A bonfire of futures: what happens when the poor lose in education
Many of you will have seen the news on Thursday that there has been a further increase in the attainment gap at GCSE between children of families claiming Free School Meals and those who don’t.
We are sure that there have been many reactions to this news.
We would like to think, although it is probable that we are deluding ourselves, that the current government feels somewhat embarrassed by evidence of the growing divide. If your ideological position is that hard work and good choices explain individual success it must be pretty galling to have it pointed out quite so blatantly that the ability to afford things that most families see as unremarkable, like an internet connection and tech to use it on, is so instrumental to children’s outcomes.
Those responsible for education in local authorities were likely to have known this was coming and felt quite resigned about the whole matter. After all, the gap between the poorest kids and all others isn’t new by any means. This gap is a stubborn and persistent feature of education in the UK. A yearly bonfire of futures that in the absence of the transformation needed to lift all children out of poverty, can only be dampened down at the edges with a few inspirational teaching professionals and a sprinkling of What Works interventions.
Given the experiences teachers have had over the past two years as they have worked hard to support their pupils' learning may be dismayed but not surprised. Teachers have been on the frontline of this issue throughout and have first hand experience of the differences in pupils' access to resources that make learning in a pandemic possible - or utterly impossible. They would be the ones to tell us that whilst the public's attention has been on the data and devices this is only a small slice of a picture that involves kids being locked down in housing conditions more affluent families wouldn’t leave a pet in, kids going hungry or being forced to grow on a diet of vital but grindingly monotonous food bank provisions, kids with responsibilities far beyond their age should allow such as caring for parents and siblings.
Class Divide’s reaction to yesterday’s news might, at first glance, appear a little over the top. It made us want to howl with rage. And then howl some more. And smash some stuff.
Why?
Because for us this isn’t an intellectual exercise. We are not safe in the knowledge that this is bad but ultimately won’t affect anyone we love. Instead we know what it means.
It means being made to feel (again) like you are a total failure and worth absolutely nothing.
It means that the best you can hope for now is being funneled into a retake course at a local college and doing that alongside some qualification you never asked for and don’t want because the system has to house you for the next two years of your life to hide the fact that there are no jobs.
In Brighton and Hove where our campaign is focused it means being dumped out of that process at 18 and having to compete with graduates with MAs in International Relations for bar jobs.
It means years of reading job ads, including apprenticeship schemes, and being unable to apply because they want English and Maths GCSEs.
It means an adulthood of surviving on low paid unskilled jobs unless you were lucky enough to be born male because then you might get a trade.
And if you are unlucky it means being vulnerable to a range of ‘employers’ who don’t care about grades and who will exploit you.
It means having to scrabble about just about keep the wolf from your door, never being able to take a break, never safe in the knowledge that there’s enough there for life’s essentials.
It means a lifetime of mental torment and anxiety as you wonder how the hell it came to this because you were someone with dreams and potential.
It means having a whole system, the criminal justice system, waiting to swallow you whole if you get so desperate you break the law.
It means the agony of having to watch your own children go through the same schools as you and knowing that unless something dramatic has happened, this is f***ing it for them too.
It means being blamed for all of it because you didn’t work hard enough or make the right choices.
If this sounds bleak, it’s because it is. Are we exaggerating? If only. In this dizzyingly hierarchical society, education matters much more than it should. If you don’t believe us, ask yourself why people pay thirty grand a year to privately educate their children, or pay tens of thousands more for ordinary houses in the catchment area of ‘good’ schools, why some parents lie about where they live, or why there is a multi-million pound unregulated tutoring industry.
Does this mean people’s lives aren’t meaningful and don’t contain beauty and joy? Of course not, people, especially those forced to exist in dire straits, are nothing but creative. They have to be. And a handful will find a way through the maze, usually more by luck than planning, and figure out how to carve out a life that is less precarious and more varied but this is hard and is even more of a challenge now because of the cost of adult education.
If you don’t think this is fair and needs to change, please read the 5 demands we have for Brighton & Hove City Council to change this story and join our fight to change things in Brighton and Hove.