You can’t really understand England if you think of it as a single cohesive society, with a shared culture and values. England is not one country. Its fractures are profound and deliberate, plastered over with its pretend traditions, its grim, silly anthem, and its system of ancient privileges, undue deference, and unearned wealth. There are different tribes and different (sometimes secret) rules for each tribe. Border crossing is difficult, hazardous, and discouraged. I grew up speaking English, but it was not the English of the ruling politicians or the aristocracy, of the bankers, doctors, or lawyers, of the broadcasters, commentators, or academics. I spoke an inferior English, a regional English: the English of my town, my neighbourhood, my street, my house. There was poetry in it, and it was washed with rain and dirt and smoke and beer and factory floors and hard work and Saturday nights. But it wasn’t their English. It wasn’t proper. Nevertheless, it was all I knew. My horizons were narrow. I did not have to go far to realise I was not ‘at home’. I knew what did and did not belong to me. My realm was vanishingly small. I knew next to nothing of what lay beyond it. I was a renter, a tenant. It was someone else’s country, and I should mind my place. I was one of those people progress, at best, leaves behind, and, at worst, kills.
By and large, there is little contact between classes in England. This is as true now as it was in the eighties, and in some respects, more so, as, in past decades, we have seen a major push back against the social gains the working class made during the twentieth century. The outcome of this is plain to anyone who cares to look. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, more than one in five of the UK population (22%) are in poverty – some 14.5 million people, including 8.1 million working-age adults (the majority of them in work), 4.3 million children (almost a third of all children in the UK) and 2.1 million pensioners. Around 2.17 million people in the UK used foodbanks in 2021/22, compared to fewer than 26,000 in 2008/09. Cuts to local authority funding have left public services threadbare and frequently insufficient. Basic needs are not being met. The National Health Service is at breaking point. People are looking at their energy costs and wondering how they will be able to heat their homes and put food on the table. Meanwhile, the bosses of privatized public services register huge profits and shareholder dividends. More than 70 per cent of England’s privatised water system, for example, is in foreign ownership, operated for profit by banks, billionaires and investment funds. Water companies paid £57 billion in dividends to shareholders between 1991 and 2020, a period during which key infrastructure works to improve the water and sewerage system were neglected. And while the rich continue to rake in obscene profits, the results of this neglect are plain to see. Since 2016, these water companies have pumped raw sewage into Britain’s seas and rivers for more than nine million hours – an increase of 2,553 per cent over five years.
Unsurprisingly, the gap between rich and poor is getting bigger. We live different lives. We live in different places, albeit, at times, cheek by jowl (rich and poor may live in close proximity in some parts of England, but the distance from one community to the other is, in an equally real sense, huge). Interactions between social classes tend to take place in certain ritualized settings, the workplace, the doctor’s surgery, the headteacher’s study or the lawyer’s office, for example, and are usually characterized by an imbalance in power, with the working class cast as supplicants, even in asserting their basic rights or demanding what is owed to them. We send our children to different schools where they receive very different educations. And while working-class teenagers are more likely to go into further education or attend a university with a vocational focus, their wealthy, privately educated counterparts dominate the elite higher education institutions, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, those dazzling finishing schools for the rich and privileged. Britain’s new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who attended an expensive independent boarding school before studying at Oxford, boasted in an old video clip of having friends who were aristocrats, upper class and working class, before adding quickly, ‘well, not working class’, as though that were the most obvious and natural thing in the world. And, of course, for people like Mr Sunak, it is. It is not at all surprising that he had not made working-class friends. Where, after all, would he meet them? And what could they conceivably have talked about? As the Spectator noted when the clip surfaced, he was hardly likely to have struck up a friendship with the chap who mowed the lawn at Winchester College!
Class is everywhere in England. The amazing thing is how little people see it or remark on it. After all, everyone there has been through the education system. I mean, they must have noticed, right? It’s not exactly fair or decent, after all. And, of course, it is not intended to be. It’s rigged. In fact, the whole system of privilege and inequality is maintained through a kind of educational apartheid, which ensures not only that rich and poor are educated in different places but also that their educational outcomes are dramatically different (spoiler: the rich do much better). Most people in England send their children to state schools, which have undergone more than 10 years of real-terms funding decline since 2010, with the poorest areas worst hit, while the government has directed funding towards free schools, academies, and grammars, increasing selection under the guise of promoting parental choice and social mobility. In fact, such interventions do none of the things their advocates like to pretend they do. They do not improve social mobility or give poorer kids more of a chance. Just the opposite. Educational selection increases social segregation and drives down standards overall, actively disadvantaging the poorest and hardening existing patterns of privilege, as even some Conservatives acknowledge.
Total public spending on education across the UK fell by £10 billion, or 8 per cent, in real terms, between 2010 and 2019, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, cuts ‘without precedent in post-war history’. These cuts have hurt schools, undoubtedly. However, the most pain has been felt in further education, the sector that supports mostly working-class young people and adults in improving their skills and qualifications, and adult education, through which adults let down by the school system (disproportionately from less-advantaged backgrounds) re-engage with learning, which successive governments have seen as expendable; quite shamefully, in my view. The figures are stark and quite shocking. Funding per student aged 16–18 in further education and sixth-form colleges fell by 14 per cent in real terms between 2010–11 and 2019–20, while funding per student in school sixth forms fell by 28 per cent. This represents the biggest fall in per-pupil funding of any sector of the education system since 2010–11. Spending on adult education, meanwhile, has fallen by nearly two-thirds since 2003–04 and is about 50 per cent lower than it was in 2009–10. This represents an incalculably large loss of opportunity for adults to improve their basic skills, become more employable, learn new skills, whether for work or self-improvement, and become better, more engaged, critical and thoughtful citizens. I find it difficult to see such cuts – policy choices, in every case, inflicted in full knowledge of the social harm they would do – as anything other than premeditated acts of violence committed by the wealthiest in England against the poorest and most vulnerable.
It is a different story for children fortunate enough to be sent to a private school. On average, 300 per cent more is spent on private school pupils’ education than on that of state school pupils, while class sizes in private schools are half those in state schools. As if that were not enough, some private schools use their freedom from the kind of high-stakes accountability to which state schools are subject, to game the system, including by exaggerating exam grade predictions for their lowest-performing students to get them into a more selective university. It is little wonder that elite universities and elite professions are dominated by the privileged. While private schools educate only 7 per cent of the school population in the UK, a 2019 study by the Sutton Trust for the Social Mobility Commission found that 65 per cent of senior judges, 59 per cent of senior civil servants, 44 per cent of newspaper columnists and 39 per cent of cabinet politicians went to fee-paying private schools. Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs is fiercely protected by those who benefit from it. Attempts to widen access to Oxford and Cambridge are met by cries of ‘social engineering’, while even modest proposals to remove the charitable status attached to private schools are condemned as ‘class war’. This is, to put it mildly, a curious defence of a system that, by design, systematically favours the richest and stacks the odds massively, and punitively, against the poorest.
Working-class kids who do make it to an elite university often discover that they are not welcome. The problem with distance is that it breeds contempt, not always but often. Working class students are routinely mocked for the way they speak, the jobs their parents do and their supposedly humble backgrounds. The same can be true of working-class academics. Sociologist Jenny Thatcher has described how the disdain of her privately educated colleagues drove her to conceal her family background and accent, even change the way she dressed, before forcing her out of academic work altogether. The experience is not limited to academia. It is common in English journalism, for example, a world which has become progressively more elitist within my lifetime (when I started out as a reporter in the early 1990s, there was a steady stream of working-class entrants to the sector). Jamie Fahey recently described how, as a working-class Liverpudlian, he had to overcome a multitude of disadvantages and class-based prejudices, not to mention serious financial hardship, to become a senior journalist. As Fahey writes, even those who do make it, take a financial hit. Working-class people can expect to be paid thousands less than their middle-class peers despite doing the same jobs (the differential is, of course, compounded if you are a woman or from an ethic minority background). It is unsurprising, therefore, that people with working-class or regional English accents continue to fear their careers might suffer because of how they speak. These fears are entirely justified. A new report found that 25 per cent of English adults surveyed said their accents had been mocked or criticised at work, while 47 per cent of university students and 46 per cent of adults said their accents had been singled out or mocked in social situations. The report also found that public perceptions of accents had not changed over the past 50 years, with received pronunciation, sometimes called BBC English or ‘the Queen’s English, rated as the most prestigious accent, and African-Caribbean and Indian accents, alongside those from Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, rated the least prestigious. It seems that English people would rather be lied to in an RP accent then told the truth in a regional one.
The whole experience of attending university as a first-generation working-class student is profoundly disorienting, and I don’t think this is acknowledged enough. You are in a wholly unfamiliar role in a wholly unfamiliar place for which you have had little or no preparation. I recall when I arrived at my halls of residence as a first-year undergraduate being asked what I was ‘reading’ and failing to understand the question (‘I’ve just finished the new James Ellroy, thanks. How about you?’). There is a language to learn. And while it does not come naturally to all, you must learn it to succeed. And then, as Jenny Thatcher notes, there are the conversations about expensive foreign holidays, the languages spoken, and the wines chosen – all potential means of exclusion. And those are just the things you can recognise. There are a myriad customs and rituals, manners and mores, secret words and even-more-secret pronunciations, ways of dressing, talking and being, through which the boundaries between the classes in England are silently policed. This frequently continues through further study and into work. Dress codes are often used to exclude and ostracise working-class people attempting to make a career in one of the elite professions. In fact, dress codes are enormously important in English society, though they serve no clear practical purpose. The main purpose of school uniforms – still ubiquitous in the UK – is not, as is often claimed, to create a ‘level playing field’ among pupils, to reduce bullying or harassment, or even to create a sense of community within the school (other school systems which do not insist on uniforms do these things just as effectively, often better, while achieving far better results); it is to distinguish one set of pupils from another. Uniforms are the physical embodiment of class distinction in education. Even within schools, they do not eliminate but tend instead to emphasise the distinctions of wealth they are supposed to address. It is the same reason that some people wear business suits and some overalls. We need to know who is in charge and who is not.
England has a two-tier education system because it has a two-tier society and the people at the top (and a goodish proportion of the people who are not) want to keep it that way. Whether you do well in life is by and large a lottery of birth and background. The better off you are, the better the education you can expect to receive and the job you can expect to get. Tolerance of inequality of educational opportunity is the distinctive, one might say defining, feature of education in England, and of English society more widely. It is quite remarkable how little troubled people are by it. This acquiescence might be said to be one of the main outputs of the education system, alongside failure, frustration, and hopelessness. Privilege is reproduced through a system in which funding follows wealth rather than need, and background is taken to be a reliable proxy indicator of intelligence, talent and ability. I was struck by a newspaper interview with Belgian footballer Kevin de Bruyne, in which he was asked why British footballers seam less well educated than their foreign counterparts, though by and large they come from similar backgrounds. His thoughtful response was that ‘There are a lot of people from different countries who speak two or three languages, where English players usually only speak English. I come from a country where by 13 you are studying Dutch, French and English’. The failure of the English state education system to impart a knowledge of foreign languages and foreign culture is notorious. But it is not because young people in England people are less intelligent or less able. Far from it. It is instead indicative of our failure as a society to be ambitious for everyone and of our willingness to write off people from the least-affluent backgrounds. We train workers when we should be educating people (the self-defeating stupidity of the English approach to training). Only 5 per cent of school pupils eligible for free school meals go on to study at a Russell Group university – that number should shame us all. We are doing nowhere near enough. Educational inequality is so hopelessly entwined with how Britain and its foremost institutions are run, is so resolutely defended by those who benefit from it and the media outlets they own, it is difficult to imagine anything changing. In fact, as the gap between rich and poor widens further, and more of the gains made by the working class during the twentieth century are reversed, things are getting worse. I have never felt more pessimistic about the prospects for positive change. I do know though that the road we are on leads only to greater inequality, more destabilising, demeaning unfairness and more and more misery for the poorest and most vulnerable. I also know that this is a deliberate choice, and it could all be different. We could make a fairer, more equal, and inclusive country. The price, though, would be the England we all know. Good riddance, I say.
