Class system

When my wife said she thought we should educate our three children at comprehensive schools, it was with a degree of trepidation that I went along with her. I was thankful to save the several hundred thousand pounds it would probably have cost to send them to fee-paying schools, money which I at least showed scant sign of being able to earn. But I wondered whether the education would be good enough. Like many a middle-class parent, I was frightened of a system of which I had no personal experience. My parents had tightened their belts to pay for my schooling, and I feared I was failing to give my children the advantages I had myself enjoyed. Articles in the Tory press which suggested that all comprehensive schools were useless struck me as unfair, but I also feared there might be something in this.

Five years after this experiment began, our children are doing well, and I have tumbled to rather an obvious point. Where you go to school is not actually of much importance. What matters is who your parents are. All the research shows, as Gillian Evans reported in her book Educational Failure and Working-Class White Children in Britain, that ‘it is possible to combine socio-economic classification of the household with the child’s overall developmental score at age 22 months to accurately predict educational qualifications at the age of 26 years’.

Evans points out that before schools have anything to do with it, ‘children’s developmental score is already stratified by social class (measured by parents’ occupational status and level of education)’. All those anguished conversations about which school to choose, including the latest rumours about the relative merits of the art, music, science, languages and PE departments at various establishments, are beside the point. Some children will do well pretty much regardless of where they go to school, and some will do badly pretty much regardless of where they go to school.