Bristol Good Morning Britain weatherman and presenter Alex Beresford has waded into a row over whether working class children should aim ‘lower’ than Oxbridge. The personality who grew up in Eastville hit out after the Government’s social mobility tsar has said understanding of the issue needs to move beyond a “rags to riches”, “Dick Whittington” approach.
In her inaugural speech as chairwoman of the Social Mobility Commission (SMC), Katharine Birbalsingh said society needed to move away from a model of social mobility where there is a “focus on big-leap-upward mobility from the bottom to the top in one generation”. And she said that in reality it wasn’t worth going for top universities like Oxford and Cambridge as it ‘isn’t a reality’ for youngsters from a poor background.
But Mr Beresford hit back on Twitter saying: “I’ve spoken to thousands of working class kids in schools about aspirations. I wouldn’t and will never dream of telling them to aim lower. Set your sights beyond the horizon if you so wish.”
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Ms Birbalsingh said there was a “definite levelling up aspect” to Dick Whittington’s mobility, growing up in Lancashire and having to “leave for London to make his dreams come true”, while social mobility should be understood more broadly in terms of “smaller steps” up the ladder.
Ms Birbalsingh said levelling up needs to “create more opportunity for more people in more places”. She added that too often, understanding of social mobility lumped the state-educated children of “one-parent police officers or primary school teachers or local government officers from Hartlepool” into the same category as the “elite public school-educated children of rock stars from Notting Hill”.
Ms Birbalsingh said it is important not to conflate social mobility and inequality, and to look carefully at all the evidence before reaching conclusions. She said: “If we don’t, we can quickly end up in a very dismal place with a slightly caricatured, binary view of society divided into two groups.
“A group at the bottom which has very little chance of improving their situation because it cannot overcome the inequality which separates it from everyone else, no matter what measures may be put in place to support their social mobility. And then there’s another group, which includes everyone who’s not in the bottom group, whose achievements and accomplishments are not attributed to their efforts, but are a by-product of their relative levels of privilege.
“Neither group has any agency - everyone is quite literally a prisoner of the circumstances into which they were born. So, we want to change that narrative around victimhood and make it so that people understand and are inspired by those who buck the trends and through agency are able to change their stars.”
Ms Birbalsingh said society needed to find a new way of framing social mobility. “If a child of parents who were long-term unemployed, or who never worked, gets a good job in their local area, isn’t that a success worth celebrating?” she said.
Ms Birbalsingh said: “For my top 5%-6% of children at school I’m really excited for them to be able to possibly get into Oxford or Cambridge. But I just recognise that for the majority of my children that isn’t really a reality, and that we’re too often distracted by that romantic Hollywood-type film of you’ve been born at the bottom and now you’re at the top and so on.
“When in fact most of us don’t actually even want to be prime minister and we don’t want to be millionaires - what we want is to be able to find a job where we can find purpose and fulfil our talents.” She said this was not about dampening aspiration for working-class pupils.
“I don’t dampen it at our school, most certainly. But it’s also the case that it’s important to remember that not all of us want to be bankers. We need to value a whole variety of different careers that are out there and options for young people.
“And valuing their talents, because not everybody is going to get top 9s in their GCSEs, not everyone is going to go on and do A-levels, and to then take the sort of condescending view of people who don’t do A-levels is wrong, because they are fulfilling their talents and doing something that’s got equal worth. “
Ms Birbalsingh, who set up the high-achieving Michaela Community School in Brent, was appointed as the chair of the commission in 2021. The SMC State of the Nation 2022 report will be published later in June, setting out a framework to revise how social mobility is measured.
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