On Working Class Aspiration

"Working class communities lack aspiration!", so says Amanda Spielman, the Chief Inspector of schools for England. Arguing that working class communities generally have borne the brunt of the economic crisis, she also notes schools that serve their children face additional challenges around teacher recruitment and retention, fewer academy sponsors and fewer networks of support that schools in more affluent areas can typically tap into. Class location and geographic location makes life harder for working class kids, which dampens aspiration and, by extension, fosters fatalism. Her predecessor, Michael Wilshaw, contrasted this with children from immigrant backgrounds, suggesting they value education more and have more supportive home environments.

There are a few interrelated issues worth teasing out here. One is a legacy issue of working class communities, one relates to changes in working class culture, and the other is about the character of aspirations and how to achieve them. Taking legacies first, there are many parts of the country, including jolly old Stoke-on-Trent, where a suspicion of formal education is deep rooted. For generations, young women and men coming of age in Stoke didn't need qualifications to get on. With local pot banks, primary industry and factory work in plentiful supply since the beginning of the industrial revolution, there have always been jobs. The cliche of leaving school on the Friday and starting work on the Monday persist because it was true, and this was the experience of millions of school leavers. Education, meanwhile, was the annoying bit you had to go through before you could start earning. Indeed, I can remember a twinge of envy when one of the lads at my school left early for a job in the local chippy. No homework, no exams, and money in his pocket - what's not to like? Formal education was superfluous to the lives and hopes of millions, and it still is. Remember, NEETs don't officially exist since the government decreed all school leavers should be in work, further education or training. School gate to factory gate has gone, but there are plenty of low paid "training" places available and from there a career of overly exploitative and precarious work awaits. Strictly speaking, you can get by on the job market without qualifications but the standard of living is low and the incomes that allowed workers of the near past to get on the property ladder are just not available.

The second issue has to do with the collapse of working class culture generally. Despite the anti-intellectualist traditions of the British national character, structurally reproduced in the Labour Party and labour movement, this existed in tension with a strand of working class intellectualism. The Penguins and, to a lesser extent, Gollancz books of the interwar and post-war years found a working class audience receptive to debates in science, history, sociology, the arts and more. Later on, the crises of the 1970s and 80s still found millions paying close attention to current affairs and informing themselves about it. The culture of self-education, at least in its traditional working class forms, were finally buried as Thatcher's bulldozers forcibly pushed the labour movement and the idea of a working class politics to the fringes. Oddly, the clobbering working class education received coincided with the fetishising of formal education in schools and of training at work as the key to "social mobility". True, there is a new kind of organic, spontaneous self-improvement that is gathering steam, but is independent from and carries little of the working class self-education movements of the past. The old collective intellectual property of class is gone, and the new one is at an early period of its formation.

Third concerns the issue of aspiration, or rather the idea working class kids and their families lack it. There are, of course, significant definitional issues around aspiration and all too often politicians define it in the terms they find congenial. Typically in terms of casting off one's working class background and becoming some sort of professional or successful business person is pretty standard. Putting those debates to one side, if we define aspiration conventionally as a nice house (or, given the times we live in, just a house), ideal/good job, car, life partner, debt freedom, and an interesting and fulfilling life, most kids want and aspire to these sorts of things. As Heather Mendick and her colleagues outline in their Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth, wanting better things, having an idea about the sort of life they would like to lead has never been a problem. The issue is the avenues have closed down for the realisation of aspirations. If you are a working class kid who wants to make music, only more affluent schools retain fully funded music departments, and so there is little opportunity at your high school or academy. If you are a working class kid thinking about a sports career, your school might not have the facilities or coaching support that can help you along your way. Arts, creative subjects, programming and IT, and underfunding of careers' support in many schools, on top of unstable school environments and a merry-go-round of teaching staff means a great deal of talent goes unrealised. The fascination many youngsters apparently have for celebrity culture serves, in this instance, as a narrative and ideological resource, as a way of framing their own issues and identities in the context of an educational culture that has more or less discarded them. An engagement with celebrity culture is a symptom of frustrated aspirations, not its cause. The problem is inequality.

New Labour half-understood this. Indeed, so do the Tories. Both affirm equality of opportunity and, theoretically at least, accept that people on the sharp end of class inequalities require extra resources to level the playing field and compete with the better off. The difference between the two is Labour under Blair and Brown did pony up the cash, while Dave and May talk the talk while defunding the support. Restoring this is a start, but can only lead to frustrated hopes unless the purpose of education and work is fundamentally changed. Frustrated aspirations and fatalism isn't a working class problem, it's a capitalism problem.