Lack of aspiration, or smashing of dreams?
We are constantly told by practitioners and policymakers that it is working class kids’ ‘lack of aspiration’ that explains their low educational achievement. But actually, the evidence points in other directions. All the ‘lack of aspiration’ discourse does is blame working class families for inequalities entrenched in our education system.
Ever since the New Labour administration finally began to acknowledge the size and immovability of the social class gap for educational attainment, we’ve been subject to the buzzword of ‘aspiration’. Apparently, the key explanation for working class kids’ comparative underachievement in relation to their middle-class counterparts is a lack of aspiration to achieve – at school and in future occupations – on the part of these kids and (especially) their parents. This notion of a ‘lack of aspiration’ among working class families was continually bandied at seminars, in speeches, and in policy documents (it can be seen running through the recent ‘Extra Mile’ initiative, for example), and continues to be regularly mobilised. The recent White Paper echoes the New Labour White Paper of 2005 in its demand to ‘raise aspirations’ as a means to narrowing the socio-economic gap for attainment.
However, this view at best reflects ignorance (and a deficit construction of those in poverty as to blame for their own plight), and at worst suggests a deceitful skewing of blame for educational inequality away from the educational system, and on to the individuals within it. In fact the evidence points away from young people’s ‘lack of aspirations’. Our own recent scoping work for the social justice programme at RSA Education confirms this too (we have consulted with working class sixth-formers on our social justice programme, and with FE students and practitioners in focus groups to scope our ‘Furthering Education’ initiative).
Young people from working class backgrounds do not ‘lack aspiration’. Indeed, for many, their aspirations are often so high as to be potentially unrealistic. This ranges from the many working class young people in inner city schools that express a wish to be doctors and lawyers, to those who aspire to be professional footballers or X-Factor finalists (the latter much complained about by FE practitioners in our recent focus groups). Supporting the research in this regard, working class young people in our recent focus groups maintained universally that their parents desperately wanted them to do well in education, and to secure good jobs. However, what they also reported was their parents’ lack of knowledge and resources to be able to offer meaningful help and advice in this regard. This lack of information also applies to the young people themselves, who often have little idea as to the qualifications necessary, and routes (often involving significant financial cost) involved in accessing their desired occupations. What is urgently needed is better information and advice to these young people, who lack the knowledge, networks and other aspects of social capital so effectively deployed by their middle-class peers.
Moreover, for many other working class young people, ‘aspiration’ is being systematically killed by a schooling system which informs them they are failing. There is a raft of educational research to support this point, notably that of Prof Diane Reay (Cambridge). In an increasingly segregated education system, working class young people are concentrated in the lowest streams, and (as Dr Ruth Lupton shows), often in poor quality schools. Although they begin school at a disadvantage, the achievement gap widens as they proceed through the system. Young people are not slow to understand the messages of being placed in low sets and so on – and as they pick up the message that they are perceived as ‘slow’ and ‘not academic, unsurprisingly aspirations for ‘brainy’ professions and occupations fall. This is a logical response. The psychological impact of such understanding and self-perception is not to be underestimated. This also has a generational effect, as many parents who have had bad educational experiences wish to protect their own children from ‘unrealistic’ and painfully disappointing investment in education.
What I am arguing, then, is that the blithe bandying of the trope of ‘aspiration’, and the self-satisfied projection of deficit onto working class families’ ‘lack’, covers a British reality that comprises a systematic smashing of dreams for many working class young people, in an education system wherein still only half young people achieve the standard 5 A*-C including maths and English at GCSE.
Ends and Means
Do the ends justify the means?
There has been much discussion recently on how to get more people to volunteer but how important a goal is this? How much would we be willing to sacrifice to see this goal achieved? My guess is that the answer for most people would be “not much”.
Matthew Taylor has written on his misgivings on what he calls “involunteering” i.e. forcing people to volunteer.
I recently read two pieces of research which found that more people would volunteer if there was more income inequality and if people were less satisfied with public services.
I am certainly not saying that we should hope for either, however, these observations do raise lots of questions about how much of a goal increased volunteering really is.
Indeed, perhaps one of the (many) PR problems with Cameron’s idea of The Big Society is that it appears to be both a means (reforming public services, training community organisers etc…) and an end (people feeling more responsible for their area and more empowered). Without making this split clear it’s hard for us to debate which means we are or are not willing to tolerate for which ends.
Big Society(5): When the Squealing Starts…
In the context of broader public service cuts, yesterday’s Guardian featured a chilling headline regarding Wednesday’s direct action against student tuition fees: This is Just the Beginning. Partly from watching this relatively benign, but portentous protest, it has become clear to me that whatever form the Big Society takes, political conflict will be part of it.
At a recent RSA event on the subject, BBC Home Editor Mark Easton opened by reminding the audience that the Big Society was fundamental to Cameron’s political vision, and not just a passing fad buoyed by a catchy phrase. He alluded to a meeting between Cameron and senior civil servants in the summer:
“Let me be very clear”, said Cameron. ”I do not want you to think your role is to guarantee outcomes of public services. Nor to directly intervene in organisations to directly improve their performance….You should simply create the conditions in which performance will improve….replacing bureaucractic accountability with democratic accountability…If you want to make targets, set new rules, impose restrictions, don’t bother.”
The implication was that Cameron sees ‘the Big Society’ as a place with radically decentralised accountability, and with Whitehall public servants creating the minimal facilitating conditions.
Mark Easton also used the striking expression “When the squealing starts” to refer to protests over public service cuts. Wednesday featured some squealing, but as the Guardian suggested, this may just be the beginning.
In the context of accountability and squealing, I found Anna Coote’s take of the promise and perils of the Big Society informed and sophisticated (based on NEF‘s recently released report.) The two core lines that caught my attention were:
“The phrase may sound like apple pie and motherhood, but is actually a major programme for structural reform. It’s the social policy that makes the economic policy of the spending review politically possible.”
and
“The Big society story makes the public sending cuts possible, but the cuts make the best ideals of the big society impossible to realise.”
The core argument seems very sound to me, and is built on the idea that what is needed to engage in the Big Society- capactiy, access and time, are unequally distributed. Moreover, as Anna Coote indicated, people opt to volunteer when things are optional, convivial, small scale and life enhancing. But the Big Society sounds conditional, formalised, complicated, and hard graft. And if Volunteering doesn’t take off, the Big Society is in peril.
I found Jonty Olliff-Cooper‘s response somewhat obtuse, given the acuity of the critiques. By his own admission, his appreciation for the Big Society was based on a theory of civil society, rather than the intracacies of practice, but he seemingly failed to recognise that this was precisely Anna Coote’s point- that the best of the theory- the things that can genuinely get people excited, will not, perhaps cannot, be realised in practice.
The Guardian’s Patrick Butler took a similarly sceptical line, fearing the naivety of the vision of ‘Pre-lapsarian self-help nirvana’ and saying that in place of Big Society idealism, he would like to see some Big Society realism.
Like many at the RSA, I instinctively like the idea of the Big Society in abstract, because it encapsualtes so many of the major themes of our work. However, in light of NEF’s report we need to concede that whatever the Big Society is, or could be, it cannot be adaquately understood or appreciated outside of our current economic context.
Some are more unequal than others…
Like many people, I’ve been mildly fascinated by last week’s events at Manchester United. For those of you who are totally detached from football, Wayne Rooney declared mid-week that he wanted to leave the club, claiming that it lacked the ambition and funds to compete at the highest level in the future. He then, at the end of the week and after much agonising in the press and the Man Utd boardroom and changing room, did a complete U-turn and signed a new 5-year contract which doubled his income to £180,000 a week.
We’ll never know whether this was an extraordinarily crude negotiation ploy to double his salary, naivity on Rooney’s part, or guile on the part of Sir Alex Ferguson the manager – or a mixture of the three. But whatever lies behind the scenes, what I find really interesting is the way in which the saga has been reported, and the apparent response from the Man Utd fans, because it speaks volumes about British attitudes to inequality and community.
The fact that a 25-year-old footballer will now earn the median UK annual income of around £25k every day for the next five years has attracted considerably less attention than the heartache the uncertainty has caused fans and the task Rooney now has of winning back their trust.
This is the week in which 500,000 public-sector job losses were announced; in which cuts in spending and public services have been vigorously denounced as regressive and defended just as strenuously as fair; in which Goldman Sachs felt obliged to cut its ‘compensation’ fund for employees but still offered an average of £236,000 per employee; and in which the Downing Street website published salary details for senior Whitehall civil servants in the name of transparency. Inequality and fairness are as high on the agenda as they have ever been. And yet the fact that a 25-year-old footballer will now earn the median UK annual income of around £25k every day for the next five years has attracted considerably less attention than the heartache the uncertainty has caused fans and the task Rooney now has of winning back their trust.
It seems likely to me that such gross inequality is seen as acceptable in Rooney’s case, but not in the case of bankers and public servants, because of the influence of community. Man Utd fans have a relationship with Rooney that, while not truly personal, is intense and two-way. They love what he does on the pitch, appreciate the effect that he has in cementing the community of fans, and at some level recognise that he makes their lives better. He’s also ‘one of us’, and could be the boy from down the street.
The opposite is true of bankers and senior civil servants: despite the fact that they probably contribute more to this country, as far as the average person is concerned they are faceless, remote and disconnected from any aspect of community life. As a result, they are pilloried for having incomes which, while considerable, are a fraction of Rooney’s. (It will take Rooney a whole week to earn what the top civil servants take home in a year.)
My point in all this is that the context in which inequality manifests itself is all important. Obvious inequality has been painted as a negative force, leading to increased stress, violence, health problems and other pathologies. But perhaps it can also be used ‘for good’. The RSA’s Connected Communities project has investigated community ties in New Cross Gate, a multiply-deprived area of South East London which borders the more affluent Telegraph Hill conservation area. There is considerable local inequality here, as I highlighted in a previous post on this blog, and little interaction between the two areas. But there is also potential for this inequality to be put to good use, if Telegraph Hill residents can be encouraged to engage with their neighbours in New Cross Gate and use their greater affluence, connections and capabilities to improve lives and community ties.
Inequality in the UK is not going to go away, but does it need to? The goals Wayne Rooney scores are more important to Man Utd fans than the fact that he earns so much more than them, and fans recognise that he wouldn’t be playing for them if he didn’t earn so much. Could the same be true in areas like New Cross Gate; could local inequality not only be overlooked, but also appreciated, if it is put to good use? And if this happens across the UK, in the context of the Big Society or otherwise, could greater engagement between rich and poor start to change the terms on which inequality is viewed?
Small worlds and lost diamonds
Filed under: Arts and Society, Education Matters, Social Economy
Fairness seems a recurrent theme of late. Today’s breaking news cries: “UK society divided and unfair, report claims.”
That ‘report claims’ gets me every time. UK society is unfair: we do not need social network analysis to tell us that who you know matters. UK society is divided: the world is only ‘small’ (all six billon, eight hundred million of us) because we inhabit very specific parts of it.
But my science only gets me so far: I can construct you a diagram that highlights divisions; others can produce research that suggests that inequality fosters both unhappiness and unsafe societies; academics can debate as to what the conflicting libertarian and egalitarian views of fairness are. Yet birds of a feather flock; we fear difference and help our kind; and if inequality and stigma become the very lay of the land, then it is hard to see them.
Our flocking and fearing are very human, but are they fair? Fair for me is that distribution of benefits and duties that reflects our conception of human beings. If we understand all human beings to be equal, then that distribution should reflect this. If a woman is worth half of a man, then so too is her testimony. Whilst this all very much ties into how I view human rights (a post for another day), and borrows from Rawls in a way both outmoded and possibly to his displeasure, this understanding of fair is very important for the good of society.
Leaving the various statistical squabbles to more accomplished statisticians and their point-scoring, this unfair distribution of opportunity harms not just the individual but, lest we forget this is in our liberal age, it harms the collective. Our collective talent is our collective wealth, but this is squandered to stigma and lack of vision. If it is most often those born at the top that rise to it, we must either believe that it is only these children that hold the seeds of future success, or we are victims of a collective insanity that allows raw diamonds to pass for pebbles, as we laboriously polish cubic zirconia.
In my recent dissertation, alongside positing an understanding of social capital as the indicator for whether the right to participation is fulfilled (another day!), I followed the development of five girls as they took part in a film making and human rights course. These girls found a voice, found themselves as agents of change , and will soon find themselves addressing panels of their fellow residents, and Universty of London MA students. In this project, as in others I have worked on, we see that little is needed to turn aspirations around. And it is our aspirations that drive us.
The UK has shown us that equal opportunities is not equality of opportunity. If social mobility can be understood as sets of escalators, with some automatically on the up, and others automatically being driven down, then it must be surely viewed as discriminatory to not focus efforts on halting the downward trends of the marginalised ‘escalators’, and to instead provide equal amounts of electricity and oil and wish them both well. The fact that in a liberal society any individual can aim for anything in theory, must not be used to obscure the fact that in a liberal capitalist economy individuals are constrained by their societal and economic circumstances in practice. Life isn’t fair, but less stigma and more tailored and deliberate help to those handed a raw deal might help us on our way. And here my science may help.
Helpful arrows?
I map for clarity. My mind works through arrows: possibly through my musical education, with its hairpin crescendo and diminuendos, my notes have always been notated both mathematically and musically. Employment ↓, as inflation ↑. Neoliberalism → to an < in soup kitchens. Economic growth ≠ socio-economic development. I do not think in a linear fashion, so these small arrows then become cross-referenced by the type of ↘ and { that would cause word to have a hissyfit and then die.
At the RSA I am social network analysis ‘champion’, trying to mainstream my love of sociograms and graphs across the whole organisation. These visual maps of people’s social ties and information flows allow us to ‘unpeel’ the community, laying hidden links and structural weaknesses bare.
Yesterday I was thrown an interesting challenge. If I map out all the civic actors in a given place, do I make it easier and more efficient for them to act, or do I merely make it easier for the most powerful to co-opt what they are doing, all in the name of the Big Society? In an era of open information, but unequal access, who does the democratisation of information actually benefit? In a recent blog Thomas Neumark directed us to a report that showed that computerising all land records in Bangalore had lead to increased monopoly and far more targeted corruption.
This all → the question. How can our mapping for clarity be targeted at those who need such clarity most? Finding that postmen and dustbin men (people?) are hidden reserves of connectivity is fascinating and sheds new light on how we view those links that make community. Yet using this information to re-brand badly paid public servants as big society information outlets would be exploitative and probably achieve the opposite of its intended outcomes. Highlighting community organisers can make volunteering more effective and far-reaching; yet we do not want those who live to organise and do, to become next years’ unpaid social service providers. If information is power, how do we stop this open-source informational power disproportionately benefiting those who already pull the strings?
Keeping up with the Joneses
So, The Spirit Level is back in the news again, although not for reasons that its authors would have wanted. The pre-election consensus over the book’s conclusion that financial inequality is bad for all of us has quickly broken down, and its evidence and analysis has been attacked from a number of quarters.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this – an idea with such real and far-reaching implications for social policy was unlikely to transcend ideological divisions for long. But it would be unfortunate if future discussion of the concept of inequality were to be dominated by wrangling over national-level statistics, because that seems to me to overlook an important aspect of the question.
What about inequality at the local level? Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that comparing one’s possessions and status with those who have more in life leads to stress and a greater propensity to violence, and that many of the damaging effects of inequality flow from there. If that is the case, shouldn’t people be worse off in areas where affluence and disadvantage sit side by side, where evidence of inequality can be seen every day? Or is there some potential benefit to be derived from this situation – could close proximity to people with more be of help to people with less, or even vice versa? Or, perhaps, do the haves and have-nots just ignore each other, having little impact for good or ill?
These questions matter, because local inequality can be found all over the country, not least in London. The area covered by the Connected Communities project is a case in point. It focusses on New Cross Gate, which looks up (topographically and figuratively) to the more affluent conservation area of Telegraph Hill. There is currently little interaction between the two neighbourhoods; despite the fact that they live almost on each other’s doorsteps, and may well use some of the same facilities, the residents look in different directions and live separate lives.
There is plenty of evidence to show that people feel happier living ‘among their own’ than they do in more mixed (and less equal) communities; but there is also evidence that this type of homogeneity is less useful when it comes to finding a job or getting access to people in power. So would greater contact between New Cross Gate and Telegraph Hill improve the lives of people at the foot of the hill, or would it simply highlight the inequalities between them? And if it would be helpful to increase contact, how could people at the top of the hill be encouraged to come down and what effect would it have on them?
If the issue of inequality gets mired in arguments about national-level taxation and redistribution, we should not forget the local angle and its potential effects for better or worse. One of the tasks for the Connected Communities project will be to understand those effects and develop ways to harness them for good.
Tags: community, inequality
The Greatest Speech since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Filed under: Education Matters, Social Brain, Social Economy
“Some are born posthumously”, said Nietzsche, and the acuity of this remark hit me on learning of the death of Jimmy Reid.
Frankly, I had never heard of him. I am a relatively Anglicised Scot and it is not the first time that an important part of my heritage had passed me by. With such a name, it was no surprise to hear he hailed from Govan, but he might have been Rab C Nesbitt’s neighbour for all I knew.
Then I read that his funeral was attended by Alex Ferguson, Billy Connolly, Gordon Brown, and my step-father, Ray, and I figured he was somebody I ought to know more about. You don’t need to be a social networks expert to understand that anybody attracting such a diverse range of stars (yes, you too Ray) probably made a big impact on the world. The funeral proceedings are available on I Player, with Billy Connolly’s amusing and heartfelt address around 1:08 (available until Thursday 3pm).
So who was Jimmy Reid? I still don’t really know, but I have read the early 21st century shortcut and the quick answer is Trade Union Activist, Labour Movement Leader, Journalist, Writer, Thinker, Rector of Glasgow University and resolute Lefty. He educated himself at Govan library, and became one of the most articulate and compelling intellectuals of his era. The most striking fact in his biography, to my mind, is that his inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University, ‘Alienation‘, was printed in full in the New York Times, who described it as “the greatest speech since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.”
The most quoted aspect of the speech is his comment on ‘the rat race’:
“To the Students I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”
Socialism may be out of fashion, or even ideologically discredited, but you don’t have to be a Socialist to be moved by the clarity of Jimmy Reid’s convictions. If you do nothing else today but read this speech, it will be a day well spent.
A Statistical Cat Fight
A quick post to alert readers to yesterday’s wonderful event about ‘The Spirit Level’ held in The Great Room.
Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of ‘The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Always Do Better, were pitted against Peter Saunders, author of the Policy Exchange publication, ‘Beware False Prophets‘ and Christopher Snowdon, author of ‘The Spirit Level Delusion‘.
I have never seen anything quite like it.
The substance is hugely important. The question at stake is how much inequality matters, and the relative importance of increasing wealth or redistributing it more fairly. This is an old ethical question about distributive justice, which is the core turf of political theory, but ‘The Spirit Level’ attempts to cut through the ethical quandary with a statistical analysis of the world’s 50 wealthiest countries. The debate was therefore not so much about the importance of inequality, but about the uses and abuses of statistics to make political arguments.
And the style of the debate…. Matthew Taylor began by asking the speakers to seek the ‘transcendent moment’ in which the two sides avoid mud-slinging and assuming that the other side is incompetent or immoral, and instead try to find a way to agree what exactly it is that they disagree about.
That didn’t really happen. Instead we had what felt like a ‘statistical cat fight’ with both sides accusing the other of missing points, statistical or otherwise.
(Image from National History Museum website)
You can listen to the audio, but I encourage you to wait for the video which will soon be available because there you can see the facial expressions on both sides, which reveal contempt, embarrassment, ridicule, anger and disdain. What I heard in the debate (not exact quotes) was something like:
“My regression line is better than you regression line”. “My outlier is more significant than your outlier”. “My research methods class is more worthy than your research method class”. “Just because I want to control for ethnicity doesn’t make me a racist”. “If this was a second year statistics assignment it would fail.” And so they went on, tearing into each other with technical details of statistical analysis coated in layers of moral invective.
I need to read all the relevant material to decide where I stand on the issue, but as I mentioned at the end of the debate, I want to believe in the thesis of The Spirit Level, for ideological reasons, but after this event I have serious doubts about whether the evidence stacks up.
It’s NOT about ‘jobs’, stupid.
The RSA event advertised in our last post, Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty? was a rallying cry for Whitehall to get over their fixation with creating ‘jobs’ and start focussing on using technology to develop existing economic activity.
As Jerry Fishenden(Centre for Technology Policy Research) put it: “The state’s idea of what a ‘job’ is is constraining productivity” and Wingham Rowan(Silvers of Time Working) added that “local authorities are beaten up by Whitehall on job creation” (thereby constraining attempts to create more flexible labour markets).
The problem is not jobs as such, but untraded resources, especially time. The focus should be on how we better harness and develop existing economic activity and help people earn money, rather than how to create ‘jobs’.
So how can we help people earn money? Who are ‘they’, and what is stopping them? It seems they tend to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum, functioning in what Wingham Rowan called unfocussed markets, where the conditions for the demand and supply of labour are fuzzy and changeable, and buyers and sellers can’t find each other(the exact opposite of the more efficient targetted markets- the kind that traders operate in).
Think baby sitters, people wanting to borrow a bike, others wanting to borrow a tenner to pay back the next day etc. There is lots of such ad hoc economic activity.., things hired, time offered, money lent, and many can do work of this nature who can’t fit in to a job structure.
The solution lies in new technology that we know to work well calledNEMs: National E Markets. Think Ebay writ large and better regulated. Slivers of Time working is an exmplar in this field, but merely one example of a much wider and still under-utilised phenomenon.
I liked the example given by Wingham Rowan:
If you suddenly need a baby sitter, you might be horrified of looking for one online, but you don’t need to merely post an add on a random website. Instead you have access to a focussed market where you can see existing baber sitters, be certain that they have the relevant CRB and ISA checks completed, have a certain amount of experience and references etc. You can aslo narrow your search to find baby sitters who have worked in your area, or with people you know. The technology can do all this hard work for you, and tell you exactly how much it will cost. You get meaningful data immediately- the kind you need to take a quick decision, just like traders do all the time… so, strange though it may seem, NEMs become a very safe way to get a baby sitter. And of course, from the baby sitter’s perspective, they are not locked in, not forever doomed and blessed to have the ‘job’ of being a babysitter, but being one as and when it suits.
How can such a system we brought into being? The most likely scenario would be that, as with the National Lottery, the private sector would fund these markets if Government could put the conditions in place.
The technology is not the problem, the problem is political will and bureaucratic inertia. The British welfare system has a binary view of being in work or out of it. If you can only earn £25 a week before your benefits are cut, you are implicitly encouraging people to work in the informal economy, or to put it more sharply, the black market. (And in this respect, Mathew Taylor commented that while working in goverment he noticed the strange reluctance of politicians and civil servants to even talk about the informal economy; “nobody wanted to go there”.)
The Government needs to work much more with the natural behaviour of people. Selling time and possessions, rather than products as such, is very difficult to regulate, tax etc, but it can and should be done.
Twitter feed of #theRSA- "A cheerful Friday read from @pickfordrich about a forestry apprenticeship in Lincolnshire http://t.co/zB9fxfC9cI #theRSA"look @trivett_lisa May 18, 2013 pickfordrich (Rich Pickford)
- "A society is defined by how it treats its weakest citizens" #thersa May 18, 2013 janseurinck (janseurinck)
- What a fab trip to Norwich - project planning with RSA Fellows, catching up @futureradio and then lunch in the Sainsbury centre. #theRSA May 17, 2013 ImAliceD (Alice Dyke)
- RT @theRSAorg: #thersa blog: Seeing the wood from the trees – A tale of two Fellows, a volunteer and some woodland http://t.co/qnnEGEZNYj May 17, 2013 LearningCities1 (LearningCities)
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