Working class? Don't think that Oxbridge is for you.

JaneJudge

It isn't just about working hard. Low paid work and poverty can create other problems, health problems for parents, disruptive working patterns, stress and family break ups. Everything is so much harder if you don't have much in the first place. Then there are groups of people who take on low paid flexible work because their home life is difficult, for whatever reason. Then add in insecure, expensive housing. This is saccharine 2 point 4 children in a happy stable home with a vegetable patch and hard working but poor parents is a pipe dream for today's young working poor. I realise this is somewhat off the original topic but being poor is complex and it is nothing to do with not working hard enough

Don't be silly, Jj. All the poor need is 'drive and initiative'

MOnica Your understanding of "meritocracy" isn't the same as mine. People aren't meritocracy - it's the description of a system. In my opinion, it's a flawed concept anyway. People who make it up the ladder make damn sure that their children stay there, so the idea of meritocracy is undermined. In the post-war years it was relatively easy to make it up the social ladder because there was a rapid growth in managerial and professional jobs. The economy is now stagnant, so there's a limit to opportunities. You have shown perfectly what the so-called middle class in your family have done to maintain their position.

Not forgetting in our generation many poorer children suffered adversity from birth because they were born smaller or prematurely and they were less likely to have been immunised against serious diseases thereby missing lots of school because of illness. Their maths was poorer and they were 3 and a half times behind in their reading. Disadvantaged circumstances have a lot to answer for and aren't we still grappling with similar problems today?

It's interesting that some attribute their success and social mobility to their own initiative and "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps". I have no doubt that it was the society I grew up in that enabled me to reach where I am now. That. without the support from birth, from the free orange juice, through the excellent schooling with uniform assistance and the further education grant I was given I would have at some point have dropped off the ladder. The lack of support for poorer families now is extraordinary and it has been cut. Any idea that people have the same degree of support once available is completely wrong.

I can remember when you had to pass entrance exams to get into Oxford or Cambridge. At my grammar school, one of the best in the area that even rich parents wanted their children to go to, you had to stay on an extra year in 3rd year Sixth form to have any chance of doing the exam. There were only a few considered bright enough and possibly others who didn’t want to spend a year extra at school or being working class weren’t encouraged by their parents to do so.

The courses were different too. To study history at Cambridge you had to have Latin and their so called modern history finished by the Middle Ages!

Nowadays the degrees are more accessible although you need to still be academically bright. If they offer the course and you’re good enough why shouldn’t you aspire to it? You will soon find out if you need to lower your objectives whatever your class background is.

Gloryanny I used those phrases to describe my grandparents. All born in the 1880s, pre the welfare state and free orange juice. The school leaving age was around 12. There was no NHS, no pensions and my great aunt described how families in the same street or going to the same church would group together to support each other when one family had problems. Her mother took into her family, the vulnerable, probably learning challenged, son of a neighbour when his mother died. He lived with her untl he died.

The majority of people now described as middle class come from similar backgrounds.

The problem is that those families who have benfitted from all the things you mention pass on to their children, all the cultural capital they acquired on the way up and those children have a head start on children frommore culturally and economically deprive. it is not that these parents buy their way to the top, their children will be at state schools, are unlikely to have tutors. This is the danger of a meritocracy.

The only way to get round it as far as I can see is to take all children away from their parents at birth and bring them up together in identical children's homes with none benig allowed any opportunity to do anything that isn't available to every other child. but even then those children who are less able will be disadvantaged because they will not be able to keep up with the bright ones, bright ones, and less bright will form friendships with children like themselves and so on ad infinitum.

The fact of the matter is I can see no way to total equality for all children, in this country or any other.

M0nica the degree of social mobility in the 1880s was very slight. Yes of course there were people who managed to achieve success, but the majority of working people's lives hung on fragile threads. Illness, injury or death could disrupt any progress and plunge a family into poverty.Some were lucky some were not. It's a great mistake to imagine personal effort could overcome all the barriers or that all communities were able to provide for their members. That's why there were workhouses.
As for school leaving age my mother left school at 13 (her 14th birthday was in the August) and my father at 14. They were certainly not middle-class.
The way to "get round" the lack of social mobility is to provide similar provision as that supplied in 1945. Children from poor backgrounds need to be properly nourished, their health care should be pro and not reactive, they should be provided with proper support (like Sure Start), they should have somewhere decent to live and their education should be properly funded. No one is saying all children should be equal, just that they should have equal opportunity and when they are from backgrounds which might restrict access to that opportunity they should receive proper support.

Glorianny i did not make my comments to argue that social mobility was good. I was discussing this in the context of why the introduction of meritocracy has slowed down social mobility.

Many respondents to this thread seem to think that the meritocracy consists only of rich people who send their children to private schools, Oxbridge and then subsidise them as unpaid interns. In fact they are only the froth on the top of the coffee. The main members of the meritocracy are people like me, probably you and many others on this thread, because most of those now described as 'middle class' have working class parents, grandparents or great grandparents, who, as I said made progress in the world through their own endeavours, or for more recently through the Butler education reforms of the 1940s. I went to university in the early 1960s. I went to a northern mainly science and engineering based inversity, where the majority of students, studying engineering, were male and working class. I married one of them.

When we married and had children we swelled the number of people in 'middle class' jobs with a middle class jobs and, without even thinking about it, we gave our children enriched upbringings, lots of books, took them to museums and talked to them a lot, giving them good communication skills. We bought houses near good schools. In fact a large estate of mainly owner-occupied houses almost guaranteed that the local school would be good. When our children applied to university, they were generally bright, well qualified and many of them studied science and engineering.

This is today's meritocracy, not deliberate, difficult to deal with, but, with the beginning of charging to go to university and the ending of maintenance fees, entrenching those who were social mobile one and two generations ago securely in the meritocracy and drastically reducing social mobility today.