How Rising London Rents are Funding Elite Private Schools

This article was originally published by Novara Media here.

Saturday saw the culmination of an incredibly successful year for the rent strike at University College London rent strike with a protest during an open day. The campaign has served to highlight the indifference of university management to the consequences of increased housing costs and has rapidly spread to other campuses.

As the rent strikers have shown, increased accommodation costs for students have been passed onto investment banks in China and the Netherlands through the management corporation, the University Partnership Programme (UPP). Alongside this story of global capital is a very British story of elite educational institutions profiting from raising rents on land they have owned for centuries.

Just round the corner from UCL, UPP has also been involved with refurbishing an old block of University of London student accommodation. From September, the Cartwright Halls will be re-opened – charging £189 per week for the cheapest room, with the most expensive costing £258. In 2012-13, the last year before refurbishment, it was still possible to share a room costing just £129 per week but this budget option no longer exists.

When the University of London began redevelopment of the halls, managers also signed a new lease on the land in July 2014. Like many London universities, the University of London does not actually own the land on which its buildings sit. Renewing the lease cost the university £17.5m, and the new 125 year lease involves an increased annual rent of £100k a year.

But where is this money going?

The land beneath Cartwright Halls belongs to the Sir Andrew Judd Foundation. Andrew Judde was a 16th century merchant who eventually became Lord Mayor of London in 1550. He used this wealth – much of it earned through trade abroad – to buy land in the City of London and St Pancras. When he died in 1558 he left this land as an endowment to fund a school in Tonbridge where he was born. His foundation, with an endowment now worth £82m, primarily serves to fund this school. Tonbridge School is now an elite private boys’ school costing £36,288 per year for boarding students, this year winning 31 Oxbridge offers.

The extortionate rents paid by students at Cartwright Halls will not only prove unaffordable to many but will actively strengthen elitist education. As a result of the deal, the school will receive over £5.5m from the Judd Foundation towards rebuilding Tonbridge School over the next five years. Under the somewhat ironic title of ‘excellence for all’, this rebuilding masterplan includes the refurbishment of the ‘Old Big School’ building into an art gallery, new ‘Olympic standard’ sports facilities costing £2m, and a new library (which contains 23,000 books) costing nearly £7m.

In contrast, state schools saw budgets for rebuilding and repairs cut by 34% under the last government.

Tonbridge School is far from alone in profiting from land ownership in central London. If you have ever bought a pint at The Lamb pub on Lamb’s Conduit Street you have indirectly funded Rugby School, which owns the whole street. Eton – with the largest endowment of any school in the UK – holds stocks and shares worth £298m and property worth a further £80m, having developed a whole suburban estate in the late 19th century. Eton’s landed wealth is dwarfed by the staggering property portfolio of Christ’s Hospital School, which is worth £142m. Until compulsory purchase in 1949, St Paul’s Boys School was also funded by the rents of working-class Londoners in Stepney. The history of landed wealth and elite schools is very ugly indeed.

These elite educational institutions – to which must of course be added the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge with their own huge endowed wealth – serve not only to produce a form of educational apartheid but are actively involved in property development and market speculation, with utter indifference to the consequences. These schools and universities have educated the imperial, British and global elite for literally centuries with all the violence that has entailed. Of course, there are caveats – this is not a glib attack on everyone who was privately educated and indeed, not all private schools share in the same wealth as these elite institutions.

The point here is that there is a deep historical and structural underpinning to many of the battles that we face. The UCL rent strike has been a struggle for affordable accommodation and is the tip of iceberg of the much broader housing crisis in London for young people. For students, this also speaks to issues of ‘access’ to education. When Andrew Grainger, UCL’s director of estates, declared: “Some people simply cannot afford to study in London and that is a fact of life” he was simply expressing the reality of elite universities and schools which pay lip service to widening participation and bursary access. Their primary social function remains the preservation of upper middle-class status, and the percentage of students in the Russell Group attending private school has remained static at around 25% since 2002 and is far higher in the more elite institutions.

So the struggle against extortionate rents in universities and in the housing market is also a struggle against the economic and cultural power of elite forms of education. These inequalities pre-date neoliberalism and are part of the deep-rooted elite infrastructure which supports and reproduces the English state. The struggle for affordable housing – in and outside the university – is also ultimately the struggle against elite schools and universities which need to be utterly and profoundly transformed, and their cultural and economic power abolished.

This transformation can only come as part of a broader struggle and shift of power within society. ‘Excellence for all’ must not be a sick joke but a political reality. Let us be clear – none of this is the ‘politics of envy’ – all we are saying is that we have had enough. The domination of society by a narrowly-educated elite has no justification, not now and not ever. It must end. To paraphrase that great imaginary British Labour leader Harry Perkins: “We are going to abolish second class education; I think everyone is first class, don’t you?”

Workers’ rights, migration and some necessary realism – why another Europe is (still) possible

Last Saturday, Another Europe is Possible held a day of workshops on the left-wing case to remain in the EU. It was also my dad’s birthday. Pulling these two together, I argue the left case to vote in to build a European alternative.

It was my dad’s 67^th birthday at the weekend. He died of lung cancer four years ago from being exposed to asbestos as a builder in the 1970s. I’m not the only one to have lost a parent (or both) and of course I won’t be the last. As I’ve posted before, he spent his working life fighting for workers’ health in the workplace – steelworkers and miners to begin with but as time went on working with cleaners and other night workers in hospitals, teachers with stress and office workers. He was an internationalist within Europe and beyond, part of a network spanning the USA, India and China in particular.

At the European level he worked with the European Trades Union Institute and others to lobby and campaign for better health and safety legislation. He was a socialist and he knew it wasn’t revolutionary work but it concretely acted to protect workers’ health in Europe. He was of course, not supportive of a neo-liberal Europe, but he saw the possibility of a radical alternative and knew that there were small, valuable victories that could be won within the EU. Quitting the EU will empirically mean that workers’ rights to health at work will get worse and I’m as sure as I can be that he would have been opposed to leaving.

One of the arguments that I find problematic about the radical left case for leaving is that it will weaken global capitalism and benefit the Global South by proxy in weakening the EU. Empirically in the short term there will undoubtedly be a crisis both for the British political elite (quite capable of destroying itself on its own as we have seen over the last few weeks) and for the EU, but in the medium to long term, a few banks will move to Frankfurt and that will be that. Germany and France will not let the EU fall apart completely. Within the UK, none of these arguments will gain any kind of political traction on the doorstep whatsoever. There are not the conditions for a “lexit” case to gain any kind of public attention or sympathy. Far less an argument about the Global South couched in theoretical terms that many voters will not understand, much less have sympathy for.

I’m an internationalist – there is no struggle which is not about overcoming the major economic division between North and South, or that is not intersectional and just keeps on banging on about class. But I don’t think we can wave a magic wand and somehow turn substantial anti-migrant, sexist public sentiment into altermondialiste ultra-leftism – we need to start with where people are at. That also means recognising our political strength within any particular situation. Weakening the structure of capitalism globally will not strengthen the left nationally or internationally. At a local level a vote to leave will undoubtedly strengthen xenophobic, anti-migrant sentiment even if it weakens the current leadership of the Conservative party. Within Europe, Brexit would strengthen racist right-wing populist parties who are most opposed to the open migration policy which is so desperately needed. How this would benefit the millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, I don’t know. Fortress Europe is brutal and horrific, but it does not follow that a weakened EU would change this predicament.

There is no quick route to building up a radical left movement to the global imperialist, capitalist system we currently have or the nasty neoliberal state at a national level. The EU referendum is not a political opportunity for radical left debate about the global economy – it just isn’t. This debate is not being led by an insurgent party to the left of Labour which is causing Labour political problems in their heartland – it has been forced by UKIP manipulating Tory right-wingers and working class alienation, disillusionment and decades (if not centuries) of disinvestment by the British state.

Something which I find deeply frustrating is that fighting for empirical improvements in workers’ right at an EU level is dismissed by autonomist ultra-left figures as reformist. Fighting within existing structures does not mean that we support them. It is a recognition that we are not powerful enough to overcome them right now and that alongside and through fighting smaller battles, we build for a radical alternative.

For me, my dad and his broader generation taught me the importance of the long march through the institutions – that 1970s New Left strategy which clearly has not succeeded but remains politically valuable. At a local level, within our own workplaces, I don’t see that we have any other choice but to be in and against the state or whatever fragmented public or private institution we find ourselves working for. It might not be politically sexy to fight for EU regulation of vibrations or noise or the use of chemicals at work, it is clearly not the sum total of what we want, but it matters.

There are tangible reasons why in a UK context specifically, leaving the EU will likely push us towards a more market-oriented economy with fewer employment protections and even more xenophobic migration controls. Recognizing that fact does not mean we turn away from building solidarity with people in the Global South and Southern Europe who have borne the brunt of EU economic policy. There is no short-cut to building an international alternative to current European and global economic system. Voting to leave and the temporary crisis in capitalism it would bring about will not somehow magically create the movement we need. In the UK it would do the opposite by strengthening the most racist elements of the mainstream political right, not to mention entrenching Conservative political control in England if Scottish independence followed. It would also bolster right-wing anti-EU sentiment across Europe, strengthening xenophobic political parties at precisely the moment when a radical, open migration policy is needed.

Building an alternative Europe is a much longer, slower task, but it will not be made easier by leaving.

Another Europe is Possible is the left campaign to remain in the EU.

Why they don’t give a shit: the chronic indifference of the South-Eastern elite to industry

 

In an excellent dissection of the Conservative party’s failure to offer the steelworkers of Port Talbot realistic long-term state support, Paul Mason briefly referred to the education of large swathes of the political elite:

Not giving a shit — about industries, jobs or social consequences — is at the heart of the ideology the political elite has learned since they were at private school.

This is the soft-end of the critique – clearly the steel crisis is not being caused by the private school education of much of the Conservative cabinet, it is the shifting structures of the global economy which are at work. However, the role of private schools is not just important in thinking about fostering a particular attitude of indifference. Elite, mostly private education plays a deeper, more structural role in British, and especially English, society, which is central to understanding the structures of capitalism in Britain. This is not simply ‘a textbook lesson in neoliberalism’, the tendencies underlying the disinterest in industry in particular have much longer historical roots.

With a famous series of articles in the mid-1960s, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn delivered a decisive critique of British capitalism. They presented a systematic historical argument about how the social structure of the UK developed, noting the fusion between the rising bourgeoisie and the aristocracy as the key development in preventing conflict within the ruling class and limiting direct bourgeois political control. Within this, brief mention was made of the importance of the public schools in fusing the rising industrial bourgeoisie, the expanding professional middle classes and the aristocracy around the pseudo-aristocratic ideal of the ‘gentleman’.

In fact in their work, an analysis of the nascent public school system of the late 19th century plays only a relatively minor role. It was the work of historian W.D. Rubinstein who really ironed out the creases in the Anderson-Nairn understanding of the British elite[1] and the geography of Britain’s class structure. He showed how middle-class incomes over the 19th century became increasingly concentrated on the South-East – exactly where the majority of private schools were founded and remain. More importantly for the case of the Port Talbot steelworkers, his analysis showed how the wealthiest men of the 19th century overwhelmingly made their fortunes through banking and commerce and lived in or around London. The provincial industrial bourgeoisie were relatively speaking, poorer, lived further from the centre of political and economic power and were culturally disinclined towards sending their sons to the Anglican boarding schools of the South-East.

London and its Home Counties environs have long been the place of residence for Britain’s elites and it remains so in the 21st century. As education became increasingly important for accessing professional employment over the 19th century, this necessitated the creation of an educational infrastructure of elite social reproduction. The reform of Oxford and Cambridge and the older public schools in the late 19th century meant the preservation of a pseudo-aristocratic heritage within education which remains powerful today.

One famous interpretation of British economic malaise, saw this apparently anti-business educational culture as at the heart of the decline of the UK economy, an argument which gained traction amongst Thatcher’s Conservative government. Rubinstein’s rebutted the ‘Wiener thesis’ firmly, and described how public schools fostered links with the most ‘dynamic’ areas of the British economy. Already by the late 19th century, the core source of wealth for British elites and the major area of economic development was concentrated on the City of London and this trend increased over the first half of the 20th century.

As finance grew in importance, students from the public schools increasingly opted to go into finance. Eton in particular developed intense links with the City. The overlap between land-ownership and City finance grew as landed estates declined in value and the wealth exchanged grew. Oxbridge and the public schools formed an increasingly important part of this nexus of elites focussed on the South-East of England, or what Tom Nairn called ‘the Crown Heartland’. This was ‘a Southern-lowland hegemonic bloc uniting an hereditary élite to the central processing block of commercial and financial capital.’ Within England and by proxy, through the continuing political power of Westminster, it is this shifting but persistent social and economic constellation who dominate British politics, economy and culture.

The public schools, and, it must be said, increasingly a small number of elite state schools, are the first institutional stage in what must be understood as a broader infrastructure of elite power, with Oxbridge, the City and Westminster being its other obvious institutional bases. It is not the curricular emphasis of the public schools which creates a bias towards finance within the British economy, it is their role within a nexus of economic, cultural and political power concentrated on South-East England and the fact that generations of their alumnae have gone on to work in these central institutions of the British state.

More than any other Conservative politician, Cameron himself embodies this Anderson-Nairn-Rubinstein understanding of the British ruling class. He comes from a family which has worked in the City for generations, married into minor aristocracy over several generations (both himself and his father) and has sent its sons to Eton from the late 19th century (which could be behind the apparent decision to send his son to prep school). Samantha Cameron may have family with strong aristocratic Yorkshire-Lincolnshire connections, but she grew up and went to school in the South-East of England.

Why though does any of this matter for the steelworkers of Port Talbot?

The ‘political ideology’ of the public schools is not anti-industry per se. Rather it forms part of a broader institutional pattern within the British ruling classes. Post-war, state-owned industry did not challenge the hegemonic position of the City of London over British economic life any more than industry did during the 19^th century. This tendency of the south-eastern elite to be largely indifferent to the fate of industry predates neoliberalism. For certain strata of the elite, the City has been integral to their personal and broader class interests for generations.

Whilst the ownership of the Port Talbot mills by Tata, an Indian multinational, reveal the depth of changes to the British and global economy, the response of the Conservatives is partly driven by this path-dependent set of interests aligned with this socio-cultural south-eastern elite. These interests are deeply historical and relate to the long-term orientation of the British economy. Neo-liberalism gave this a new form and mode of operation but it did so within the context of an existing geography of class and economic power which was structurally indifferent to provincial industry.

Moving away from this model would involve a seismic shift within the British economy and society. It would involve acknowledging the real geographical political division within the UK is between the Crown Heartland elite and the rest of the country. The steelworkers of Lanarkshire, Port Talbot and Scunthorpe, just like the rest of us, have more in common than what divides us.

 

[1] There are clearly important distinctions to be made in terms of the history of Irish, Scottish and Welsh elites which I can’t do justice to here. I refer to British elites concentrated on London as these groups were dominant within the British ruling class as a whole but that is not to say that there are not distinctive national histories as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to fight the right on education, housing and aspiration – and win

 

The exchange at Prime Minister’s Questions in the middle of January revealed how easy it is for Cameron to bat away arguments about the unfairness of cutting nursing bursaries and maintenance grants. Corbyn came across strongly at the end of his questions with his line of questioning with his points on nursing but Cameron’s lines about ‘uncapping aspiration’ and his argument about economic security at the end were strong and politically damaging.

 

Here’s a few Corbyn could use in reply: the new funding system is a policy of broken aspiration, lifetime debt and economic hypocrisy. Taking these last two points first, for literally millions of young people the Tories are the party of deficit-makers. For a party that continues to position itself on the economy in relation to government debt, they are strangely insistent on indebting an entire generation up to the eye-balls. This contradiction should be exploited politically and Labour quite simply never has.

 

On the issue of aspiration, picking out teachers and nurses is symbolically important: both of these are careers which became associated with upward social mobility over the 20^th century. But it isn’t enough to talk about the aspiration of safe Labour voters. The greatest political weakness of the Conservative party is the economic vulnerability of the working lower-middle class which their higher education reforms are undoubtedly damaging. Poorer students will now graduate with an average of £12,500 more debt than their wealthier peers. This coincides with the broader changes in the housing market which has seen house ownership and mortgage rates fall since the financial crisis, across all income quintiles and especially for the bottom 60% of households. Fundamentally the aspiration to owner-occupancy increasingly difficult if not impossible for more and more people. Aspiration based around these norms is increasingly vulnerable – it is at least breaking if not broken.

 

Labour desperately needs to appeal to this demographic but this has to go beyond an electoral strategy. Having soundbites that people understand that we can repeat over and over again matters. But it matters not for the cynical reasons of the Conservatives – what we are engaged in is a struggle to transform the political ‘common sense’ of people and we need to build a movement which can do this. We are trying to challenge the long-term occupancy of power – not just in a political sense but in the deep transformative way that Thatcher shifted English society and culture rightwards. For the first time in my lifetime there is just the possibility that the left could move onto the front foot.

 

By talking about education and housing we pick away at two areas which are now far more vulnerable areas of social policy for the Conservatives. In these circumstances, social mobility itself as it has been conceived of, i.e. the fair chance through education of free upward (never downward) movement, is politically vulnerable. In an immediate sense, there is a clear tilting of the scales against the poorest and most debt-averse students. But this crisis runs far deeper.

 

A generation of more affluent though not rich young people, and, let us not forget this essential political point, their parents, are facing the serious likelihood of serious difficulties accessing the housing market combined with a lifetime of debt repayment. Conservative housing policy will deepen social and racial cleansing of inner-city housing, but it does so in a desperate attempt to prop-up middle-class first-time buyers. The trick for Labour is to come up with a policy which speaks to that middle-class anxiety, not because they are our priority but because their status represents the security that many aspire to. We shouldn’t reject that as bourgeois, we should acknowledge that this is the language of the everyday life that people want.

 

There is a fundamental need for a rigorously thought-out political programme from Labour which highlights these weaknesses, critiques the old models and puts something new in their place. Just as McDonnell announced with reference to cooperative models of worker ownership, ‘we cannot simply turn the clock back’ to old forms of public ownership. The same is true in higher education and we need a systematic programme for a radical alternative to back up the soundbites.

 

If as Stuart Hall argued, drawing on Gramsci, ‘every crisis is also a moment of reconstruction; that there is no destruction which is not, also, reconstruction’ then we have to make sure we win the political argument of the current crisis. This is not just an economic crisis – the crises within education and housing are an opportunity to re-shape not only the political agenda but the deeper social and cultural assumptions which are rapidly being shown to be contradictory. Cameron and the old hegemony of the new right is vulnerable and, with Corbyn as leader, there is an opening for an offensive from the left.

Rhodes Must Fall – should Oxford fall too?

What does the crucial campaign about Cecil Rhodes mean for fighting for alternative structures and ways of doing higher education.

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford has been one of the most important and vocal student campaigns of this academic year. This morning it forced a public response from the chancellor of the University of Oxford. The English elite is being forced to confront its colonial legacy and it doesn’t like it. Little surprise given that it strikes at the very heart of an institution which is integral to maintaining the legitimacy and domination of the English elite.

Lord Patten, Chancellor at Oxford asked where would it stop if we were to give in to the group and remove the statue. So many buildings housing major institutions of the British establishment were built with the ill-gotten, blood-soaked funds of the British Empire. The fact that it has sparked such media uproar on the right and the liberal left, reflects how little debate there has been about the historical legacy of the British empire. There has never truly been any Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past, of the sort that happened in the two Germanies and continues in the unified state, since 1945. Hopefully with this upsurge in activism which challenges the left on issues of race as well as the establishment and greater discussion of Britain’s colonial legacy, this will begin to change.

For higher education, and the British elite the debate has opened up a can of worms. From an institutional perspective, it asks serious questions of the role of these universities. Above all, it makes us see how colonialism is woven into the physical fabric, the very architecture of our universities. The expansion and reform of Oxford and Cambridge in the late 19^th century was reliant, directly or indirectly, on money from the Empire.

More than that, Oxbridge taught generations of colonial administrators and continues to train national and international elites who are deeply implicated in new forms of oppression. This asks all sorts of questions of the British establishment which in all honesty, it has no good answers to. Beyond this confrontation about the past, though this campaign is also about curriculum and everyday treatment of students of colour, what does Rhodes Must Fall Oxford mean for the structure of UK higher education as a whole?

 If there is an area where questions[1] could be asked of the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign from the left, then I think is in relation to how issues of race at Oxford differ from those elsewhere in British higher education. The University of Oxford has serious issues with how it treats students of colour – this has been obvious throughout the RMF Oxford campaign but was also clear beforehand. Educational institutions of the British elite have long and largely unacknowledged or forgotten histories of racism, with Eton College being a case in point.

Within the UK however, the biggest racial divide in higher education is between the Russell Group and the post-1992 sector. Ethnic diversity in the ‘Golden Triangle’ of elite institutions (London, Oxford and Cambridge) actually got worse between 2006 and 2010, when there were nearly 10 times as many black students in post-1992 universities than at these universities at the apex of the English system.

This situation is changing and organisations exist which deliberately, but I would argue problematically, seek to challenge this racial divide:

Rare is passionate about creating a more equal society. We believe that if more black people get in to Oxbridge, more black people will reach the top of our society. Target Oxbridge is our contribution to making that happen.

The problem here is that we want a society where universities are more open, less racist and yes clearly that means more students of colour at Oxford. But surely we do not want to simply replace a largely white, male elite with an elite which has more people of colour, women and LGTBQ individuals. The discourse of organisation Rare seems to imply simply a more diverse elite. In the here and now and speaking pragmatically this matters, but it is not enough. We want to push beyond this, we have to push beyond this otherwise our activism is nothing but the re-legitimizing of the status quo where an elitist form of higher education reproduces a more acceptable hierarchical social structure.

It might seem like these questions are not relevant to a campaign which has as its focus the colonial legacy and symbols of this which adorn institutions of the British elite. My question, and it is a friendly one, is if those symbols are removed (and they must be) and the curriculum was changed, what type of higher education system would we be left with? The institutional hierarchy would still be there – Oxford would still be an institution of the elite, London Metropolitan University, if it survives the current cuts, would still be dominated by local, first-generation students of colour/working-class students. We want a university which is de-colonised and anti-sexist. But we also want a university which do not have as a central function the creation of elites.

The violence of a symbol is powerful, especially in a country which does so little to acknowledge its colonial past. But the University of Oxford is fundamentally a site of symbolic violence – it has been the site of the creation of national and international elites for hundreds of years. The attraction of Oxford and Cambridge to some international students is not only as centres of knowledge – like the elite ‘public’ schools[2] that feed into them, they represent the deep ossification and persistence of the British elite. This south-eastern, pseudo-aristocratic, now finance-led class has long dominated British society and, with waning influence, parts of the rest of the world. The violence is silent and these institutions find legitimation through the dreamy spires image – fairy-tale medieval places of learning, where Rhodes and others like him have been, until now, invisible.

Making Rhodes visible as a sign of colonial and racial oppression has to be simultaneously wedded to making the classed violence of Oxbridge visible too. We have to fight for a new form of higher education and this means fusing our struggles for a university which is not colonial and racist, capitalist, classist or sexist. Centres of knowledge must exist but do we ultimately wish to study in institutions which perpetuate these different forms of violence?

Beyond Rhodes Must Fall, the real question we have to ask is, should Oxford fall too?

[1] I used this term in the loosest sense, this is not about criticism rather about adding to the debate.

[2] These are private fee-paying schools which are referred to as ‘public schools’ in British English.

Why we need a radical proposal for an alternative (higher) education system – now more than ever.

I argue that we need a detailed alternative for what we want higher education to look like. We need to learn from past mistakes and fuse our struggles together in a systematic argument for a different kind of university.

The HE Green Paper has shaken the higher education sector, and when the consultation closes on January 15^th the legislation that will likely follow will deepen the power of market processes within the system. What it makes clear is that the fee rise to £9000 was only a stepping stone. For those institutions that can show sufficient ‘widening participation’ efforts and NSS scores, fee rises beyond £9k will be possible.

We have to remember that the path for this was laid out not by the Coalition government but by the New Labour years which came before. It was Blair that introduced fees, increased them to £3000 and ordered the Browne Review into HE finance. Labour paved the way for these changes, but Corbyn’s leadership gives us – all of us who work or learn in our universities – a chance to set Labour’s HE policy in the right direction. We need to change Labour’s HE policy, not just the stance of the leadership. Their commitment to removing fees is a phenomenal start, but we need to go much further and deeper in arguing for a system of universities which benefits everyone.

Since Corbyn’s election there have been a few articles thinking about what a ‘comprehensive university’ might look like.[1] In the UK context, the term comes from a book written in 1972 by Robin Pedley, one of the key reformers behind the earlier movement for comprehensive school reform. Pedley posed this alternative model in opposition to the binary system which split the polytechnics with their working-class intakes and more vocational courses, from the older universities which remained bastions of ‘academic study’ and reproduction of middle-class status. In its place, he proposed a model which would bring together Further Education Colleges, Polytechnics and Universities under one collegiate but democratic governance structure in each city or town. This would end hierarchies of prestige, wealth and snobbery and allow much greater movement of students between different institutions.

The system of higher education is now very different, but the binary division along lines of race and class remains. It is still the ‘old’ universities which are dominated by the white middle class and the ‘new’ post-1992 universities, the former polytechnics, which are racially and socio-economically diverse. In his book, Pedley was critical of the decision of Tony Crosland, Labour education minister under Wilson in the 1960s, to implement the conservative proposals for expanding universities outlined in the 1963 Robbins Report on Higher Education.

A more radical alternative was never even considered. Instead Crosland, opted to maintain the political consensus, which expanded higher education but deepened inequalities between institutions. It is exactly here that we have to learn not to repeat past mistakes when it comes to Labour, ‘comprehensives’ and education policy more broadly. This means thinking about what we mean by ‘comprehensive’ and posing a truly radical and modern alternative.

Comprehensive schools were arguably the most radical education reform of the 21^st century. Ending selection at 11 was a major defeat for an ideology of educational selection which had held sway in English educational politics since the late 19^th century. But the comprehensive school reform of the 1960s did not end gendered, classed or racial forms of disadvantage perpetuated by the education system. New forms of inequalities arose, based particularly around 16 as the new point of academic selection and catchment areas as a means of cheating the system. One radical critique of Labour’s post-war education policy came from those based at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Writing in 1989, Richard Johnson criticised the tendency to defend education ‘as it is’ against neo-liberal attacks, to make short-term ‘tactical’ responses (as Crosland did) with the broader long-term hope that through piecemeal reform, gradual social progress could be made through education. This progress has no doubt been significant, but it has also been so grindingly slow and weak that generation after generation are being educated in a system which divides us much more than it unites us.

The crux of Johnson’s critique was that this kind of short-term thinking blocks the development of an alternative which should be just as radical as the neoliberal education reforms of the 1980s. In his words:

It is not enough to assert the value of pre-Thatcher public education, or to move on to Thatcherite ground, finding some socialist virtues in the market. We need a post-Thatcher version.

New Labour tried the middle option, and for universities (and schools) it consolidated the direction of travel which led us to the dead end where we now find ourselves. We – students, lecturers, cleaners, admin staff – now have no option but to stand and fight, but we must do so clinically and around an organised structural programme for long-term change in higher education.

The comprehensive university is a useful term which we should take and transform to meet our own needs. Yes, we need to abolish the hierarchical system of institutions which creates and reflects sexist, racist and classist structures on the employment market. But we also need to go beyond this – calls to liberate our curriculum, and the campaign to remove racist colonial figures, like Cecil Rhodes, from our universities are important. We need to call for a system which does it all – we don’t want to study at a university which is free from racist symbols but which remains elitist and perpetuates class hierarchy; we don’t want to study in a non-hierarchical system of institutions where women and LGBT students still face harassment. These struggles have to be welded into one.

Over the next five years we will organise to resist the Teaching Education Framework, the Prevent programme and potential fee rises beyond £9k. But we also need to organise, eyes-wide-open, for a thorough and clinical political alternative for HE which we can press for within the Labour party. If the history of comprehensives and Labour’s education policy tells us one thing, it is that we cannot trust Labour to come up with an alternative which is as radical as we need it to be.

We need our own HE Green Paper and it should have all the detail and sharp political implications of a Browne Review of the left. Past radical reforms of education, from the right as well as the left, should give us hope that structural change is achievable. Short-term struggles are necessary, but we cannot keep just fighting piecemeal when what we need is systemic change.

Abolishing fees is only the start and we can, and we will, win.

 

[1] I ran a workshop on the idea at the NCAFC winter conference in Sheffield in December and you can see the slides here.

 

Free education, the middle classes and a radical education policy – a class analysis for Corbyn and the student left

I wrote this for Novara FM – you can read the final version on their site here, this is an unedited and slightly longer piece which fleshes out some of the points a little more.

Corbyn’s election has transformed the political landscape for the left and given a new sense of optimism and importance to the free education demo on the 4^th November. Removing tuition fees completely is a massive potential vote winner for Corbyn amongst young people and should provide a key rallying point in 2020. However, the pseudo-permanent elephant in the room in talking about higher education is class. I say this not because gender and race do not matter in accessing education (they do and, ultimately, they cannot be understood separately), but because politically the dominance of the, primarily, white and male middle-class over higher education goes unaddressed and we need to tackle it head on. This matters for the student left in how we formulate our demands and it matters for Corbyn both electorally and crucially in the driving ideology which underpins a radical left approach to education. Here’s the problem and some proposals in five steps.

1. When it comes to free education, the (student) left doesn’t talk about HE as a middle-class dominated domain

The most prestigious forms of higher education remain dominated by, and culturally geared towards, the middle classes. Nothing new here then, but politically this matters. The student left shies away from talking about this, something which comes out in that powerful but anachronistic slogan/chant – “Education for the masses, not just for the ruling classes.” Education in its state organized form, is neither the preserve of the ruling class, nor has it ever really been defined or created by or for the working classes. It is also already a mass system (participation is now close to the 50% target, 47% of 17-30 year olds in 2013-14, and it’s actually over 50% for young women) that Blair set back in 1999.  This is a system which is riven fact by a de facto binary class division with working class students overwhelmingly concentrated in the former polytechnics: the binary system of higher education set out by Robbins in 1963 is, in truth, alive and well. Higher education, and state education more generally, has been a central domain for advancement into white collar middle-class employment and then increasingly ensuring that people’s children achieved the same status. It is that intergenerational link which is increasingly under threat and here there is political hay to be made.

2. The weakness of the middle class right now is politically powerful and free education counts

Free education is a policy which, pre-election at least, actually had relatively little support amongst the general public (though note the support for grants and loans is different…). This needs to be acknowledged and examined but is probably misleading about the political potential of free education as a policy. If we look at how incomes have developed across different social classes over the past 30 years, what we see is a growing gap between the managerial and higher professional class and the rest: the top-end of the middle class is pulling away from lower-level professionals. A lot of the current policy coming out of Cameron-Osborne HQ is designed to prop up middle-class social reproduction – look at the announcement on housing last week. Under the last government the academies programme was quietly used to convert private schools which were suffering financially post-crisis, private school use has also fallen across the North.

The latter point might seem like an obscure point, but it isn’t: the flip-side of these policies is the Tory awareness of the vulnerability of the middle class. If that is true, then, whatever the survey data say about support for fees, there is serious scope to manipulate these anxieties from the left and not simply from the right. Moreover, these are not just anxieties: if wage inequalities between Piketty’s ‘super-managers’ and the rest of us continue to grow there are political problems ahead for the Conservatives. The battle to be had is about framing, the Tories know this and Cameron taking up the ‘good right’ rhetoric last week indicates both a response to Corbyn and an acknowledgement of the deep fissures which run right across the British socio-economic structure.   We need to undermine this by calling their bluff, but also by putting forward an alternative which deals with some of the same anxieties. Free education should be one plank in allowing us to do just that.

3. Manipulating “middle class” aspirations/anxieties whilst retaining a deeper critique of education as a culturally elitist and classist set of structures

Let me be frank, I am not saying the middle class should (or would) be the main beneficiaries of a free education policy but these insecurities are there to be played on. In Chicago the fight against Charter School reform and associated gentrification has become a multi-racial and multi-class issue, which entails treading a very careful path. Including the white middle class had to be done in such a way that they do not take control – it must not become a campaign of privilege, but it is crucial to acknowledge that power means sitting around one table. In the UK, when educational reform has been at its most radical it has taken a path which has taken advantage of working and middle class dissatisfaction to push for major reform. Ending selection at 11 through the intensely problematic but nevertheless radical move towards comprehensive schooling was one key example of this. In doing this though, we need absolute clarity about the need to challenge the exclusionary and ultimately violent nature of middle class control over educational norms. We don’t want to embed middle-class social reproduction, ultimately we want to abolish it, and to do this we need to go beyond talking about funding. Selina Todd has talked about turning Oxford into a comprehensive: this is where we need to start from and this is where we need to push. Attempts at educational reform which leave the elite untouched will fail. Oxbridge (and to a lesser extent the Russell Group) provide so much of the norms surrounding what counts and matters about learning. These judgements are flawed and arbitrary. There is nothing more violent than imposing forms of culture and knowledge of associated with an elite and building an education system which deliberately and systematically classifies people on the basis of this.

4. Fighting anti-reformist reforms and subverting old political assumptions

Free education needs to be a rallying call for a long-term, deep critique of education policy. What we are really learning to do here, is to fight for anti-reformist reforms and this requires a new language. Fighting the government’s re-booted discourse on social mobility is a key site for the kind of battle we face. Individual aspiration is, as I have said elsewhere, a blind alley for the left. Social mobility structurally (I’m not talking about the individual level) is not a good thing – it is predicated on accepting and, crucially, legitimizing inequality. If we want to use it as a term we need to transform its meaning. We need a to create a language of collective ‘aspiration’ and we need to underline that this means attacking entrenched privilege at the top, not just ‘compensatory’ measures which aim to ‘improve’ the educational attainment of the working classes and people of colour. The real battle in education is about institutional hierarchy and how that combines with curriculum to reproduce social structures. What we define as ‘knowledge’ and learning is embedded in an institutional hierarchy which primarily serves to reproduce class, racial and gender inequalities on the employment market.

5. Free education and beyond: what we are asking for is life

And this brings us back to where we started – because the position of many on the student left, including myself, is as products of this educational system built on middle-class cultural norms and practices about learning. It is hard to see how alien and exclusionary higher education is from the position of someone who is in the second or third generation of going to university. For the 50% of people who still aren’t going to university before they’re 30, and it is mostly men, we need an alternative. The student left may be institutionally weak (though stronger than for a long time!), but they’re a whole lot stronger than young people in work, apprenticeships and other training schemes. We want grants and free education – but fundamentally what we are asking for is life – we want a fully-funded transition from childhood to an autonomous, (fully-)automated luxurious livelihood. Alongside our call for free education must be a vocational alternative which is fully-funded and offers secure livelihoods thereafter. Ultimately we have to smash the boundary between vocational and ‘academic’ forms of knowledge but in the meantime a demand of 5 years of fully-funded education or training will do. We need a pragmatic language to talk about education which can draw a range of people in without losing a radical critique which wishes ultimately to demolish the structures and cultures that remain deeply violent.

The old curriculum has to go. The white middle class and largely male monopoly on what counts as knowledge has to come to an end. Hierarchies of institutional prestige need to be eroded. Education has to be free in every sense.

This is the task we face. See you on the 4^th November.

Class-wash, capital and social mobility: critiquing corporate investment in widening participation

Another critical look at widening participation. This time I look at how the big corporates are involved and how the social mobility initiatives they support serve to legitimize their own interests whilst neutralising a political language of class.

“It’s all about class…” Dennis Skinner.

‘We do not believe in prizes for all. Whilst one can learn from the experience of the journey, ultimately there is often only one winner.’  Tony Sewell

I argued in an earlier post that the logic of selecting up a limited number of ‘non-traditional’ students for access to elite universities had deep parallels with the old logic of the ladder, the 11+ entrance exam and the scholarship boys and girls of the 1940s and 50s. At the crux of this critique is the argument that these programmes, despite the undoubted good they do at an individual level, also function as a social alibi for the universities involved. There is, however, another social alibi at work: the major financial banks and consultancy firms of the City of London are deeply embroiled in funding a whole machinery of widening participation organizations and programmes and we need to ask why and think critically about what they are doing.

What organizations am I talking about? The list is long – the Social Mobility Foundation, upReach, Generating Genius, Future First, The Brokerage City Link, Inspiring the Future, My Big Career… These organizations, primarily based in London, but increasingly expanding outwards, offer a heady mix of activities to schools and their students – talks from professionals, mentoring, special access to work experience, summer schools and so on. Often, though by no means always, accessing these programmes is in itself academically selective and the logic behind them, can be competitive. Take for example the description of programmes offered by Generating Genius, who offer a range of aspiration raising activities around STEM subjects:

“‘The programmes we offer are intended to be challenging,’ says Dr Sewell. ‘The students are expected to maintain a high standard of self-discipline, behaviour and academic performance. ‘We do not believe in prizes for all. Whilst one can learn from the experience of the journey, ultimately there is often only one winner.”

Sewell has close links to Boris Johnson and headed up his London Schools Excellence Fund, so there should be little surprise that his approach to WP activities is based on a heavily individualized, discourse of aspiration as part of a fierce social competition. We might not like the framing, but once again in a zero-sum sense, these programmes make a difference to people’s lives – they encourage students to apply to elite universities who would otherwise be less likely to gain a place and evaluations of these programmes shows this. Moreover, specifically in the case of Generating Genius, who could argue that we don’t need more people of colour and women working in science and engineering? Again – my point here is not to criticize the value for individuals of these programmes or the importance of having greater ‘access’ to professions for marginalized groups and organizations which encourage this. What we have to ask is what structural function does this serve and who is gaining here?

If we look at the financial backing and the ‘partners’ of many of these organizations, it quickly becomes clear that the major City institutions are backing these initiatives seriously – JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Deloitte, Unilever, the list goes on. In some cases, this is explicit to the aims and purposes of the organizations in question, as with upReach, who explicitly target jobs in finance and management.

This is a serious business – these organizations are investing significant amounts of money and employee time in these initiatives. KPMG is perhaps a particularly clear example of this, spending £6.2 on community contributions in 2013-14, with a strong focus on social mobility (their pre-tax profit was £414m that year, but hey). They are also particularly strong in offering an apprenticeship scheme for school-leavers, but as one of my interviewees responded all is not what it seems:

And of course, the other thing that we’ve not done in this country, we’ve never developed a good technical alternative to higher education. And when I hear now, governments banging on about higher apprenticeships- they’re not there! Students come to me and say, “David, where are the higher apprenticeships website, couldn’t find anything, it’s crap.” And I say “Yeah, it’s crap.” “Couldn’t find anything on the website and when I do get it to work, there’s nothing there.” The message they’re getting is, this is a wonderful option to higher education- No it’s not! There are a few marquee things like KPMG, Deloitte, BT that gets 1000 applicants for one place. I mean this is rubbish you know. And I get on my email, someone from Credit Suisse will say we’ve got this great internship, immediately I get worried I see the word “internship” – what’s that? Is it money, or what is it, where does it lead? And it says, we want 300 UCAS points, so what they’re saying is that we don’t want you to go to uni, we want you to come to us and then we might fund you to go part-time, but we still want you to have at least 3 B’s at A-level

David, HE and Careers Adviser (my emphasis).

The crux of what I want to get at here is the point in bold: ‘this is rubbish’. It is not that the scheme in itself is not, on paper, a good one, but that this is an impossible solution for most of the students he sees in the sixth forms he works. Most people simply will not benefit, and those that do have to pass a substantial academic barrier to do so. But the structural logic runs deeper. What is also being re-framed here is the jobs students from marginalized groups should aspire to do and attain. Why ‘higher’ apprenticeships? What is wrong with a simple apprenticeship? Yes we need more ‘diverse’ professions, but there is an implicit de-valuation of non-middle-class employment going on here. I am not arguing for a return to some fairy tale land of full employment in manufacturing – there was no fairy tale. But the undertones of this discourse carry the leaden weight and symbolic violence of class stigmatization. In purely concentrating on class in terms of ‘access’ for a selected few, the political nature of class as a collective struggle is neutralized and jobs which do not fit into this category are de-valued.

For KPMG, Milburn’s report on social mobility and access to the professions directly call into question the legitimacy and ‘fairness’ of their recruitment processes and KPMG acknowledges this. What is never on the table is any question of the work these large corporate funders do and whether or not we actually support this. I was told a few years ago by a young white middle-class person I met at a wedding that ‘the hardest thing’ she had to do in her job at KPMG was tell people who had worked in council jobs for many years that they had to leave/were being sacked. Their response was ‘What right have you got to come in here and tell me to leave? I’ve been here 30 years…’ We have the phrase ‘green-wash’ and ‘pink-wash’ to describe how LGBT rights and investment in Green programmes are used to cover-up other forms of oppression and inequality. Perhaps it is time that we begin to think about ‘class-wash’.

What I mean by this is that the major corporate financial backers have an interest in supporting widening participation and their funding does have positive impacts. Their interest is immediate and has to do with tackling the image that they are in some way involved in producing inequality at the point of recruitment to their organizations. Anything else is off the table. The entire discourse surrounding social mobility which is pushed by central government, and much of this was bedded in under New Labour and continued under the coalition, allows no space for a discussion of the actual everyday social and political implications of the existence of investment banks and so forth in the first place. In education the fact of class inequalities in ‘attainment’ and access to university is openly acknowledged and discussed. By discussing these inequalities in terms of social mobility and access, the politics of class are kept hidden and the institutions legitimize themselves in relation to this narrow understanding of inequality.

The issue is with the framing of the solutions to the problem – the new wave of NGO-run measures, of which WP initiatives are only one, to ‘tackle’ the issue of social mobility is deeply damaging to a left-wing approach to dealing with inequality. Social mobility and WP measures are providing these organizations with another ‘social alibi’ but in doing so they also make it impossible to talk about any other conception of society. Class-wash covers these organizations in the short-term by showing that they take the issue of ‘access’ seriously. It also distracts from the deeper structural violence by framing the problem in such a way that any other alternative seems impossible. Politically the language of class is neutralised, pushed into a shallow, safe and strictly de-limited context of ‘access’.

From a left perspective we need to be absolutely clear about what is going on here ideologically, even if we support and work with these organizations to gain immediate benefit for young people in the short-term. In short we need to be clinically pragmatic but talk politically in a language of class which moves us away from individual aspiration. Quite simply, individual ‘aspiration’ is a blind alley for the left, as has been discussed elsewhere this week. Corbyn’s election campaign has transformed the shape of political debate in a way which simply could not have been predicted. We should be absolutely clear that talking about social mobility is not the way forward. The corporate backers of class-wash should be worried however, the wheels on the Blairite bandwagon which helped keep this discourse in place could be about to fall off…

Remembering my dad: the politics of grief and death at work

It’s father’s day and I don’t have a dad any more. I am not alone in this, there are others in my age bracket who have also lost a parent, some who never had one and a few who have lost both through some deep awfulness. Despite that, we are ahead of the curve – most people our age will not lose their parents for many years and so much the better; the grief and trauma of losing a parent will come sooner or later but it is never easy. There are times though when people can be thoughtless in how they talk about their parents, a taken-for-grantedness which you cannot understand until they are simply not there. This is the stuff of everyday conversation – talking about seeing them last weekend, what it will be like when they retire and so on. I wouldn’t ask anyone to stop talking about this because of me, but it is difficult. Grief and the sweet-bitter joys of remembering are generally an everyday process, sparked by a memory, a discussion you can no longer have or a question you can never ask.

For me father’s day is not a time of fierce emotion, it digs at me because of the personal unfairness of it in a way which is hard to explain. There’s nothing wrong with having a day to focus on mothers/fathers and all the rest, despite the consumerism which is often associated with it. My dad’s birthday, the day he died and international worker’s memorial day on the 28^th April each year are more powerful for me personally. The latter remembers all those who die at or because of work, the TUC puts that figure at 20,000 each year and my dad was one of those. I wanted to publish this then but it was simply too difficult and painful. Similarly attending a memorial event is not something I have felt able to do since 2012. My mum said that she didn’t want to go there and remember in reverence but to scream with anger and grief.

Far worse than any of the feelings I have on father’s day is the personal anger I feel about deaths caused by work. There are few more crass forms of insensitivity than the comments of David Cameron back in 2012 that he wanted to “kill off the health and safety culture for good.” He simultaneously succeeded in being extraordinarily offensive to victims of work-related illness, whilst quietly framing greater physical and economic violence against working people amongst a “common sense” argument for less “red-tape”. He thus trounced once and for all the unintended insensitivity of father’s day.

My dad, Simon Pickvance, died in November 2012 of Mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos which he was exposed to in the building trade in the 1970s. He spent his working life fighting with working people for the right to health at work. Initially this was with Sheffield’s steelworkers and builders in the early 1980s, but occupational health or workers’ health goes far beyond this. Links between long-term night-work and breast cancer amongst women are just one example and the UK has a poor record within Europe for de-regulation and inertia in taking steps to improve health at work. For me personally, his death was and still is a deep personal loss. His generation was wrapped up in how the personal is political, and in many ways my grief is no different. Below is the text for a speech which I wrote for a memorial organised by his friends and colleagues in November 2014 on the second anniversary of his death.

This week I’ve been planning a lecture on 1968 as my second supervisor is away (another 68er, though somewhat more ‘angepasst’ – conformist – than dad ever was).[1] Whilst I’ve been planning the talk, right through the process (looking for references, reading, writing the slides), I’ve missed him. Most of the time I’ve wanted to cry. It feels like a fuzziness around your eyes which dips down to the back of your throat and comes back up, burning your face around the edge. My body feels heavy and I sigh. That’s all I do mostly. I have to carry on. But now and again, and now, the tears come.

This is grief. Missing… the missing that doesn’t stop but comes and goes. One day a quick thought of him stabs you but passes quickly. Other days he’s there most of the day because you just want him there. That’s what it’s been like today, reading all this stuff about workers struggles in the 1960s and 70s because you know that if he was still here you’d be talking to him about it.

For me, just now, these autumn days are full of him. It’s partly the time of year – cycling through the park on my way to work with smells of wet leaves, like family walks in the peak district as a kid. It’s also because these were the last terrible weeks of his illness. But it’s the politics, the politics which has really got me today.

I remember talking to dad once about ‘being political’ and what it meant. I can’t remember who said it, me or him, but we both agreed that he was quietly political. I said I was too and he said ‘No you’re not, you’re passionately political.’ Or loudly political. Anyway it’s true, I quite like speaking (and shouting) about politics when I can. Today’s an example really.

What I wanted to say today was really something about politics, about my dad’s politics and about yours – not that I claim to know lots about it. Today I’ve been sat reading about worker’s self-management in France and Italy. So much of what my dad, Sue and John Lawson, Martin, Naomi and many of you were trying to do was about extending that process. About giving working people control over their lives, starting with their own experiences and using that to try and empower them to gain some level of control over their health. Workers’ health.

(I always thought it sounded better than occupational health – I’ve spent about 10 years trying to explain what an occupational health worker is and I always get a confused face).

I was telling a friend recently though about what my dad died of. Of asbestos, used in the building trade, she said to me: ‘But that’s terrible, he was killed from what he worked and fought against.’ My dad never talked about that much during his illness, but she was right.

It is terrible.

And this is where I want to talk about politics. You could call it the politics of grief, but it’s the politics of work as well, and your work in particular. When we first found out about dad’s cancer, when mum and dad told us what had caused it, that it was asbestos, I said ‘They knew, they fucking knew that stuff was poisonous.’ And I was furious, absolutely furious and totally fucking distraught.

That feeling faded, but it never went away. Sometimes it comes back and I kick something – I make sure it’s something soft. More often it hits me like a punch and I wince, suck the air in through my teeth and sigh loudly. Because what it feels like, what it is, mesothelioma and every other work-related illness.

It feels like theft. It is theft.

It’s theft for my dad who lost years that he should have had. It’s theft for us – our family and you his friends and colleagues. And it is theft for all the others who have come before him and will go after him.

People that die at or because of work, they die for no other reason than a fundamental indifference to people’s needs and their basic, basic, right to live a healthy life. Often it’s worse than that, it’s not indifference, it’s pro-active lying. Hiding the evidence, producing corporate-funded academic lies about the safety of asbsestos or lobbying for the de-regulation of working conditions.

My dad spent his working life fighting with you against that. He suffered the same theft of his life that so many others have done.

But I don’t want to get caught up in grief or self-pity. My dad had very little of that during his illness. (Though he did make the most of doing basically no cooking and no house-work and finally letting someone buy clothes that made him look actually quite stylish.) [2]

And I’ll end on this. He was adamant at his retirement do that there was still the same need now to struggle for worker’s health, as there was in the 1970s when he moved to Sheffield. I’m glad that today part of the day will be about current research and progress because there is no greater honour that you could do for my dad than to carry on fighting for worker’s health.

So let’s remember my dad – a partner, a father, brother, friend and colleague. And let’s take our grief and use it to keep fighting.

[1] I’m a PhD student in London.

[2] My dad was a pretty staunch feminist, which is partly why I have my mum’s surname, not my dad’s. The housework was always shared, but my dad’s illness changed that and so much else in my parents’ everyday lives.

The logic of the ladder – elite widening participation and the implicit “scholarship boy” discourse which never went away

I argue here that the logic and implied class-ism of “raising up” a gifted few through the 11+ was never completely lost and has returned with a vengeance in the widening participation discourse at certain elite universities.

‘[…] whenever there’s something about Russell Group admissions in the press the Russell Group say, “Well it’s not our fault, schools aren’t producing enough poor kids with A’s and A*’s, so what can we do about it?”’

Widening Participation Coordinator, Limeways Sixth Form College, London.

‘L’Ecole Libre d’abord, l’IEP ensuite, ont permis l’ascension de quelques « sur-socialisées »… leur réussite sociale constitue une sorte d’alibi pour la rue Saint-Guillaume qui peut se targuer de recruter dans les classes dites inférieures.’[1]

Across a range of different elite educational institutions, not only in England but in France too, there has long been an acceptance of the need to recruit a (small) number of students from socially, racially, geographically or gender-oppressed backgrounds. The beginnings of opening-up of secondary schooling in England were rooted in this logic of selecting a chosen few from the working classes to access academic, middle-class dominated forms of education. At first this worked through state-funded scholarship schemes for a small proportion of ‘free scholars’ to access secondary schools, then after 1944, it was generalized through the 11+ exam, as secondary school became free and accessible “for all”.

This system produced some of the most famous figures and works of post-war social science and cultural critique of the education system. Authors such as Olive Banks (1955), Richard Hoggart (1957), Dennis Marsden and Brian Jackson (1962) drew in part on their own experience to problematize a system of education which operated a form of social apartheid. This system produced complex splits and divisions between academically-able working class communities and the families and neighbourhoods they came from. For the grammar schools involved, and post-war society more widely, these students provided a sort of ‘social alibi’ which allowed the justification a system of education that still overwhelmingly benefitted the middle and upper classes, at secondary and university level.

However, I want to argue that the structural logic that was at work has not disappeared from our education system. As the schools and universities have expanded, this ‘logic of the ladder’, and the insidious ideological alibi that it provides, has simply moved upwards. It is no longer entry to grammar school where this filter of social selection and limited diversification of the middle and upper classes occurs, instead it is our elite universities who have taken over this function, and it is widening participation (WP) that has allowed them to do it.

I should say now that I am not opposed to widening participation, far from it. It is something I have been involved with indirectly and directly through my research and something which I see as potentially emancipatory – though more often this is at the individual than at the collective level. What I wish to problematize here is the underlying issue that at times, elite institutions’ widening participation efforts are not egalitarian, in fact quite the contrary, they are openly selective and geared towards finding the ‘scholarship boys and girls’ of the 21^st century.

When I was gaining access to the sixth form schools and colleges, one of my opening gambits would be, “Maybe your school/college would be interested in the WP work that King’s does…” In one sixth form college I worked in, when I handed the HE adviser the leaflet about the KCL scheme, which requires 5 GCSEs at A or A*, she simply said “Oh we have hardly any students that meet those criteria.”[2] Again, in another college, I was told:

So um, for example with the grade requirements for WP programmes, we get all these things from UCL and its like, all these students must have 5 A*s to come on the widening participation programme and you think well, that’s er, we’ve got 1600 students and there’s like 3 students who would have that, and those students are already getting bags of support, what about the other… and I sent an email to that effect to the person at UCL and they were defensive about it. And also the other thing is that, it’s not unrealistic, we sent two students to Oxford last year who wouldn’t have got onto the UCL programmes. Er, which I tell them and they sort of shrug

Widening Participation Coordinator, Limeways Sixth Form College, London.

He continued:

And I was in a seminar with someone from UCL outreach, but they um, they said “We used to run a thing with students that got Bs and Cs at GCSE and we worked with them for a couple of years and we worked with 250 students and actually only 1 of them got into UCL so we’ve stopped doing it.”

Now, it goes without saying that these intensive summer schools, year-long mentoring schemes are great for those students who get on them, who probably ‘are already getting bags of support’ from different schemes or universities. Clearly university WP departments have limited resources and they do great work within, and often beyond, the remit set for them – my aim here, please understand, is not WP staff, some of whom I know very well and count as my friends. The issue is the structural function that WP serves for elite universities and how this plays out in the field of post-16 education more broadly.

For those students who are able and aspiring to attend university but do not meet the criteria, what is the value, or indeed the point, of WP schemes which are already openly academic selective? The logic seems to be overwhelmingly clear: what we are looking for is ‘enough poor kids with A’s and A*’s’, if you don’t meet those criteria then we are not interested. I am oversimplifying here, and there are wonderful schemes, such as those at St. George’s medical school, Bristol, Sheffield amongst many others with extensive programmes and context-based admissions. Nevertheless, the core issue is that widening participation within the Russell Group serves a minority of students, and more specifically a minority of “non-traditional”, first-generation university students, in the post-16 sector.

Clearly this is, as the second quote implies, a dilemma for WP departments who are being asked, presumably by management, to run schemes which will help elite universities meet their OFFA-set targets for widening participation students. Again in my interviews, it is through anecdotes with senior members of university staff where attitudes towards WP at certain elite universities is made abundantly clear:

when Harway College opened their new building […] they had an inaugural opening and Harway has got a link with UCL, […] ‘Gerald Pomp’ [a senior university manager] came and did a speech and he sat in the room, we had other universities there, he sat and made his speech saying How wonderful it was that they were linked with this brand new sixth form building and it was a wonderful building: “UCL are at the forefront of widening participation, we’ve set up this, this and this.” At that point, the people from London Met got up and walked out, because they thought “We aren’t listening to that – you aren’t!”

Another time, I sat in UCL at a meeting where he [G Pomp] was saying the same thing, a meeting for careers advisers and teachers, and for some reason he did his speech where we were all being served food, there were two chefs, West African chefs, behind him and he was talking about diversity and I caught their eye. And they were looking at each other going like that [Shrugs/disbelief] they were probably PhD or MA people with degrees having to work as chefs and they thought, what is this guy talking about? You know, I wish I could have taken a picture, if it had been in the days of smartphones I could have taken a picture and caused havoc.

David, HE and Careers Adviser

These two anecdotes underline the sheer absurdity and rank hypocrisy which can underline the attitude towards widening participation in elite higher education institutions. My quotations above have singled out my former university UCL, but I doubt that this attitude is limited to senior management at that university alone. Moreover, I am sure, in fact I know, that WP staff at UCL are committed and that their WP work does indeed make a difference to students who are involved with it. What is at stake here, once again, is the farcical claims made by elite figures in the university about the effect of their WP efforts in a context where the majority of first generation students still attend post-1992 universities.

What has returned, and perhaps never truly went away, is the deep logic and symbolic violence of selection within the British class system and its schools. Selection of a gifted few to be raised up into a diversified and socially acceptable elite and a shrinking and increasingly fragile middle class is not a new phenomenon. It is as old as the urban-industrial roots of British class structure and the schools that it produced (Banks, 1955; Hoggart, 1957; Jackson and Marsden, 1962). Looking forward to the 21^st century, we have not rid ourselves of the vicious and implied classism of tri-partite selection which secondary education “for all” relied on. Rather, as is so often true with matters of class in British society, the mode of selection and its ideological supports have mutated, in this case moving upwards as secondary schooling and higher education have expanded.

In the twenty first century we need, more than ever, to break the logic of the ladder. We cannot seek to build an egalitarian model of education (higher, secondary or otherwise) on a mode of widening participation which itself is already selective. It is time to burn some sacred cows, first amongst them has to be the idea that raising up a select few and diversifying elite institutions is some educational panacea for the university system. It isn’t. In the short-term, of course, we have to and should continue with these pragmatic steps. But we need to radicalize it from within: open up these widening participation schemes, build sustainable partnerships with schools and colleges, look beyond the logic of simply meeting market-driven targets for WP students. I know that WP work already involves all of these things, and I am aware of pontificating, quite literally from an ivory tower – I apologize for this in advance. Nevertheless, what is at stake here goes right to the heart of a left-wing, radical progressive stance on education: we cannot base our approach around individual aspirations, we need a radical collective approach to schooling which challenges the structures and language within which we are forced to operate. Only then can we begin to dismantle the ladder which has dominated British educational ideology for more than a century. If we start to do this, then we will have no need for social alibis because the education system will begin to be truly ours.

References

Banks O. (1955) Parity and prestige in English secondary education: A study in educational sociology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Hoggart R. (1957) The uses of literacy: Aspects of working class life, with special reference to publications and entertainments, London: Chatto and Windus.

Jackson B and Marsden D. (1962) Education and the working class: some general themes raised by a study of 88 working-class children in a northern industrial city, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

[1] Gérard Vincent, Sciences Po. Histoire d’une réussite, (Paris : Orban, 1987), p. 294. ‘First the Free School [abbreviation of the original name of the school, l’Ecole Libre de Sciences Politiques, the free school of political science], then the IEP [Institute d’Etudes Politiques – Institute of Political studies] have allowed the rise of a few “over-socialised” individuals… their social success constitutes a sort of alibi for rue Saint-Guillaume [the road on which Sciences Po is situated, often used as a short-hand abbreviation for the institution itself] which can pride itself of recruits from the classes said to be inferior.’ The IEP Paris is an elite French university, with a similar focus to LSE. Since 2001 it has operated a ground-breaking widening participation programme with an admissions stream and year-long programme for students from schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

[2] I should say that despite this, the work of King’s was praised by other WP/HE advisers.