“This government’s priorities are those of ordinary, working-class people.” If one were to generate a word cloud of Theresa May’s recent speeches, in which she has committed her government to expanding faith schools and selective education, “meritocracy” would appear in 20ft-high letters, but alongside it, and barely any smaller, would be the phrase “working class”.

I cannot recall the last time a Labour prime minister, let alone a Tory one, was so specific in talking about the working class. Instead, British politics has been treated to a parade of euphemisms to tell us who governments wanted to talk to, some not a million miles away from The Thick of It’s infamous “quiet bat people”. To see a prime minister draw so strongly on class language is therefore novel.

It is also important, because class language is so powerful in English politics. One could even say that to be English is to be class conscious: it is a source of a huge amount of our culture, humour and debate. Class is why it’s funny that Hyacinth Bucket pronounces her name like a bunch of flowers, why Lady Sybil Grantham’s romance with a revolutionary Irish chauffeur in Downton Abbey is transgressive and why The Royle Family takes place entirely in front a telly, while members of the actual Royal Family get married on it.

But for all that the English, much to the bafflement of our European neighbours and transatlantic cousins, talk about class a lot, what we say about it, and why we think it matters, is often confused. At policy level, and particularly in education policy, it is very confused indeed. In her speech launching her grammar schools policy last month, the prime minister actually acknowledged this.

Amid the announcements about selection and private school charitable status was a critique of the use of free school meals (FSM) entitlement as a definition of the working class and a suggestion that work is going on in the government to find a better statistical definition for this group.

Sophisticated grasp of class

Compared with other politicians who have trodden this ground, May seems to have a sophisticated grasp of class. The Education Select Committee, in the course of the last Parliament, wrote an entire report ostensibly about the underachievement of the white working class. The report baldly confessed that the statistical data was based on students entitled to FSM, but it further pointed out that this was not, by either a sociological or a common-sense definition, a description of the “working class”. Students are entitled to FSM if their parents are in receipt of state benefits related to income, a criterion that excludes almost everyone who is working.

FSM is a measure of economic deprivation, covering the very poorest in our society. Providing support to these families is obviously important - no one would suggest it is not - and the advent of the pupil premium to provide funding to schools teaching such students is welcome. However, these students do not come from the group that most people would think of when they hear the words “working class”. We know this is true because only about 15 per cent of students are eligible for FSM, but the British government’s statistical measures of occupation puts 36 per cent of the population in groups that might be described as working class.

To see a prime minister draw so strongly on class language is novel

Of course, one of the problems of class in the modern age is that it is not simply a quantitative measurement of social structure but also a lived experience. Few of those in leadership roles within the Labour Party - from its leader through to his team, to top union barons and the leaders of the many factions the party has developed - actually do a manual job, yet most will announce that they are “working class”.

The most recent British Social Attitudes Survey found a big gap between the numbers captured by the FSM measure and the numbers who believe that they are in the English working class - a gap not defined by occupation alone. A full 60 per cent of the population would define themselves as “working class”. And that number is broadly the same today as it was in 1983, when Britain’s economic landscape was littered with Ford factories, coal mines and shipyards. Those jobs have gone but the perception of class difference has remained. Interestingly, those who see themselves as working class perceive a far wider gap between the middle and the working classes than those who consider themselves middle class.

This matters: much of the conversation in English education about the achievement or otherwise of the working class, or the impact of given interventions on that group, are based on statistics that everyone freely admits actually describe a different and much smaller group. Moreover, membership of that larger group, in the public mind, is a matter of identification, not occupation - and those who do identify as working class perceive far greater gaps in living standards than those who identify as middle class.

Positive start

Therefore, May’s suggestion that the government is working to find a better statistical measure for the working class is important and should be welcomed. For example, the government holds within its databases information that simply needs to be linked up - pupil admission numbers matched to National Insurance numbers, for example, would be a rich trove of information. Encouraging more varied data to be collected is a positive start.

But there is more to this problem than just correcting the statistics. For a decade or more, the government has repeatedly and explicitly committed itself to helping the most vulnerable in education. This is a laudable aim, but the discourse around that mission has, time and again, conflated the small group at whom such help is aimed with a much larger group to which many people feel they belong.

Brexit should have provided us all with a warning that this larger group which, in general, asks for little from the government apart from decent public services and a chance to improve the lot of their families. Yet this group increasingly feels short-changed with what it gets for its taxes. It is this, I suspect, which underpins much of the May education agenda, and it should become an essential feature of all discussions of English education.

John David Blake is a history leading practitioner in a non-selective multi-academy trust and a writer on education. @johndavidblake