a foothold on life’s income ladder, then this surely is it.

At the same time it is widely acknowledged that we have failed to create a viable alternative route of ‘vocational’ apprenticeships that for many young people could offer a better option for their life prospects. It is as if the other half of young people pursuing non-academic routes do not exist. While there are still far too few advanced apprenticeships on offer, it is little known that they can lead to greater earning returns than many degrees.55

Battles in Later Life

There is another emerging battleground in the arms race: who secures internships during the early critical stages of careers after university study is over. Increasingly internships are the key gateways to starting a professional career. Unpaid and often unadvertised, these positions have become yet another impediment to social mobility.⁵⁶

The impact of coming from a less privileged background continues long after education has finished. Britain’s social mobility challenge is far from over once the graduation ceremonies are concluded. International comparative studies suggest this is a particular issue for Britain. Gaining a good education appears to genuinely equalize life prospects in the United States, but only has limited power in this country.⁵⁷

Sociologists have identified a ‘class ceiling’ in Britain preventing the upwardly mobile from enjoying equivalent earnings to those from upper-middle-class backgrounds. Analysing the 2014 Labour Force Survey, the researchers investigated the earnings of people in elite occupations, comparing how income varies by social-class background.

People in elite occupations whose parents were employed in semi-routine and routine working-class jobs (‘the long-range upwardly mobile’) earn on average £6,200 a year less than their colleagues from higher professional and managerial backgrounds (‘the intergenerationally stable’). This was the case even after taking into account a host of factors including educational qualifications, job tenure, the ‘London effect’, ethnicity, gender, age, hours worked, firm size, and whether a person worked in the public or private sector.

There was striking variation across different elite occupations. At one end of the scale, engineering provided a notable exemplar of meritocracy, with negligible differences in pay regardless of social background. In contrast, the children of the working classes experienced a particularly large pay disadvantage in law, media, medicine and finance.

The researchers concluded: ‘There is no … easy distinction between “the person you were born” and “the person you become”. As our results show, individuals tend to always carry – at least in some shape or form – the symbolic baggage of the past. Moreover, the imprint of this history can have important consequences for both how people act in the present, and – perhaps more importantly – how they are evaluated by others.’58

Superior Life Skills

Sociologists confirm that privileged children in Britain who fail to make the mark academically avoid the knock to their life prospects that children from poorer backgrounds experience. This is due in part to the ‘social capital’ gained from their middle-class upbringing, conclude the researchers, equipping such children with the social skills ideally suited to the growing number of service and sales jobs in the economy: ‘In addition perhaps to helpful social networks, are the – very marketable – “soft skills” and lifestyle and personal characteristics that these individuals acquire, less through their education than through their family, community and peer-group socialization.’59

There is growing evidence that accumulating essential life skills as well as social and cultural capital is instrumental to future life prospects. These are the ‘non-academic’ attributes as well as the tacit knowledge to get by in middle-class circles. The inexorable rise of A grades and first-class degrees has ironically put an extra premium on the non-academic characteristics that distinguish some candidates from the rest. You need not only to pass the grade, but to exhibit the right behaviours to succeed. As we have seen, these other attributes, whether social, cultural on financial, may partly account for privately educated students being more likely to enter top occupations and elite universities than their similarly academically qualified state school peers.

The so-called ‘brown shoes effect’ summarized how young people from less privileged backgrounds lost out on banking jobs because of their dress, accent and behaviour. Investment banks were turning away talented youngsters from poorer backgrounds as they simply did not fit in with expected cultural norms, including dress codes. The wearing of brown shoes with a business suit was a faux pas too far.⁶⁰

Middle-class parents are acutely attuned to the importance of social as well as academic skills in the educational arms race. Much of the evidence gathered on ‘enrichment gaps’ in the United States resonates with the trends observed in Britain. It suggests an increasingly wide divide. The richest families in the US spent seven times more on out-of-school cultural enrichment (including for example museum visits) than the poorest families, a much bigger gap than forty years previously. The Harvard academic Robert Putnam has documented how the American professional classes are investing more in family life, community networks and civic activities.61

Surveys in Britain have also revealed significant gaps in the extra-curricular enrichment children are exposed to.⁶² Inequalities in the essential life skills of children emerge early.⁶³ Children from poorer homes tend to exhibit, on average, worse self-control (conduct) and emotional health than their wealthier peers. These differences are apparent for children aged three years old. The gap in essential life skills between poorer children and everyone else has widened over the past thirty years.⁶⁴

In this race, it is difficult to distinguish between working the system and stepping over the line. Research for the BBC found one in five students in private schools had received extra time to complete examinations – compared with one in eight pupils in state schools.⁶⁵ Private school heads were accused of gaming the exam system to boost their results. Yet they could just be doing a good job of identifying students with genuine special educational needs.

In a separate incident, a Government inquiry was launched to investigate accusations that teachers at Eton and other leading public schools had passed information to pupils about their upcoming exams. The scandal prompted resignations at the schools and calls for tighter rules under which teachers work as examiners writing and reviewing question papers. Announcing the inquiry, the Schools Minister Nick Gibb warned: ‘cheating of any kind is unacceptable.’66

The education system remains tilted in countless ways to the already advantaged. Glass floors limit downward mobility of those from privileged backgrounds and class ceilings limit upward mobility of those who happen to be born into poorer homes. Whether by foul means or fair, the escalating educational arms race is far from a level playing field.