That's completely irrelevant and not even necessarily true...

From the BBC:

Grammar schools are "stuffed full" of middle-class children and do not improve social mobility, the chief inspector of schools in England says.

Sir Michael Wilshaw told the Observer the selective system was not the way to make up ground on other nations. He spoke after plans to expand grammar school provision in Kent were rejected.

The main point of the education system is to educate people. If that leads to "social mobility", that is a bonus and not a feature, but we'll come to that later.

And let's use the analogy of doctors:

1. Doctors are primarily "middle class" (they are surely the definition of middle class, are they not? And they are a self-selecting bunch. Most female doctors are married to other doctors.)

2. The taxpayer (via the government and the NHS) pays for the bulk of medical education and then pays them their salaries afterwards.

3. Although everybody pays to educate middle class doctors (glossing over the fact that high earners pay far more tax than low earners, so high earners pay far more towards doctors' education), this does not, using his logic, lead to more "social mobility".

4. Therefore, justice would be served if we shut down or privatised all our state-run medical schools and also shut down the NHS.

5. Whatever the economic or political merits of this, would that:

a) Improve the standard of doctors in this country and improve the standard of medical care for the common man? Possible but unlikely.

b) Would it improve social mobility?

- The people at the bottom would be worse off because no "free" NHS any more.

- Who would end up going to those now privatised medical schools? Only people with very rich parents, so the band of doctors would become even more self-selecting and self-reinforcing, and then nepotism and cronyism in the healthcare system will get even worse (I'm not saying it doesn't exist already).

- What are the chances of anybody outside the top couple of percent becoming a doctor? Virtually zero. So that would reduce social mobility. It would be the same with state grammar schools: everybody outside the richest seven per cent would be pretty screwed.

Interestingly, David Davis starts off by talking good sense:

Tory MP and former grammar school pupil David Davis told BBC News many working-class children "got on through having access to grammar schools".

He said: "The reason grammar schools are dominated by the middle classes now is because we've shrunk the size of the sector."

And then ruins it all:

He added that "working-class kids" could not get in "because they've been elbowed out by ambitious middle class parents".

Hang about here.

It's every parent's right to do what they think is best for their kids, which does involve a lot of extra-tuition, attending church, making 'donations' to the school's PTA, sending them to a private primary school etc, and so on to get their kids into the best school (be that private or state) they can.

Does that give kids of pushy parents an advantage: yes. Is this an unfair advantage? I don't see how it is, that's like complaining that Eddie Van Halen has an unfair advantage over other guitarists because he's practised so much.

Are they deliberately "elbowing out… working-class kids"? Are they heck, these people couldn't care less whom they elbow out, by definition, every kid that gets in has elbowed somebody else out. They'd sell their grandmothers to get their child into a state grammar school.

Having made the good point that non-middle class kids would get a better shot if there were more grammar schools, Davis misses the obvious follow-up point: what if all kids had to sit the entrance exam, like the good old-fashioned 11-plus.

Those kids who aren't interested are free to flunk the exam if they wish, but that is surely a fairer and better system than one in which only a few parents (the pushiest ones) even bother entering their kids for the entrance exam.

Here endeth.

Refreshingly un-Home-Owner-Ist

The comments following an article in The Daily Mail celebrating house price increases are almost unanimously aghast. Paul, London on 13/1/2010 at 11:38 says it best:

"[a Conservative election victory in 2010, and the] associated changes to planning policy, could result in further upward price pressure in the medium term as the supply of new housing is further restricted"

This author of this article celebrates this as good news. It doesn't matter that successive generations of hard-working young families will never have the opportunity of owning their own home, just as long as the existing generation of home-owners can continue to cash-in. "Thank goodness" indeed.

Unbelievable...

Reader's letter of the day (2)

Also from The Times:

Sir,

Alan Milburn’s attack on alleged “closed professions” rings a little hollow. Since coming to power, quite a few Labour ministers seem to have been either related to, or have at some time shared a flat with, another member of the Cabinet. Surely an even more tightly closed shop than any of the professions that Mr Milburn deplores?

M. Pettinger, Herstmonceux, E Sussex.

I suppose we could also ask Alan Milburn probing questions about how difficult it is for working-class kids to accumulate so many tasty sources of income.

This 'social mobility' debate completely misses the point

Alan Milburn has sparked off the wild goose chase, yet again, for example per the BBC:

Top professions such as medicine and law are increasingly being closed off to all but the most affluent families, a report into social mobility has said. Former minister Alan Milburn has chaired a study for the prime minister on widening access to high-status jobs.

Now, let's look at high-paying jobs generally and split them into two broad categories.

1. There are those which require some combination of innate skills, education/training, hard work and/or luck. Let's include top footballers, pop stars, film stars, Formula One drivers and of course entrepreneurs in this list. Nobody in his right mind would suggest that these groups are particularly the domain of the middle or upper classes. Of course family and other connections help, but they are not the be-all and end-all.

2. Then there are "the professions", as defined by Alan Milburn, which appears to be journalism, medicine, law and the civil service.

a) Yes, there is nepotism in the media, but in the non-State sector (i.e. everything but the BBC and Channel 4) there is a natural limit; if the sons and daughters of other journalists produce a crap output, circulation and advertising revenues will fall and the newspaper or TV station will fail. Nepotism in the State sector is a disgusting waste of taxpayers' money of course, but then again, State-controlled broadcasting is a disgusting waste of taxpayers' money, so that's easily fixed.

But aside from journalism, his list of "professions" are what I like to refer to as "people who profit from the misery of others, largely at the taxpayers' expense".

b) 'Doctors' is a tricky category as it does require some innate skills and a lot of hard work to qualify, the work is probably not particularly enjoyable and serves a useful purpose, but by the same token, most doctors are paid for by the taxpayer, most handsomely, it would appear. And their pressure group the BMA certainly has ideas above its station, it being at the forefront of the bansturbators.

c) The whole criminal justice system appears to be there largely for the amusement and enrichment of judges and lawyers rather than the protection of the public, despite being funded by the long-suffering taxpayer. Even in other areas, the income of the legal profession depends on the government enacting ever more laws to generate ever more work for them. That's why we'll never get a commonsense rule like divorce courts recognising pre-nuptial contracts, because it would deprive swathes of the legal profession of their incomes etc. Ditto 'employment law', 'human rights law', 'environmental law' etc etc.

d) The civil service is far too big anyway, we just don't need three-quarters of it. So that fixes that problem, rather than 1,000,000 top civil service jobs being hogged by the upper classes, there'd only be 250,000. I'd rather see 750,000 top civil servants being given the sack that create an additional 1,000,000 civil service jobs to be reserved for working class people (as defined).

To sum up, the question is not "Why do so few working class kids make it into the professions?" (whether they do or don't is difficult to prove or measure), the question is "Why are the professions so bloody well-paid in the first place?".