Yes, teachers ought to inspire, but they can't work in isolation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/28/will-hutton-education-aspiration-david-laws

Version 0 of 1.

David Laws, newly restored to the front rank of British politics as Lib Dem education minister, is a disgrace to his party and political tradition. He was one of the principal architects of the coalition agreement, one of whose consequences was to undermine Britain's threadbare social contract. Now, compounding the felony, he has joined the choir of elite figures who attack teachers as undermining working-class aspirations.

Last week, he told the <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, voicing what he imagined is the emerging consensus, that teachers' "depressingly low expectations" fail to encourage too many children "to reach for the stars". Too few teachers, career advisers and colleges encouraged pupils to believe they could reach the top. Improved social mobility demanded change.

There is no easier constituency to attack than teachers, especially as, at first glance, Laws has a point. In too many schools, teaching is little more than getting through the day without incident, shepherding the barely controllable class to modest qualifications. Of course it should be better and teachers and teaching unions would do their cause a great deal of good if they committed themselves fully to excellence and aspiration. There are enough barriers to disadvantaged children breaking out of their situation without teachers offering another.

But to focus merely on the shortcomings of teachers is to dodge huge questions, not just about the nature of contemporary society but about what it means to live a life well. Stagnant social mobility characterises the entire industrialised west. And, uncomfortable as it may be for those who believe that social class is so very yesterday, the brutal truth is that the higher the inequality and the weaker a country's social contract, the lower its mobility and aspiration. Inequality matters. Blaming hapless teachers for deep trends that have an impact on all western societies is little better than scapegoating.

Too much discussion of inequality takes as axiomatic why we should be concerned about the extent to which the top 1%'s incomes are outstripping the rest, driven by technology, skills and not a little old-fashioned exploitation. Yet what makes inequality toxic is not so much the differential buying power but that it creates social groups in which the members of society have no idea or stake in how others live and which work as self-fulfilling traps.

The more hermetically sealed the world of the rich, the less a sense of obligation or shared destiny they feel they have with the rest of society. Conversely, for the average and disadvantaged, the chance of escaping their position becomes ever more remote as expectations and aspirations, collapse along with their relative incomes.

Laws says it is deplorable that even young people in his own constituency of Yeovil, not a social black spot, feel that a career in investment banking is so much another world that they and their teachers would not aim to join it. But such a response is completely rational.

Investment banking <em>is</em> another world. Nor are its denizens interested in creating wealth on the ground in Britain. To declare yourself a candidate means doing something of dubious value, where the objective odds of selection are tiny.

I doubt Laws would criticise, say, Lord O'Donnell for not being aspirational enough to be candidate for the governorship of the Bank of England: why set yourself up for a highly probable failure? Precisely the same logic applies to a bright student from a state school in Yeovil, pondering a career in investment banking. In any case, even if Yeovil's half-a-dozen brightest end up working at Goldman Sachs, in what way would anything substantive be solved for the rest of Yeovil's school-leavers?

Of course school-leavers want to make the best of themselves, live a life they have reason to value and find jobs where employers allow them to do just that. Most social mobility is not driven by making spectacular leaps across ever widening social gaps, even though we should never discourage the attempt. Rather, it is done by joining an organisation and working one's way up. The problem is that so few of today's employers provide such ladders and those that do are being driven by economic exigency to remove them.

Promotion in the public sector has been close to eliminated by the over-the-top austerity for which Mr Laws is such an enthusiast. By next year, for example, it will be four years since the Metropolitan Police stopped promoting constables to sergeants. Meanwhile, in the private sector, large organisations are removing layers of management and very few offer starter job apprenticeships on any scale. Barclays, creating 1,000 apprentices, was oversubscribed more than 10-fold.

To promote social mobility, we need to create a more dynamic capitalism so that more firms can grow together with their people. Alongside it, we need a social contract that equips people, especially our young, to make the most of their capabilities. Only then might the gap between the social groups be narrowed to allow more people to move up, and also create a society in which we live more fulfilled lives, surely a broader conception of social wellbeing than just mobility alone.

Some of the foundations of a 21st-century social contract were laid by New Labour. The child trust fund was a means by which working-class parents could create a pool of saving for their children, their contributions matched by the state, so that as adults they would have some wherewithal to buy training or, at the very least, the means to buy or rent a home. It was carelessly scrapped by the coalition. Same story with the education maintenance allowance. Housing allowance for the young is soon to go as well. Yeovil's young men and women are trapped both geographically and socially, while the firms that might employ them are no less stymied.

Doubtless, some teacher in a Yeovil school might have dissuaded a bright student not "to reach for the stars", but most are only too anxious to spot and coach young talent. It is what makes the job worthwhile. But Britain's teachers operate in the most socially polarised schools in the world, according to the OECD. The great liberal thinkers – Green, Hobhouse, Keynes and Beveridge – who wrestled with how to create a social liberalism that offered opportunity alongside capitalism would never have singled out uninspirational teachers as the cause of falling social mobility. Neither should their successors today.