Scratching the Class Ceiling

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When I was training to be a teacher at Nottingham University, we were given an excellent grounding in the teaching profession, and they prepared us well. The experience gave me two of my most distinctive memories:
1) When my tutor told me I had a great deal of potential in the profession and I should aim to be a Deputy Head.
Instead of taking this as the compliment it was clearly intended to be, I remember thinking – Why not Head? Mmmm was my determination NOT to lose my Geordie accent their imagined threat to my career?
2) ‘Adaptability’: In one session we were asked to write down one word that we had to be in life – I put, and the lecturer knew I had put ‘adaptability’. When we discussed the array of words, one privately educated fellow student commented on how ‘middle class’ the response was. As a comprehensive educated working class girl, I should have spoken up and challenged this, but I had a sinking feeling of ‘Why bother?’ I could see the lecturer almost daring me to speak up, but I didn’t.

Adaptability?
My thought process was how I had to almost totally change my identity from the person I was at the campus university, and in my emerging profession, in comparison with my return home to my family. As I was the first to go to University, they had little understanding of my university life. They were all very proud – apart from my Nanna, who just kept asking me why I was still at school, and wasn’t it time I got myself a proper job. Basically, I just returned to my Geordie self on my return home. There was no point in airs and graces, and I loved being with my family, and I did not want to alienate myself from them. BUT I did not want to be dismissed as a ‘thick Geordie’ at University. Therefore, I had to adapt – not a middle class trait, a balancing act between the life I had, and the life I was moving towards.

Another discussion that has never left me was in 1997, in London when ‘champagne socialism’ was at its height. There were lots of Labour followers devoting themselves to the cause. As the granddaughter of a miner, who then became a butcher and fought for the rights of shop workers, I was well versed in the fight for social justice. In a discussion with one particularly vocal activist I mentioned how people made assumptions of stupidity about me because of my Geordie accent. Her show of affinity was how she had a similar problem because of her London accent. She then went on to tell me how ‘Little did people realise she was third generation Oxbridge and her grandfather was a Bishop.’
My exact response was – ‘Well, I am 100% scum’.
Another deep sigh – when Labour activists play the class card for ‘oneupwomanship’, do we have any true chance of social equality?

Identity?
One of the problems of growing up working class today is there is no traditional identity to cling on to. The next problem is, from my own perspective, I don’t want to become middle class just so I can sneer at the people ’below’ me. And I still don’t, and I don’t want my children to think that they are better than anyone else, just because of the perception of social standing either. What kind of legacy is that?

Ultimately, while we have titles, and aristocrats and the Queen, and private schools, and generation after generation of ruling classes whose only real aim is to maintain their own, and their future generations social standing, it does not matter how many initiatives we have for working class boys – (what about the girls???). Social equality is a long way off. Does any working class boy truly aspire to be the next David Cameron, or Gideon – sorry George Osborne? Or Ed Miliband for that matter. Give them a sense of pride and something achievable, and something that interests them to work towards, that’s all most people really want.

The ultimate educational initiative
We could have the ultimate educational initiative. Scrap all of the private schools, and the nepotism, evenly redistribute the educational wealth equally across the whole of society. The ultimate target, promote the best students according to their talents and ability, and see who comes out on top? I know, I know, this will NEVER happen, but it would be an interesting way of establishing who the truly gifted people are in society today.

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