Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: The absurdity of social mobility
17 June 2015
What does our collective preoccupation with social mobility tell us about the nation in which we live? It tells us that we have lost sight of everything that should matter most to us as human beings.
Whenever the Sutton Trust, a charity dedicated to the widening of access to top schools, elite universities and professions such as law and finance, publishes another report which rubs our noses in the unfairness of our society, whenever Alan Milburn, the social mobility tsar, climbs onto his soap box to berate schools, politicians and employers for failing to do enough to ensure that the disadvantaged can make it into the top echelons of society, I think of my grandfather, digging the vegetable patch in his Somerset garden.
He was a proud, independent and cantankerous old man, a skilled carpenter and a fanatical gardener. He would spend his days restoring antique furniture in his workshop and digging the vegetable patches and flowerbeds of his extensive garden.
The term ‘social mobility’ had not, of course, been invented when he was alive. If it had, I have no doubt that it would have prompted a sardonic riposte and a snort of derision. What mattered to this old man, who was something of a hero to me, was his individuality and independence. He would have rejected the idea that anybody would want to climb the social ladder in order to mingle with their supposed betters as a complete absurdity.
In the late 1960s when he died I was studying English at Bristol university. One of the writers who meant most to me was DH Lawrence. Lawrence, like my grandfather, despised anybody whose view of life was dominated by a sense of the importance of money or class.
Read Lawrence’s letters from his time in Cornwall and you learn something of what it is to be genuinely alive and quick, alert to every emotional moment and to the beauty of the natural world. It is somewhere in one of those letters that Lawrence states that the first thing any genuine human being must do is free themselves from the treadmill of financial gain. There are more important things, he says, in life than the security of a steady job, and we should summon the courage to live for what really matters. Looking back, I wish I had found that courage.
It is squalid, this belief that what matters most is social mobility. I watched that BBC series on The Tatler magazine earlier this year, and switched off at the end of every episode wondering who on earth would want to be ‘posh’. Posh, anyway, in the sense that you have a big house and a luxury car, and, if you’ve really made it, some polo ponies.
There is another kind of ‘poshness’, though. You do not have to be a millionaire to be an aristocrat of the spirit. Lawrence and my grandfather were true aristocrats. ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by’. Cast a cold eye, in particular, on the talk of social mobility which dominates our political and educational discourse.
Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.