When I started secondary school in the mid-Sixties, by the measures then used, unemployment was effectively zero and had been since the end of the war. The older brothers of most of the boys around me at Holloway County were rolling out of class at 15 or 16, often with few or no qualifications and into a job of some kind. Despite sometimes heroic efforts on the part of the teachers, the prevailing attitudes of the pupils towards being educated remained indifference, good-natured bemusement or sometimes straightforward hostility. They really didn’t need no education.
Spool on a few years and I was in Rotherhithe, a mostly working-class area still. It was Tony Blair’s first term and his education secretary, David Blunkett, had brought in a new act establishing city academies, which, you may recall, were to be different from “bog standard comprehensives”. A friend, a local school governor, was telling me that there had been a rush of inquiries from parents about the academy that was to be set up locally. But most of these parents were black Africans, first generation immigrants, looking to secure a better education for their kids. The white working-class parents, she said, were conspicuous by their absence.
By then, unemployment, though far lower than in the trough of the mid-Eighties, was three times higher than it had been when I tripped through the gates of Holloway. Low-skill jobs were disappearing. There was a much greater need to leave school with some qualifications.
That same year girls outperformed boys in getting As at A level for the first time. And David Blunkett worried about a “laddish anti-learning culture” that was leading to chronic underachievement.
Gradually, over time, the worry has morphed from being about boys to being about poor white boys. Whites (not just poor ones and not just boys) are less likely to go into higher education than any of the ethnic minorities, and far less likely than some of them.
It is too early to know what the outcome will be for the largely white immigrants from the EU, but the evidence seems to suggest that their children perform well at school. Indeed, a recent paper by the Economic and Social Research Council, which started off looking at possible problems in educating Polish and other children, ended up worrying that these pupils were not being sufficiently challenged academically.
It is unsurprising, then, that the terms of the popular debate about immigrants has altered fundamentally since I was young. The model of migrant miscreance is now not the smelly, ****less, uneducated, crime-prone chancer but the hard-working, job and school-place snatching overachiever. The problem with migrants is not their inability, but their ability relative to some of the indigenous population.
There are exceptions, of course, but I would put it to readers that a rational people would now turn this national discussion on its head. Such a people would recognise that we don’t have an immigrant problem. The immigrants are mostly doing everything we could want them to, in schools, colleges, workplaces and businesses.
Their success is fuelling a backlash. In their excellent book Revolt on the Right, the academics Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin analyse support for Ukip. They demonstrate that it is “anchored in a clear social base: older, blue-collar voters, citizens with few qualifications, whites and men”. These are people, they write, “with obsolete skills and few formal qualifications (who) have struggled in a post-industrial economy”.
Now look at the county of Lincolnshire. Last May Ukip became the opposition on the county council, winning 16 seats. The 2011 census confirmed that Lincolnshire has a significantly higher proportion than the national average of residents with no or low qualifications. The county is older and more unhealthy than the nation as a whole.
Last May Ukip won five out of seven seats in the Lincolnshire town of Boston, polling between 35 and 45 per cent of the vote. Boston has the lowest level of educational attainment in Lincolnshire, already an underperforming county.
A statistical analysis of children on free school meals, based on 2009 figures, showed that those in Lincolnshire had almost the worst life chances in the country, while those from Newham, in London — the most ethnically diverse borough in the country — had the best chance.
Why? Part of the explanation is obvious. Immigrants tend to be more motivated than most people, have often already overcome major barriers to get here, are younger and so on. But why do poorer indigenous people often seem so unmotivated?
The answer is not, by the way, the loss of grammar schools. Though Ukip is strongly in favour of a return to the 11-plus system, claiming that it aids social mobility, the educational situation in Lincolnshire should give them pause. There, a selective system means that 25 per cent of the children do indeed attend grammar schools (and therefore 75 per cent don’t). The results for those who do are good and for those who don’t, as we have seen, are pretty poor. It is an irony that the educationally deprived of Lincolnshire should vote for a party that would continue their deprivation. But then, such ironies are legion in 2014.
To reiterate, we don’t have an immigration problem. We have instead a problem with and for those fellow citizens who can’t keep up and that is where we ought to concentrate our attention. If we were to set up the equalities and human rights commission anew, this would be the first task it should be given. Don’t worry about the Bangladeshis, we’d say, they’re OK. So are the Indians. And the Africans. Even the girls.
But how do we prepare the least educated and the harder to reach for the world as it is? All our sensible politicians know this is the real question. Iain Duncan Smith knows it, Yvette Cooper knows it, David Laws knows it. They may yodel the anti-migration message, but their minds aren’t in it, let alone their hearts.
Somehow we have to bust through the lack-of-aspiration barrier, break-up the anti-education ethos, help instil in indigenous Brits what immigrants already seem to possess. The desire to go forward. The need to progress.
