Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I undertook a middle class rite of passage. Awaiting the birth of our first child we spent a couple of Saturdays sitting in a cold church hall being told in gruesome detail what to expect from childbirth and how to look after our newborn in the first weeks and months after she was born.

You guessed it: we were on the National Childbirth Trust antenatal course. And it was excellent. The instructor - a semi-retired midwife - was superb. We were both reassured about the hurricane that was about rip through our lives. Most importantly, perhaps, our coursemates (seven other couples) soon became a support network of friends in the neighbourhood (complete with obligatory whatsapp group). Job well done.

But I was sure there was something wrong, and it took me a while to put my finger on what it was.

My wife and I live in a mixed area of Northeast London which, while quickly regenerating, retains pockets, large and small, of very real poverty. And yet as I looked at the huddle around the biscuit tin swapping personal details and anecdote I realised that pretty much everyone was unmistakably middle class. 

A few weeks prior I had been somewhat shocked when my wife mentioned in passing the cost of the course. Perhaps naively I had assumed up to that point that it would be free. I mean free for everyone. After all the NCT is a charity. Actually, I’d sort of assumed it was a New Labour initiative and a bit like Sure Start centres: open to all.

I was wrong, of course: while the NCT is a charity, it is totally independent and since its foundation in 1956 it has done its own thing, mainly focused on promoting a distinct agenda for childbirth and early childhood. It has become famous for its antenatal courses, for which it very much charges.

It was only after the course that I really started to realise why so many middle class parents were willing to part with shocking £280 cost (which seems to be about average, although there is some geographical variation) - especially when most of the actual courses are replicated for free at the nearest NHS hospital. And it has very little to do with the NCT’s philosophical outlook. It’s all about the ready-made network.

It’s not just the mutual support in the middle of the night; it’s the access to a 16-person whatsapp-brain, constantly whirring and beeping away, sharing insight into development, into local educational opportunities, children’s books to read, which exercises the kids should be doing, and much else besides. Even now, it’s still going strong. To that recipe you can add ingrained middle class competitiveness, pushing parents to encourage their children to the next developmental leap. 

The full horror of the situation dawned on me.

Seeds of educational advantage

For pretty much as long as this newspaper has been published we have pointed out that early childhood is where the seeds of educational advantage are first sown. Invest earlier and earlier we have argued: it’s the only way to close the gap in achievement between the well-off and the deprived.

But the NCT, I now realised, starts this process even earlier than I realised was possible, right back in the womb.

As such, I thought to myself, surely the NCT, a charity, must provide many thousands of bursaries for parents-to-be from deprived homes, so as to share all the benefits enjoyed middle class parents all around. They must, I thought, exist to ensure that the benefits, as described in its mission statement, of “sharing knowledge and creating networks” are disseminated to the four winds. Surely our course was a one-off. Presumably most of them reflect the social mix of their local community?

So I asked the NCT for data. And when a helpful press officer came back, the numbers weren’t great. Not great at all. I was flabbergasted to discover that just 2.2 per cent of participants had benefited from bursaries. Out of more than 70,000 participants in its antenatal courses, just 1,600 were subsidised.

To put this in some kind of context, the independent school sector, which is also largely charitable, and also gets regularly beaten up for not doing enough for deprived children, offered 28 per cent of pupils some kind of means-tested bursaries in 2015.

The NCT wanted to make it clear that they recognised that their work with parents and parents-to-be wasn’t good enough, and it was doing something about it.

Indeed, back in 2015, the charity’s then new chief executive Nick Wilkie had made a speech in which he admitted to having been ‘astonished’ to learn that 10 per cent of members of the National Childbirth Trust were from the wealthy London suburbs of Wimbledon, Dulwich and Clapham.

So much for ‘national’, then.

Another helpful press officer pointed me towards outreach work the charity was doing to set up ambassadors and pop-up breast-feeding centres in deprived areas. One such initiative I was directed towards had been piloted in Park Royal, North West London, and had been wildly successful, I was told. Which is nice. But not good enough. And pointedly not increasing the number of parents being offered bursaries to its antenatal courses.

Another defence offered up was that the NCT was now offering 4,000 courses through the NHS. These are paid for by you and me, the taxpayer, and so is therefore totally and utterly besides the point. 

It all rather felt like Sir Michael Wilshaw’s memorable 2013 description of the work independent schools with neighbouring state schools as “offering crumbs from the table”.

And even if it was good enough, why on earth has it taken so long? The NCT has been around for 70 years, and only now does it seem to recognise that its cause, and its raison d’etre, ought to stretch beyond a middle class families in the south east of England. Why? I have nothing against the teachings and philosophies of the NCT. Indeed, I would argue that, as a man, I am not in a position to comment on the hows and whys of breastfeeding or pain relief-free labour. None of my business.

What I do have a problem with its entrenching of middle class advantage. For decades and decades the NCT has, whether intentionally or not, given affluent children an educational headstart even before they are born.

Even before my daughter came kicking and screaming into the world she was benefiting from a middle class educational advantage entrenched in the system. That’s a total shocker.

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