Climbing the social ladder...

‘Why I believe in teaching middle-class values’

Article from The Independent by Sean O'Grady dated Wednesday 5^th March 2014

                                

(Sean O'Grady is deputy managing editor of The Independent and a former economics editor and leader writer for the title).

Schools should train working-class kids to be more middle class. That’s what happened to me. Learning to ‘act posh’ has its place in tackling social inequality.

I think I may be the sort of person who Peter Brant, head of policy at the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, had in mind when he said that working-class children should be taught to think and act like the middle classes - ‘act posh’ - if they want to get on in life. In particular, Mr Brant warned, poorer pupils are less likely to apply to top universities for fear of ‘not fitting in’.

Well, there’s a surprise… Of course they are terrified of social isolation. I know, because I was too. Yes, I was that working-class child, back in the 1970s, at the fag end of the great British state grammar school experiment. When the time came for me to think about university I was fortunate enough to have been schooled at the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester, that, laughable and pretentious as it may seem, sought to ape the public schools in every aspect. Apart from the fees bit, obviously.

The school spent the best part of eight years getting me to ‘act posh’. They failed, as anyone who knows me can see, but I, and the few other working-class kids who passed the 11-plus, could manage a reasonable version of the manners of the middle classes. The masters all wore gowns, we stood up when they entered the classroom, they were called ‘Sir’, and we were frit (as we said round our way) of them (i.e. afraid of them).

We also had a uniform, strictly enforced, a house system, and a formal hall, where tables were chaired by one of the prefects, and we were taught proper manners and conversation for communal meals, a sort of junior dinner party training. There were plenty of societies where you could learn middle-class stuff such as chess and debating. Football, regarded as common, was only played informally, during the breaks; rugger (as it was referred to, i.e. rugby) and cricket were the school sports.

The school was rightly proud of its record in sending its boys to Oxbridge (Oxford University or Cambridge University). All paid by the taxpayer. Money well spent I say. So all this gave me some confidence when it came to thinking about going off to Oxford, which I was encouraged to do. I needed it, even after all that grooming; the class thing was still putting me off.

At that time, The Sunday Times ran a series about all the ‘Hooray Henrys’ who supposedly populated the university. There were big pictures of toffs (posh people) in dinner suits and ball gowns chucking champagne around, something I had never encountered in my entire life to that point. These were people who, and I can recall the phrase distinctly, got ‘hog whimperingly’ drunk, and were clearly dead rich. God, they had cars.

It was clear that the likes of me were not going to find it easy to keep up with these types. Socially, at any rate, I was going to be pitifully out of my depth.

Still, I persevered, and when I arrived at my strange medieval little college I was dismayed by the lack of hog whimpering, and somewhat disappointed by the feeble brainpower of some of the products of our great public schools. Instead, I found lots of ex-grammar school boys and girls who were just as surprised as I was that they had got this far. Like them, I was also able to tell my soup spoon from my dessert spoon, and go for the right knife at the right time, and avoid embarrassing myself at formal dinner.

Nowadays, I don’t care much about such things, I’m that middle class. I know what I need to do to fit in. Social mobility¹ is a wonderful thing, but, without a school that can help you learn such subtle aspects of proper behaviour, it doesn’t come easy.

¹Social mobility is a person’s ability to advance their place in society through income, status or education.

Is everybody in the UK becoming middle-class?

UK map showing the diversity of the English language

Why are schools trying to wipe out regional accents?

Adapted from an article by Lynsey Hanley

theguardian, Monday 23 May 2016

The news that trainee teachers are being encouraged to adopt a more middle-class accent and lose their regional accents in order to be better “role models” for schoolchildren is part of a worrying trend…

Call it the “Downton effect”, or the return of old-fashioned snobbery, but there is, increasingly, one acceptable way to be in society: middle class and from the south-east of England.

As if further proof were needed that the dominance of middle-class values and identity is becoming more powerful, the linguistics researcher Alexander Baratta has reported that trainee teachers from the north and Midlands are being asked by their supervisors to lose their regional accents in order to be better “role models” for schoolchildren.

What he terms “linguistic prejudice” is essentially another form of class prejudice: northern accents, in particular, are perceived to be exclusively working class, with scouse accents firmly at the bottom of the value scale (a couple of months back, casting agents for a new Morrisons advert put out a call for people with northern accents to appear in the campaign, but with the firm instruction: “Nobody from Liverpool, please.”)

Teacher trainees from Leicester, Nottingham and Eccles interviewed by Baratta were told to “speak properly” – in other words, without a regional accent – and that their pronunciation was “too common”.

It provides further evidence that teachers are being inducted into an education system designed to produce, essentially, identical types of people. People with identical accents, communication styles and methods of personal presentation are well primed to work in the private sector, to earn above the median, and to compete for work on the basis of not being different, but of simply being better at doing exactly the same thing.

Becoming socially mobile is simply a matter of someone from a non-professional background getting into the professions. Take a rough diamond, polish it and send it back out into the world more economically productive than before. Such simplistic logic denies the experience of social mobility, which for many people – as revealed by the subjects of Baratta’s study – involves being asked to change fundamental aspects of who they are in exchange for achieving their ambition.

Schoolchildren interviewed by the education researcher Diane Reay noted how such forms of snobbery are passed down, from teacher trainer to teacher, from teacher to pupil. “Some teachers think a pupil is stupid because he hasn’t got a posh accent,” said one child. “I think telling you a different way of speaking is sort of good, but I think the way they do it isn’t good because they correct you and make you look stupid.”

Pupils realise the importance of clear communication, and are aware that being given the chance to acquire some of the skills of the dominant class may go on to serve them better than a well-meaning teacher who pretends such things don’t matter. What pupils resent is the implication that to sound working class is automatically to sound stupid.

As aspects of culture become more centralised and focused on London, it stands to reason that the “dominant person” – the person who is valued most, who is viewed as the most civilised – happens to be middle class and to speak in a standardised south-eastern accent. It’s especially the northern museums that are closing, the northern councils that have to prioritise adult care over libraries and parks because they can’t afford both. The BBC’s 5 Live and CBeebies channels may have moved to Salford, but you’d never guess it from the accents of its presenters.

The sociolinguist Peter Trudgill noted as long ago as the 1970s that language use had begun to change, and to some extent to level out, in smaller towns due to the undue influence of larger, more culturally dominant cities. But this is clearly not the sort of natural linguistic levelling that is brought about by people moving around more often. The urge to devalue regional accents is part of a deliberate process. We’re all being taught that the only acceptable role model – intelligent, authoritative, responsible – is now a middle-class one.

Measuring teenagers' happiness in England...

More friends and emotional security - how northern children in England top the happiness league

Polly Curtis, education editor

theguardian

Thursday 8 January 2009

(The text has been slightly modified)

1. Teenagers in the north of England are emotionally more secure ("happy") than those anywhere else in the country and are the most likely to report that they have more than one best friend by the age of 15, according to a major study of children's happiness that lays to rest the adage that life is grim up north.
2. Teenagers in Knowsley, Merseyside - one of the most disadvantaged areas of the country - scored highest in the friendship ratings published yesterday by Ofsted and the Department for Children, Schools and Families, while those in leafy Richmond, in south-west London, reported the lowest levels of emotional wellbeing.
3. The findings suggest that perceptions of London teenagers' lives as blighted by drug abuse are also misplaced. London boroughs consistently scored the lowest for drug and alcohol use among English teenagers, but a problem of substance misuse by young people in suburbs and poor rural areas was revealed.
4. The study gives every local authority in England a score on five measures: the emotional health ("happiness") of children (how many friends they have, and how much they feel able to talk to them about problems); levels of bullying; participation in sports and volunteering; substance misuse; and ease of access to parks and play areas.
5. The scores are based on responses from 150,000 children who took part in an annual survey conducted by Ofsted, called Tellus. A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said local authority chiefs had been told to set themselves targets to improve children's lives by next year, taking into account the findings of the study.
6. Children in Knowsley, which consistently sits at the bottom of league tables for educational results and health, report having stronger relationships than anywhere else in the country. Halton in Cheshire, Lancashire, Liverpool, Kirklees in West Yorkshire and Hull also score highly.
7. Inner London authorities, by comparison, score consistently below the national average, suggesting that the alienation associated with life in a big city could be setting in early. London teenagers, however, benefit from having the best access to play areas, parks and other activities.
8. Inner-London teenagers are the least likely in the country to take drugs and drink alcohol, according to Ofsted. The score, derived from children's responses to questions on how often they had used drugs or drunk alcohol, showed inner London scored an average of 6.1, compared with 10.9 nationally.
9. Children in leafy London suburbs are more likely to take drugs and drink than those in inner city boroughs, it found.
10. Reported levels of bullying are highest in the south-east and south-west. The Isle of Wight has the highest score for bullying, while Knowsley and Liverpool score lowest.
11. Anne Longfield, chief executive of the children's charity 4Children, said: "You have some more affluent areas where drug problems are an issue because young people don't have material disadvantage but don't see their parents much and have a disposable income. Drugs are likely to be much more a problem for them. Parents who move their children from urban environments, where there is bad news in the headlines, to what are seen to be safer areas, often find their children confronted with other problems. Bullying continues wherever children are. It's not limited to urban areas, and drug abuse also happens in areas with more affluence and fewer things to do."
12. In Haringey, north London, where there has been intense scrutiny of children's services since the death of Baby P at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend, despite having been seen many times by social and health workers, children's happiness was rated among the lowest in the country. But the borough was found to be well below the national average for bullying and children were more likely to take part in "positive" activities such as volunteering or sports.
13. The scores were published yesterday along with suggested new targets for local authorities to reach over the next year to improve services for children. Local authorities that score badly on bullying, for example, are expected to launch new programmes in schools to tackle it.
14. The scheme is part of a government shift away from measuring the effectiveness of policies for children only in terms of their educational results to take into account new measures of happiness.
15. The government is consulting on plans to rate every school on a range of happiness indicators, including measures such as teenage pregnancies. The plan has proved controversial with teachers, who say they cannot be held responsible for the whole of a child's life.
16. A spokesperson for the Local Government Association said the survey was helpful but, because it involved children completing the survey themselves, some children outside formal education were excluded: "There is an awareness that some of the children most in need are not picked up by it."