Years ago, an educational magazine used to produce an annual table showing the proportion of children in each local authority who went to university and the proportion who came from working-class homes. The inverse relationship between the two was precise, linear and invariable. Come hell or high water, Tory authority or Labour authority, Tony Crosland or Margaret Thatcher, the iron law of social class prevailed. And it seemed to apply across the world, from Blackpool to Buenos Aires, from Montreal to Melbourne. The reasons were not a great mystery: poverty, economic and social instability, low expectations, lack of cultural resources, and so on. Not all working-class children suffered from all these hardships - some rose above the lot of them - but they were more prevalent in working-class than in middle-class homes. Left-of-centre governments believed that, if only they could break the link between social class and educational achievement, they could start to build the new Jerusalem. Probably more than any other single factor, the failure to do so contributed to the collapse of social democratic confidence across the developed world in the 1980s.
So why does David Blunkett think it can all be cured by setting "tough" targets and bullying "weak" schools? His latest wheeze, announced on 1 March, is to threaten 68 schools with a "fresh start" (new Labour speak for closure) unless they can get at least 15 per cent of their pupils through five or more A-C grades at GCSE. Most of these schools may be described as the usual suspects: nearly all are in deprived, inner-city areas; several have been "named and shamed" in the past; one, poor old Spurley Hey in Manchester, was named as the worst school in England by the Tory MP Rhodes Boyson about 20 years ago. None of this matters, we are told, because Mr Blunkett has "research" showing that some schools with a high proportion of poor pupils get quite good exam results. So what? Nobody has ever denied that some individual schools can partially overcome their handicaps. Likewise, some smokers live to a ripe old age; the general observation that smoking leads to deadly diseases is not thereby invalidated.
In either case, it is foolish to generalise from exceptions. For schools, an outstanding head certainly helps; but so does getting rid of two or three highly disruptive pupils in each class. (Whenever you read of a school being "turned round", there has usually been a wave of expulsions; but the smarter heads simply persuade parents to take the troublemakers away.) There is no evidence that being hectored by a Secretary of State for Education helps at all.
Mr Blunkett, to be fair, faces bigger problems than his predecessors did. The greater social inequality of the Thatcher years led to greater educational inequality. The creation of a market in schools helped middle-class parents keep their children away from the "rough sort", further increasing the disparity between "successful" and "failing" schools. Schools like St George's, Westminster, which has just been closed for a week because of a breakdown of order, have become no-go areas for the indigenous middle classes. The only credible solution is to pay a premium - a very large one indeed - to anybody who will teach in such a place, and to tie its continued payment to the achievement of specific improvement targets, tailored to the individual school, rather than to round figures that Mr Blunkett plucks out of the air. Classroom teaching at St George's then becomes a plum job - better paid, say, than the headship of a quiet Surrey comprehensive. But it is not our habit to offer high pay, good working conditions or high social status to people who take on the most stressful jobs: running prisons, working in children's care homes, teaching in inner-city schools. We interest ourselves in such people only when riots, mass child abuse or exam failure are in the news. Then we excoriate them, making retention and recruitment of staff more difficult.
Mr Blunkett's £350 million Excellence in Cities programme shows that he has some understanding of what is needed in the 450 deprived secondary schools it covers: special "mentors" for children's welfare, special units for the most difficult pupils, and other measures. But the big lesson of the past half-century is that this sort of social democratic tinkering does not break the iron law of social class. Make teaching in deprived areas a job only for the brightest and the best. That would be true radicalism, and true evidence of a belief that there should be no limit to a working-class child's aspirations.
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