Source: OECD, 2013
Figure 2.1 Mean proficiency in numeracy at ages 16–24, OECD Countries 2013
There is a damaging ‘poverty of aspiration’ in Britain that lies not in the working classes but among our political elites. Yet what UK society needs, more than anything else in the contemporary moment, is greater equality and less social and economic distance between its citizens.
Diane Reay, Professor of Education, University of Cambridge, 20121
We have an educational system that is designed to polarise people. It creates an elite that often has little respect for the majority of the population, thinks that it should earn extraordinarily more than everyone else, and defines many of the jobs of others as so contemptible as apparently to justify their living in relative poverty. The ideology that underlies elitism is imparted in childhood. For the elite, especially in the most unequal countries where the educational systems help to maintain the status quo, other people’s children can be greatly denigrated.
The country where the richest 1 per cent takes the most is also the rich country where sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds are most likely to be innumerate – the United States of America.2 England is home to the third-most innumerate cohort of young adults in the rich world. In Finland and Japan, two of the world’s most equitable rich countries, young adults are the most numerate. The top four countries by young adult numeracy also include the Netherlands and Korea, where equality levels are high, but not the highest (see Figure 2.1). These coincidences appear to be related in at least three ways.
Source: OECD, 2013
Figure 2.1 Mean proficiency in numeracy at ages 16–24, OECD Countries 2013
Firstly, when the rich take as much as they take in the US and the UK there is less left to spend on the rest, and the education of the poor suffers. The easiest way to increase the value of private education is to reduce the quality of state education by simply spending less on it, just as reducing the quality of the NHS increases the benefits of private healthcare without having to do anything in particular to improve private healthcare. When the rich say they want lower taxes, they are also saying they want to pay less for other people’s schools and hospitals.
Secondly, how we educate and bring up our children more generally matters because, for example, when many people are innumerate it is easier to convince a large number that they or their children might one day be among the 1 per cent – despite the fact that the number of people in the 1 per cent is fixed. Many others in these unequal situations assume that they do not ever ‘deserve’ to be in that top 1 per cent because they are simply too stupid, as demonstrated by their exam results. The myth that the people at the top of the economic pile are super-intelligent is widespread.
Thirdly, when the top 1 per cent dominates society, as it does in the US and the UK today, it is able to shape what we call education to work more in its favour, to become less about learning and more about ranking. Children are repeatedly tested and channelled towards what they are told is their allotted place along the continuum, to be the ‘best’ they can, which is usually not a lot in the opinion of that 1 per cent, if not also of their teachers. To overvalue the 1 per cent is to devalue the rest.
As the divisions within our society grow, the main aim of teachers becomes no longer to educate the child for life, but increasingly just to try to keep their school out of trouble. They must teach children how to pass tests rather than how to learn. The whole enterprise has become distorted in the name of supposedly upholding accountability. But some teachers do not have to concentrate on crowd control as much as others. Schools in Britain vary more than in almost any other comparable country, because children in Britain, and especially England, are more segregated into different types of school.
Private ‘prep’ schools for younger children in England have average class sizes of thirteen children – half the average size of state primaries, and far fewer per teacher than the crowded primary schools of cities with growing populations. This is because so much more money is spent per child in the English private sector, which results in less being spent on state schools because there is less pressure from the very affluent for their improvement. They do not want to be taxed more to provide schools they avoid using. Only nine countries out of thirty-five surveyed by the OECD had larger class sizes than those in the UK, and they were mostly much poorer countries. Private schools and the bodies that promote them use these statistics to encourage the few who have the money to have a choice not to use state education.3
It is the very richest, the 1 per cent, who most solidly support segregated education, who almost all use only private schools – usually the most expensive of all private schools. They are followed by another 6 per cent of the population who find paying the private school fees far harder, but feel they must do so because of how wide the private/state division in England has become. State education suffers in the UK and, largely as a consequence, is not seen as being as good as elsewhere in Europe – where almost everyone uses it. In the UK and US, when people complain, some key supporters of the 1 per cent suggest privatising all schools.
I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization … Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system.
Milton Friedman, Washington Post, 19 February 19954
Attitudes towards education once held by only a small elite have today come to be presented as common sense. Many members of the 1 per cent who wish to see their share of income rise like to portray current state schools as the problem, and they suggest that those schools are the reason why others end up being paid so little, and why average incomes have dropped. They have convinced many people of this. They often pretend there was once a golden age of state schooling when the grammar school gave working-class children a chance. Some may even believe this was true – but grammar schools were a relic of a more unequal age.
People currently buy access to ‘top’ education for a reason – to gain an unfair advantage. The UK government’s own Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has undertaken research that found that, three years after graduation, ‘male graduates from a managerial background who attended a private school are around 10 percentage points more likely to enter the highest status occupations’.5 By ‘managerial background’, the authors of this study meant having a parent who was a manager, and they equated status with pay.
The private school advantage can be found to influence later careers ‘despite the same prior academic attainment, subject choices and university’. The Commission found that it was a disadvantage to have had state education, to come from an area where fewer went to university, or to be female or black. The highest-paid jobs are given mostly to particular kinds of graduates, not just because of what they have achieved, but also because of what schools they have been to, their sex, their ethnicity – even which town they lived in prior to getting into university.
It is not even true that people with the same high-grade A levels are academically equal. Two studies released in 2013 under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that children who went to state schools did better at university than their private school counterparts who had the same A level results: ‘All other factors being held constant, students from independent schools tend to do less well than students from comprehensive schools.’6 This finding is hardly surprising, as private schools are more sought after if they help their pupils to achieve unexpectedly high grades, rather than helping them to be more self-sufficient in their ability to learn in the future.
If your private school is more exclusive, you can then charge higher fees and make a greater profit (or, at least, pay the head teacher more). Earlier research had suggested that it was only in Oxford and Cambridge that children arriving from comprehensive schools might feel intimidated to the extent that their studies suffered, so that private school pupils there had an instant advantage. Given that just four very private schools, confusingly called ‘public’ – namely Eton, Westminster, St Paul’s Boys and St Paul’s Girls – and one highly selective state sixth form college, Hills Road in Cambridge, send more children to those two universities than 2,000 other secondary schools, this finding is hardly surprising.7
It is often claimed that the national debate on higher education is dominated by an interest in entry to Oxford and Cambridge universities; but, for many in the 1 per cent – the only people with the financial means to hope to secure places for their children in those few feeder schools – this really matters. The most prestigious one hundred schools (out of many thousands) in Britain, 84 per cent of them private, secure 30 per cent of all Oxbridge places.8 In June 2013 the Office for Fair Access ‘argued that access to the elite universities in England has hardly improved in recent years despite lots of pressure from government and numerous initiatives, including fee waivers, scholarships and bursaries’.9 In 2014 when they checked again, they found no improvement, and noted that in ‘one highly selective university, rich students were 16 times more likely to attend than poor students’.10 The name of the university was not revealed.
It is hardly surprising that, as the rich in Britain become richer and private school fees increase, with all that money being spent on trying to secure a string of A grades from a very small number of children, overall access is not becoming more equitable, and remains extremely unfair. As Stefan Collini, of the University of Cambridge, explained when commenting on the latest international education statistics, ‘countries committed to high-quality comprehensives, such as Finland, yet again come out on top. A stratified and class-segregated school system is not the answer: it’s the problem.’11
The secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, has never made it clear that he is opposed to widespread selection and greater privatisation – especially by stealth, with the creation of free schools that might be sponsored by a company, and private companies taking over former comprehensive schools when they are forced to become academies. His wife, the journalist Sarah Vine, may write on the problems with the private sector; but while her views appear to mirror his on the issue of different pupils having very different potential, she is more honest than he is about what drives many rich parents to choose private schools:
The private sector … is built on very different principles. Its agenda is a fundamentally selective one, based not only on ability to pay, but also on pupil potential. And it is also, let’s face it, about snobbery. Of course the parents of private school children are paying for the best teachers and facilities. But let’s be honest: they’re also paying for their child to mix with the right kind of kids.12
Note that teachers who actively support private education, and all the attitudes it promotes, are described as ‘the best teachers’.
In more equitable countries, like Finland, almost all children are seen as ‘the right kinds of kids’, and almost all become those kinds of adolescents. This does not mean that they become somewhat arrogant and overconfident boys and girls, used to wearing suits and ties or formal dresses and old-fashioned gym-wear from a very early age – it means they become normal, that they can easily mix with others, and you cannot tell simply from their appearance, let alone from the moment they open their mouths, whether they come from a rich or poor background.
In the UK, increasing numbers of young people try to hide their class backgrounds by means of how they dress and behave. Television, among much else, makes young people far more aware than their grandparents were of how they might be perceived; but they cannot escape the effects of being segregated as children. You do not learn how to mix by not mixing.
The UK’s education system is beginning to look more like that of the US than like the schools and universities of other countries in Europe. Many American private universities now spend just a sixth of their fee income on teaching. These private providers take more than a fifth of fees in profit, and spend even more on marketing.13 Marketing can be effective. The parents who send their children to those private universities no doubt believe they have some of the ‘best teachers’. It will have been the job of the marketing department to persuade them of that. The most prestigious private schools in the UK also have marketing departments, which are absent from almost all state schools – although academies are beginning to compete in this marketplace of style over substance.
Privatisation is most advanced in the university sector. Since 2010/11, fully private universities in Britain, most of them new, have had access to tax-payers’ money, and are free to make a profit. That first year, over £40 million pounds was accessed by such private bodies, £9 million in grants; but this will seem like chicken feed in comparison to what is planned in the way of subsidies to the private education market. Pundits now talk of the ‘subprime student loan’,14 because what is being purchased through borrowing is often not worth the initial fee, let alone the interest on that fee. Students should ask how much of their student fee is spent on university marketing, to entice the young people who come after them into paying such high fees. But what can they do?
There is an answer: don’t reach so hard for the top, and don’t believe the marketing hype. This attitude is already being adopted. For four of the last five years, the numbers of children enrolled in private fee-paying schools in the UK have fallen, by 2013 the number was standing at only just over 500,000. Part of the reason for the fall is that the average annual private school fee is now £14,000; and part of the reason for this high price is that numbers are dropping. Average annual fees for boarding school stand at £27,612 – almost £29,000 for boarding sixth-formers. Nevertheless, the number of pupils in those schools fell by 1.4 per cent in the year to 2013, to 66,605.15 The numbers attending boarding schools are also dropping – not only because of cost, but also because of increasing fear of what boarding does to children: ‘the ex-boarder is a master of emotional disguise’.16 Many of the 1 per cent are ex-boarders. But, while private school enrolment is falling, there is – as yet – no great drop in university attendance, because there appears to be no alternative, especially if you wish to be socially mobile.
We should stick with orthodox comprehensives, phase out grammars, do the same to faith schools, and promote the good local school over supposed ‘choice’. And we should do everything in our power to pull parents away from fee-paying places, starting with an end to their charitable status, and an insistence that the intakes of all Russell Group universities should reflect the proportions of school students in state and private education – and, come to think of it, those who’ve been to comprehensives and grammars.
John Harris17
Social mobility is lowest where local ‘choice’ in education superficially appears highest. The Manchester local authority of Trafford has the highest level of educational social segregation. This is due to secondary moderns and grammar schools having been retained there, as well as private school provision being high. When confronted with the evidence that government education policy was reducing social mobility in such areas, ‘A spokesman for the Department for Education said they did not wish to comment on the report.’18 Others, such as John Harris (quoted above), have been more robust in explaining what might better serve the interest of the 99 per cent.
Most people in Britain – well over nine out of ten people – attend state schools. Of those people, as adults, 99 per cent have friendship groups that only include people who went to state schools.19 Thus, although privately educated children will probably have friends from state schools, they will only be from a very narrow slice of those schools. Rather than socially preparing children for the wider world, a private education is likely to restrict the breadth and depth of their social contacts later in life. One possible reason why parents choose private schools is that they fear the state sector. Many parents do not know that it is children coming from the poorest addresses who do worse, not those who go to the supposedly poorest schools.20
The country that many educationalists look to for good lessons is Finland, where 99.2 per cent of school education is state funded. In Finland there is no inspection of teachers or league tables; pupils are not set or streamed; and in four international surveys since 2000, ‘Finnish comprehensive school students have scored above students in all the other participating countries in science and problem-solving skills, and came either first or second in reading and mathematics. These results were achieved despite the amount of homework assigned in Finnish schools being relatively low and an absence of private tuition.’21 What John Harris describes could be as good as what Finland has.
There are people who do not want you to know that there is a better way. Sometimes it is easy to see the motive. When the tobacco industry began to spread doubt about the health hazards of smoking, it inadvertently created a new area of research into learning – an area of study concerning ‘how ignorance is made, maintained and manipulated by powerful institutions to suit their own ends’.22 Should you believe that the employment market is set to polarise further, that there will only ever be a small space at the top, then you might think it is kindest that most children never understand this, because they will never have any power or much money. What good would it do for all children to think that they should have the same chances, if most must lose?
I mean, your society’s broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let’s blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don’t even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault.
Iain Banks, final interview23
Who are the people with no power and no money? Many of them are children. The 1 per cent and 99 per cent are not just groups of adults. According to one survey, most children in Hull receive only 5p when they put their teeth under the pillow. In contrast, across all of London, the tooth fairy’s largess averages over £5 per tooth. Given inequalities across the capital, in parts of London she may well be delivering £50 notes on some streets and 50p or 5p pieces in others.24 In Glasgow the average deposit by the tooth fairy is reported to be 11p. Such salacious stories can dull us to the extent of inequality. They can make inequality appear normal. And similar inequalities are reflected in children’s pocket money.
When I was first given pocket money, in the 1970s, the UK’s richest 1 per cent only received four times the average income, after they had paid their tax. Unemployment benefit was much nearer to a very low working income than it is today. Despite the dole being so generous, almost no parents were out of work. Better welfare benefits did not lead to more people on the dole. Pocket money was very limited, but common after a certain age. Forty years later what you get, if you get anything, depends far more on the income of your parents, or parent. Children are acutely aware of the relative differences in their social circumstances. Children are much less able than adults to select whom they mix with. Adults decide which children are put into which school class.
One in six children in Britain received no pocket money in 2013. But, for those who did, the average was £6.50 a week, or 93p a day.25 The variation in children’s income is huge. Pocket money in Britain was just a pound a week in the 1980s. By 1997 the average had risen to £1.67 a week; and in 2007 it had risen rapidly to its highest-ever recorded average (for those receiving it) of £8.01 a week, before falling by a quarter following the 2008 crash.
To understand how rising income inequality can hurt a society, it helps to think about pocket money and schools. Imagine a school-of-inequality, where the average pocket money received each day is a fraction above the current 93p national average – at, say, £1 per child each day, or £7 a week. To make things easy, there are exactly one hundred children in the school. But they don’t each receive the same pocket money. In this fictional school, the inequality in distribution of pocket money is as great as the inequalities in income in the United States today. In the US the richest 1 per cent take 20 per cent of all income. That same inequality within a school of one hundred children would mean one child receiving 20 per cent of the combined pocket money that all the children in the school receive every day – or £140 a week!
This example might seem ridiculous, but it is simply a reflection of how unequal income is in the US – and of where we in the UK are heading. Next, try to imagine what that rich child might think about the other children, and how the other children might treat that richest child. Seen from the point of view of children, the injustice of gross inequality is clear. A child cannot easily pretend to have done anything to have ‘deserved’ so much. They are described as ‘spoilt’, using words and judgement that for some reason we don’t apply to rich adults.
The other 99 children in the school-of-inequality will each, on average, receive just a fraction above 80p a day, or £5.60 a week for the overall average to still be a £1 a day. At this rate it would take an average child a year to receive what the 1 per cent child receives in just a couple of weeks. The richest child might be ostracised, unless he hides his income and behaves like the other children. If the school pocket money reflects parental income distribution, then hardly any children will receive the average amount of 80p a day for the 99 per cent. A few will receive much more than 80p, but most will receive much less. Averages can be very deceptive. In the school-of-inequality, when the richest kid is excluded, the daily £1 average falls to 80p. Separating the children into three numerically equal sets, according to how much pocket money they receive, will mean that the top set receives on average pocket money of £2.50, the middle set receives on average 40p each a day, and the lowest set consists of children who mostly receive no pocket money.
There would be a large overlap between that bottom class and the children in the school getting their lunches for free. In 2005 about one in six children in Britain received free meals at school because their parents were so poor. That figure is rising rapidly as poverty deepens, and soon as many as one in three will have received a free lunch at school in Britain because their parents were very poor at some time in the previous six years.26
How does the inequity of parental income make children feel? Surveys have been taken of how many children in Britain believe they get the correct amount of pocket money. In 2012 an online survey of children aged between eight and fifteen found a minority thought they were not getting enough; but in a repeat survey in 2013, 53 per cent of the responders thought they did not get enough. This was despite the fact that this group, which excluded those without internet access, were getting an average of five times as much as their parents’ generation had received as children – or about twice as much in real terms.27
These feelings of deprivation have arisen because pupils compare what they get with their friends. And it turns out it is in London that such comparisons are most important. When surveyed there, 56 per cent of children thought such comparisons were important. It is in London that the highest incomes are found and overall income inequality is greatest. And it is in London that you can find the nearest thing to a school containing a mix of children that is financially representative of the national composition.
In reality, even the most mixed of schools will still have missing chunks from both the top and bottom of the income scale. British children are highly segregated by income right from birth, and through all their school days. In a survey by the Halifax bank, boys thought it was more important than girls did to know how much their friends were receiving in pocket money. Boys were also more likely to think they did not get enough and – very probably as a result of their comparing and complaining more – it was boys who received, on average, 5.5 per cent more pocket money than girls. The gender pay divide begins early. A second 2013 pocket money survey, carried out on behalf of the Pocket Money Savings website, confirmed that boys received more, but suggested that the differential rose to 16 per cent once pocket money was associated with carrying out chores in the home.
By 2013, children in Britain were apparently being paid, on average, £1.21 for tidying their bedrooms, £1.24 for doing their homework, 78p for washing up – and £2 for ‘good behaviour’.28 At that price, a child quickly works out that it is worth behaving badly to encourage their parents to then bribe them to behave well! Pay them to tidy their bedrooms, and children may be learning that something is not worth doing if they are not paid to do it.
Children learn both from their parents and from making comparisons with other children. If their parents are well off enough to be able to start paying them to do the washing up, they will come to expect to be paid for doing it. If one child hears that another is paid just for ‘behaving well’, then – what are they to think?
40–45 per cent or more of US Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, federal judges and Senators attended elite universities whose median standardized test scores are above ∼99th percentile for the overall US population: i.e. ∼1 per cent of the population make up ∼50 per cent of the elite group running the country … However, even within this 1 per cent there are huge differences between the brains and character of a Zuckerberg and an average senator.
Dominic Cummings, advisor to Michael Gove, 201329
If greed is presented as normal, then you are being taught to be greedy. If a few children at the top are continually given the implicit message that they deserve the most, they will come to expect the most. In Britain the children of those at the top attend private schools, and each has more than three times as much spent on their education than the rest (see Figure 2.2). For the exclusive 1 per cent, much more is spent on their school education than that.30
In the UK more money is spent on private education than almost anywhere else on the planet. Recently almost all of the richest 1 per cent, and about half of very affluent children (the next 9 per cent) were privately educated, while only around 1 per cent of the 90 per cent below them ever went to private school. In OECD nations that have more equality, this private/public school inequality is largely avoided. In addition, and probably not unrelated to this acute divide, in 2012 the number of teenagers staying on in school in the UK after age sixteen fell for the first time in a decade, and the proportion of sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds ‘not in education, employment or training’ rose by 8 per cent in that same year.31 These youngsters were previously classified as ‘Status Zer0 [sic]’, but since 1999 designated by the acronym NEETs. Neither title is edifying.32
Less is being spent on the education of the majority, who are consequently more likely to drop out earlier. The private schools, attended by the richest children in Britain, thus promise a very high chance of later enrolment in our ‘top’ universities. These universities were recently labelled by one educational commentator ‘finishing schools for gilded youth, as bestowers of glittering prizes’.33 Careful research has shown that dividing children up within schools tends to set them all back on average by a month, although it may give a small advantage to those put in the ‘top sets’.34 Growing educational divisions are a huge social problem in economically unequal countries. They are often only promoted because they might confer a slight benefit on those at the very top – but those arguing for division have the power and money of many of the 1 per cent behind them.
Even among the ‘top’ universities, divisions are growing and the numbers attending the less-favoured of the elite Russell Group universities – Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Southampton and Warwick – fell between 2011 and 2012. A year later, it was reported that these divisions between the ‘top’ universities were widening, just as income inequality in the UK was continuing to rise.35
Despite the fact that only 7 per cent of children attended private schools, some 70 per cent of judges went to such establishments, as did the majority of the members of almost all other ‘top’ professions, from the lowest-paid London journalist to the highest-paid CEO. On any given day, a fifth of children in Britain qualify for free school meals – but this is true of only one in every hundred children who later attend either Oxford or Cambridge universities.36 Part of the reason that there is such concern over which university children go to is what happens to them and their income after that. Among the top UK employers paying salaries that might one day put a young person in the top 1 per cent, some 60 per cent only visit twenty or fewer universities to recruit from. And they visit some of those universities far more eagerly than others – especially Cambridge, London (UCL and LSE), Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford.37
The following is a list of the firms and government businesses involved in such recruiting. These high-salary employers disproportionately draw graduates from those universities that service the top 1 per cent in society. Universities in the UK are increasingly viewed as stepping stones into top companies:38
Accenture, Airbus, Aldi, Allen & Overy, Apple, Arcadia Group, Army, Arup, Asda, AstraZeneca, Atkins, BAE Systems, Bain & Company, Baker & McKenzie, Balfour Beatty, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bank of England, Barclays, Barclays Capital, BBC, Bloomberg, Boots, Boston Consulting Group, BP, BT, Cancer Research, Centrica, Citi, Civil Service, Clifford Chance, Co-operative Group, Credit Suisse, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, Diageo, DLA Piper, Dstl, E.ON, EDF Energy, Ernst & Young, ExxonMobil, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, GlaxoSmithKline, Goldman Sachs, Google, Grant Thornton, Herbert Smith, Hogan Lovells, HSBC, IBM, J.P. Morgan, Jaguar Landrover, John Lewis, KPMG, Kraft, L’Oréal, Lidl, Linklaters, Lloyds Banking Group, Local Government, Marks & Spencer, Mars, McDonald’s Restaurants, McKinsey & Company, MI5, Microsoft, Ministry of Defence, Morgan Stanley, National Grid, Nestlé, Network Rail, NHS, nucleargraduates, Oliver Wyman, Oxfam, Penguin, Police, Procter & Gamble, PwC, RAF, Rolls-Royce, Royal Bank of Scotland, Royal Navy, RWE npower, Saatchi & Saatchi, Sainsbury’s, Santander, Savills, Shell, Simmons & Simmons, Sky, Slaughter and May, Sony, Teach First, Tesco, Transport for London, UBS, Unilever, and WPP.39
When the 1 per cent have held so much sway over our society for so many decades, the effect can be that otherwise sensible people begin to believe that it is fair if the poorest are only given a minimum of resources, and just enough education for their children, so that if one of them should turn out unexpectedly to have ‘potential’, then it can be realised. Here is how this view is put by the director of the leading British progressive think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Note that all he is doing is reflecting what has now become common wisdom:
At the other end of the scale, individuals require a sufficient income to live free of stigma or shame, and should receive public services, such as education, that are distributed in such a way that each can fulfil their potential and enjoy equal standing with their peers. Market inequalities are necessary for economic efficiency and freedom of choice, but within ranges constrained by these factors.40
‘Potential’ is the give-away word that implies the inevitability of large disparities in ability, and consequently in income. It is presumed that, if certain minimum levels of educational services are provided, then the few more able among the lower orders can be talent-spotted, as a young footballer might be, if provided with a chance to show off on a level playing field. Begin to believe that only a few are truly remarkably gifted, and you can begin to create justifications for the remarkable geographical concentration of multi-millionaires in Britain (see Figure 2.3).
The word ‘potential’ appears in the motto of Save the Children’s 2012 report on child poverty: ‘We save children’s lives. We fight for their rights. We help them fulfil their potential.’41 But how does the charity know what each child’s potential is? ‘We don’t presume a limit to their potential’ would be a better ending for their motto. The only studies there have been which suggested that some children differ from others in aptitude for some aspects of context-free logic (‘geekiness’) find that the association is inherent rather than inherited, so that any predisposition to find abstract reasoning easier is not passed down generationally.42
It is remarkable – in the early twenty-first century, in one of the most advanced and fortunate nations on earth – to have to acknowledge that some people really do believe that some of us are actually of ‘better stock’ than others. They don’t say this out loud, of course. Animal breeding metaphors are hardly acceptable as a way to talk about fellow citizens. But they find other ways of saying the same thing – for example, by equating talent and capability to one’s wealth. The usually unspoken underlying rhetorical question is: Well, how else did you or your parents get to be wealthy?
Figure 2.3 Mapping the abstract metrics: poverty and wealth 2012
The assumption which has become the mainstream elite view is that all children are limited and only a few are potentially talented, and that talent is then reflected by wealth. Such a view leads to criticism of calls to reduce income and wealth inequalities. The director of the IPPR puts the establishment message more subtly in a section of his paper headed ‘Refashioning Equality’, when he says he wishes to challenge ‘a focus on abstract metrics of material equality with a commitment to valuing the expressive and cultural dimensions of life, recognising that one’s position in society only makes sense in relation to others, and improving everyday experience over the pursuit of abstract utopia’.43 He is presumably trying to explain that what is good enough for the masses may not be good enough for people who can write as obscurely as he can. The concept of ‘the 1 per cent’ is an abstract metric, but a very useful one which can also be used to consider the expressive and cultural dimensions of life, including theories of childhood and education.
There are many people who believe that it is, or should be, the ‘fittest’ who get to the top.44 These people believe that we are largely ruled by our betters, and that that is good for us.45 They think that almost all of the 1 per cent are very clever – much cleverer than most people – and that within the 1 per cent there are some exceptional geniuses.46 However, many of the 1 per cent are, in fact, not part of an especially talented bunch, and even those who are talented may not be that special.
A remarkable number of those who rule us believe they do so because they are special. That is less surprising when you realise that most went to schools and universities where they were repeatedly told they were all special – although most are at least clever enough to realise that the majority outside their circle might not take kindly to being told this. Dominic Cummings is not like most of those who have got into the top echelons.47 He has a tendency to say what he believes. He wrote the words used at the start of this section in a thesis made widely available when he was advisor to the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove.48 In that thesis he also suggested that 70 per cent of a child’s attainment is determined by his or her genes.
Following the human genome project, it has been possible to conduct various whole-genome association studies to assess how much the entire genetic code might be affecting the chance of particular outcomes without having to know which parts of the code matter most. Studies in children have shown that over 20 per cent but under 50 per cent of their differences in the ability to do abstract logic or IQ tests might be accounted for by tiny variations in a very large group of genes, but not by individual genes. It is not possible to carry out equivalent comparisons on thousands of individual environmental factors.49 Twin, family and adoption studies show that being brought up by someone with a high IQ does not particularly boost your ability in IQ tests.50 Some would point out that the most intelligent teachers are not necessarily the best teachers.51 None of this implies that the children of people who have been able to acquire a lot of wealth will necessarily be gifted.52
In educational research it is now the norm to develop ‘approaches to teaching and learning that do not rely on determinist beliefs about ability’.53 Children can be taught to be good at tests and to get better at them, and children who start off with more advantages in life tend to see those advantages multiplied, especially in more unequal societies.54 Children who do not do well at tests can be demoralised by the system, and that increases the likelihood of future failure.55 They are less likely to talk themselves up – or ‘self-enhance’, as such boosterism is called in psychology. Thinking you are great is more common among the rich, but also more common in more unequal countries where the population at large has to begin to mimic the self-enhancing behaviours of those above them just to get by (see Figure 2.4).
Having a high opinion of yourself – believing you are part of a deserving minority who has got to the top and that there are only a few others like you – is a trait that is much more common in more unequal countries. A comparison of attitudes in fifteen nations which did not include the UK found that ‘people in societies with more income inequality tend to view themselves as superior to others, and people in societies with less income inequality tend to see themselves as more similar to their peers’.56 The study implied that high self-esteem and self-enhancement might be an accurate, justified attitude, but that it is often viewed by others as signalling an arrogant and unwarranted sense of superiority. Overvaluing yourself implies undervaluing others.
Note: The data points for Australia and Italy are very close and overlap on the graph.
Source: Loughan, Kuppens et al., 2011
Figure 2.4 Individual average self-enhancement verses economic inequality in fifteen nations
In a major speech in November 2013, London mayor Boris Johnson told his audience: ‘Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130.’57 A numerate audience would have known that exactly 50 per cent of the population have an IQ above or below 100, and the ratios at all other IQ values can be found in a table. IQ is defined so that 16 per cent always score below 85: no other result is permitted.
Genetic determinism is an attractive idea to many in the 1 per cent. It is used as a defence by those who support their wealth as justifiable – although their superior inherited abilities apparently make them unable to manage satisfactorily on much less money. Whatever the truth about how much the ability to do well at IQ tests is inherent, what is obvious is that it should be no justification for receiving more money.
There is no evidence that people with high IQs are more likely to be in the top 1 per cent by income. Worldwide, the vast majority of those who score highest on such tests will be very poor. In richer countries, people with high IQs might find solving obscure mathematical puzzles easier than most others. They may also be less worldly-wise, less adept in other ways – and as they are not greedier than average, there is no reason why they should be much richer.
If genetics do play a part in determining who is in the wealthiest 1 per cent, it will be in the fact that this small segment of society contains more people with genes inclining them to be acquisitive, to hoard, and to be less concerned about others. These are what psychologists call ‘individualistic traits’, rather than the norm of being more pro-social, with positive, helpful and friendly attitudes to other people, not grandiose or conceited.
Steve Jones, emeritus professor of genetics at University College London, puts the case against the favoured few succinctly. In chastising Dominic Cummings, he noted: ‘For geneticists, the more we learn about DNA, the more important the environment appears. The lesson from the double helix is that we need more and better teachers, rather than wringing our hands about the unkindness of fate. A few lessons about elementary biology might be a good place to start.’58 We now worry about the extinction of rare species, and the loss of their genes, and see apparent genetic variation within our species as more and more important (see the illustration below). Hereditary rights appear to be back in fashion. We do not question dynasties in particular professions as much as we did when we were more equal, and today many more people argue against inheritance tax than the number of people likely to be subject to it. As the middle class shrinks, it becomes easier for the rich to argue that they deserve to pass more of their wealth to their children, who, in turn, deserve to receive it.
Much more is inherited than money. Think about what kinds of subjects the children of the 1 per cent are educated in, and what careers they are steered towards. Only a tiny fraction of the 1 per cent consists of talented singers, sport stars or entertainers. From a 2004 analysis of tax returns in the US,59 the proportion of the population that was both in the top 1 per cent of taxpayers and worked in the arts, media or sports was just 0.031 per cent. For every two showbiz or sports celebrity members of the top 1 per cent, there were three estate agents, four lawyers, twelve people working in finance, and twenty-six executives and top managers who were not directly working in finance. Most of the very rich are people who have control over their own pay – not those whom the rest of us think of as very able, but often people who are entrusted with large amounts of other people’s money.
Resistance to the impoverishment of the majority, USA, 2013
It is a myth that within the top 1 per cent there is a disproportionate number of geniuses. Instead, there is a disproportionate number of financiers, bankers and bosses, especially in the US and UK. Somehow the idea of 1 per cent of the population being particularly clever has become mixed up with the idea of there always being 1 per cent at the top. It is in the interests of those who have the most to promote the idea that they deserve their riches because they are very special – but that promotional effort emanates in particular from just two Anglophone countries. Could that be because there are over 4,000 households in the UK and US combined with a minimum wealth not including property of $100,000,000 each? This means that there are more superrich families in these two countries than in the next eight most superrich-containing countries combined (see Figure 2.5).60
Today, as the superrich crowd into the UK, buying multiple homes in London, at exactly the same time as more money than ever before is being spent on the school fees and university education of the children of the 1 per cent, millions of children at the bottom of the 99 per cent are falling into poverty, or seeing their poverty deepen. Some 40 per cent of children in the UK now go to university, while another 40 per cent leave school without five good GCSEs – now considered the most basic of qualifications. The 20 per cent between those two camps has been squeezed even further in recent years.61 As the 1 per cent becomes richer, the country polarises educationally. In contrast, year on year from 1918 through to 1978, the UK became progressively (and educationally) more equal, at that time when those at the top took less and less, and eventually, after comprehensivisation, most children attended the same type of school.
Source: Boston Consulting Group, 2012
Figure 2.5 Number of $100 million households in the world, by country, 2011
Over that same 1918–78 period, British culture admitted more and more people from normal backgrounds to the highest levels of society. Increasing numbers of MPs came from the working classes. Regional accents began to be permitted on radio and TV – only slowly at first, but then increasingly often. And actors began to star on TV and in the theatre who had backgrounds not unlike those of most of their audience. However, actress Julie Walters recently explained: ‘I look at almost all the up-and-coming names and they’re from the posh schools … Don’t get me wrong … they’re wonderful. It’s just a shame those working-class kids aren’t coming through. When I started, thirty years ago, it was the complete opposite.’62
The idea of progressive improvement generation after generation is now a distant memory. It implied not just improvement in overall standards, but also standards rising most at the bottom, for those groups of children who had been made to leave school at the youngest of ages in the past. Today, those who will learn the least at school will tend to be those who have the fewest books at home, and whose parents cannot afford access to a computer and the internet. In 2013 the children’s commissioner attributed what was happening in the UK to cuts and austerity: ‘Families with children will lose more of their income than families without children. However, lone parents will lose the most out of everyone.’63 And the main reason for rising poverty in childhood was that so many parents were paid such low wages (see Figure 2.6).
As the poor become poorer, the rich tend to become more selfish. In 2012 Debra Leigh Scott, an American university lecturer, wrote a blog about what was happening in the US that illustrated what the UK might become if the 1 per cent continue to take more and more. One observation stood out: ‘I often see it on late-model, expensive cars near my town. It says, “Cut School Taxes.” These drivers/voters/taxpayers have given up on the schools, or they have kids who have graduated, and/or they’re being selfish.’64 How did Americans get to the point where some of the old not only think they should not be paying taxes to school youngsters, but also want others to know they think that? And how long might it be before the first bumper sticker appears in the UK demanding, ‘Lower our taxes. Cut the education budget’?
Figure 2.6 What differences will changes to taxes and benefits have on children?
