In a meritocracy we all own our destiny. So potent is this fallacy that even those sold short by it, those at the very bottom of the social ladder, can be found yielding to its key messages: the poor are poor because they’re not smart or haven’t tried hard enough. It’s the sort of nonsense that’s even easier to believe when you’re young and susceptible to insecurity.
This week the Prince’s Trust reported on research it has carried out which tells us what we already know: social mobility doesn’t exist. Inevitably, there will be outliers, of whom I count myself, hauled out to prove this assertion wrong. “Look, over there, a used-to-be-poor person who’s not poor now! And there’s another!” Family and old friends will be lumped together as lazy or feckless or both: no-hopers who haven’t made the cut.
But the evidence is irrefutable. Your family background is in fact most people’s destiny.
Young people from poor families, the Prince’s Trust report explains, find it harder to get ahead in the world of work because they bump against nepotism practised by the already privileged. The Daily Mail puts it more kindly than I do, preferring to call it the absence of “a leg up the career ladder due to their lack of family connections”. Private schools educate 7% of the nation’s pupils and yet those children go on to make up: 71% of senior judges, 50% of members of the House of Lords and 43% of newspaper columnists.
The chief executive of the Prince’s Trust, Martina Milburn, explains: “There is a social bank of mum and dad which can open as many doors as the financial bank of mum and dad. Sadly, not all young people have the same access to it, and all too often young people are locked out of jobs and other opportunities simply because of where they’ve started in life.” Although we are well into the 21st century, this still remains a fact of life.
Call it what you will, squandered opportunity or a failure of our society to capitalise on the potential of so many, it is dangerous to promise so much and yet offer so little. Brexit has proven what scholars like Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson have been saying for some time, namely the more unequal our society becomes, the less stable it will be.
There will be those who believe, as seems evident in the comments section of the Mail article announcing these findings, that inequality is a fact of life. Rather than considering it a problem, they’ll argue it’s a necessary kick up the backside so many need. Poor parents shouldn’t be so lazy, selfishly relying on benefits, they’ll claim – forgetting that nearly two-thirds of children living in poverty have one parent who is working full-time.
Seeing inequality as some kind of social necessity spurring people into action, inevitably leads us to viewing competition as its cure. Those, then, with aspiration and aptitude will certainly detangle themselves from the sludge of their backgrounds and float above it all. Nowhere is this more the case than in education and debates over grammar schools in particular. Once, apparently, they were great conductors of working class talent into middle-class stability.
What is true of grammar schools today is far from the halcyon myth-making constantly evoked in their name. Less than 3% of grammar school pupils are eligible for free school meals (despite the fact that the average proportion of children entitled to them in these selective areas is 18%). As if this weren’t damning enough, the Sutton Trust finds that in local authorities operating the grammar system, children not entitled to free school meals “have a much greater chance of attending a grammar school than similarly high-achieving children who are eligible for free school meals”. The new education secretary, Justine Greening, announced she is “open-minded” about the expansion of grammar schools, a system that cements inequality rather than tackles our dysfunctional status quo.
Tackling social immobility and its enabler inequality, isn’t about blaming people for where they find themselves. Empty platitudes focused on aspiration mean nothing when poverty stops you from having a full stomach or a warm home. But whereas our lack of social mobility exposes it for the illusion it is, this should not make it acceptable to consign one in five to live below the official poverty line. All deserve a fair standard of living and social class should have nothing to do with that.
