Many people have a tin ear when it comes to issues around poverty: they pontificate about matters far beyond their lived experience, often in crass and wildly inaccurate ways.

There was a striking example amid the coverage of Boris Johnson’s reported comments on the prospect of letting bodies “pile high” during Covid. One political commentator said that, even if the prime minister had uttered those words, it would “strengthen his reputation as a man who talks as a man in a pub would”.

Comments like this feed into insidious stereotypes of the working class as an intemperate mass with a predilection for cruelty and violence - and that can colour how we treat people who go to school, not just those who frequent pubs.

People from less affluent postcodes are, in public discourse, often feared, scorned or pitied, with little nuance in between. That’s been true for a long time: think of the political drive for ID cards to control football fans in the 1980s or of the furore after James Kelman won the 1994 Booker Prize for a novel replete with profanity-fuelled Glasgow dialect. More recently, look at the disdain directed at those in the post-lockdown queues outside Primark (and the lack of attention given to queues outside more upmarket shops).

The flip side to such disdain of the working class is pity for those living apparently helpless and abject lives. In 2018, when children’s organisations came together to set out priorities for improving young lives, one of their calls - gathered together by the Children in Scotland charity - was to stop seeing children who live in poverty as “tragic”. There was a need to “move away from tragic narratives about young people in poorer areas, and recognise them and their communities as complex, with strengths and challenges”; Scotland needed to “change the language of poverty: young people deserve dignity, not stigma and discrimination”.

The danger of these “tragic narratives” is that they frame whole swathes of young people as inert and helpless, as potential recipients of charity rather than people aflame with hopes, desires and ambitions, living in diverse, complex and not necessarily dysfunctional communities. Yet, young people in poorer, working-class communities tend to get media attention as either charity cases or as feral perpetrators of violence (remember the moral panic about hoodies?) - and both narratives are an abdication of collective responsibility to think more deeply about their lives.

In The Young Team, Graeme Armstrong’s Lanarkshire-set novel, the titular protagonists are caught in a cycle of gang violence, drugs and post-industrial poverty. A stern but caring headteacher sees the potential of Azzy - the book’s narrator - but his influence is weak against that of the scheme, on whose streets Azzy says he gets the education he really needs to negotiate the hazards of his daily life.

In a widely read open letter published by Tes Scotland in 2019, a mother living in poverty told teachers about the ways her nine-year-old son’s education was undermined by forces far beyond the school gates. No family “should have to live with the constant stress of a life on the breadline”, she wrote. “We need access to flexible work that pays at least the real living wage, access to affordable childcare and decent housing.”

Education can still exert considerable influence on young lives. But Eileen Prior, executive director of parents’ organisation Connect, says children will get the maximum out of school only if those in charge treat it as “a human service” built on relationships with individuals rather than one of rigid systems and processes.

Schools may not be able to solve all society’s ills but they can show pupils a world that sets aside hoary old clichés about entire sections of society - in the belief that each individual can make a distinct and valuable contribution to that world.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 7 May 2021 issue