After literally decades of digression and diversion, wasted effort and, at times, resources, the hunt for social mobility seems to have finally lost all nobility. Even some of its keenest advocates are beginning to realise that however clever or well-educated you might think you are, the second you step into that closed-for-the-day primary school and find the little booth with the stumpy little pencil, we are all equal, at least for the time being.
However much it made people feel better; writing about social mobility for the press, embedding it in organisational mission statements, or advocating it energetically on conference platforms, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the day job, ever. It was always a gauche, overdressed, clumsy bridesmaid. The beautiful, glowing bride stood doggedly and humbly in front of thousands of ordinary classrooms, day after day, making sure the children left knowing more than they did before they walked in. Which is how children pass exams. Teaching is not rocket science (unless you teach rocket science).
The sooner that everyone who has thrown themselves enthusiastically onto the spurious social mobility bandwagon acknowledges just how misdirected they have been, politicians most especially, the better for the entire profession and for the children it serves.
Once you accept, as some recent voices have, that imposing middle-class values and goals on working-class families is both presumptuous and folly, then you have the opportunity to let teachers teach just as they have in the past. Great teachers - no matter where they are - are always driven to help children learn, not because they might get into a Russell Group university or land a well-paid job, but because they know learning is the surest route to them becoming free adults, whatever their disadvantages, wherever they started from.
I’m not expecting or looking for displays of humiliation or a public retraction, however amusing it might be, but if we are to move forward in a direction that allows schools and teachers to carry on working without being hamstrung by someone else’s moral conscience, then you cannot shy away from the inescapable conclusion of this new awareness: “social mobility”, as a working phrase as well as a concept, needs a decent burial. Let it go.
In its place, allow teachers to use the concepts and language they know about and actually deploy as professionals. Let them introduce that child to a subject they never even knew existed, because their experience, not some brightly coloured spreadsheet, tells them they will relish it. Let them discuss success and failure at every level; from the old-fashioned, bushy-tailed hand up in the classroom through the hours of painstaking effort some children will need to answer the same question, right up to high-stakes exam results, openly and honestly.
Give them opportunities to meet and debate the benefits of new ideas, in widely different types of schools, with children from widely differing social classes, of different nationalities and from other cultures, without feeling forced into homogenizing everything to the lowest, politically correct denominator.
Allow them to enjoy debate and discussion without fear of Ofsted, regional schools commissioners or other regulators forcing their own social and political agendas into their classrooms.
In short, let them educate those they teach.
I think the impressive rise and sheer vitality of grassroots teacher organisations and events is evidence of exactly this long-standing mismatch between the real professionals and their political masters.
The profession needs to wash its dirty hands of the crude politics that has tainted the lives of so many children for decades who, if they have any human rights at all, have the right to be educated, not indoctrinated.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author. To read more columns by Joe, view his back catalogue.
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