Dumb luck, nurturing, hard work: how class does not always dictate fate

In 1990, the Brotherhood of St Laurence began a study in the inner-city Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood and Fitzroy. Life Chances has echoes of the British Seven Up series, which has documented the lives of 14 people every seven years since the early 1960s.

The heart of both projects is class. Life Chances began with 167 babies born to wealthy parents, poor parents, middle-class parents, migrant and single parents. Its key question is whether we can trace – or even predict – from the circumstances of their birth what opportunities these children will have later in life.

The babies are now in their late 20s, and the Brotherhood has just released its 11th report, on the impact of advantage and disadvantage during the tricky transition from education to work. The answer to the central question, says Dr Dina Bowman, who heads the study, is that class does matter in Australia, but it’s not fate. Other things, some informal and some formal, play a role too, and that’s where policy can even the playing field.

“It shouldn’t be that the family you are born in to determines your life chances, but to some extent they do,” says Bowman.

Lives are not predictable, human beings surprise. “There may be a really good teacher. You might have access to a really good school. You could when you are first getting into work have a mentor and someone to support you.” Love and nurturing matters, and aspiration, and dumb luck, and hard work. Then there are what formal structures are in place, from high-quality education to services when families are in crisis.

Take Kasey Hazelman, 29. When she was a baby, her family lived in the Fitzroy housing commission flats before moving to public housing in Benalla, a country town in north-east Victoria. Her parents had difficult upbringings – her mother was one of 13 children and was raised by her aunt, and her father took drugs at times.

There were seven children – three from her father’s earlier relationship. They were loved and cared for, but Hazelman remembers how tight money was. Her father was a shift worker and her mother stayed home with the children for many years, before working at local supermarkets. There were few holidays and no money for luxuries.

Kasey “hated exams” and left school before she was 15 to go straight to a full-time job in a café. She says her family circumstances motivated her to make money, to become independent.

“I suppose I’ve learned from mum and dad what not to do,” she says with a laugh. “When I was younger, it probably limited me a lot … we never we never had money, but that’s why I always worked. If I wanted a nice skirt, I bought it myself ... Mum always paid for our food of course, but if wanted clothes and things like that, we had to pay for it ourselves or we wouldn’t get it.”

Earlier this year, she bought a boutique for $63,000 outright – she doesn’t like debts – and she and her husband Nathan, an electrician, have bought a house in Kyabram and are now renovating. She works a second job managing a bar two nights a week and the couple are hoping to have a child next year.

“I think we’re pretty lucky to be in Australia,” she says. “People just need to get off their arses I reckon.”

The study presents a complex and subtle picture of class in Australia. These children grew up in the 1990s, a time of dramatic economic change that included a recession. In Victoria, the Kennett government oversaw big cuts to government services.

The families in the study who were on low incomes were more likely to be led by a single parent – usually the mother. The parents were more likely to come from a non–English speaking background and have little formal education beyond year 10. By the age of three, children from low-income families were already being excluded from some participation in the wider world, with less use of paid childcare, playgroups and libraries.

Access to kindergarten was less likely for children from poorer backgrounds, mainly due to cost, and fathers were less involved with their children’s lives. As school went on, parents on low incomes had a tougher time affording school fees. Some children missed out on school and after-school activities such as sport and music and were less likely to have resources at home, such as computers. The children who did less well academically were more likely to be from low-income families, although it wasn’t uniform.

While 98% of students from high-income families completed the VCE (Victoria’s senior school certificate) and 86% in medium-income families, the figure was only 44% for low-income families.

The education equation

Anna Lam grew up in housing commission flats in Richmond with her mother and younger brother, Robert. Her mother, Hui Yi Chen, fled a violent relationship when Anna was about five, and she remembers staying at a women’s refuge for a time. The flats could be “pretty scary” and she recalls a stigma about living in public housing. But because there were so many children and the local primary school was so inclusive and diverse, it wasn’t something that bothered her. It was just her world.

Today, at 29, Lam is talking about her early life and influences at a primary school in Melbourne’s north. She’s a teacher of year 1 children, has bought a unit, is engaged to be married and is about to fly off for her first big European holiday.

What made a difference to her, she said, was her mother’s insistence that education was the pathway to independence.

“Sometimes she’d look at the homework and be like ‘oh that’s not enough, let’s go to the newsagent to buy those exercise books and with all those different worksheets’…. when we had parent teacher interviews, she’d go, ‘oh, what else could we do?’

“She always said that you need to finish high school and go to uni and get a job because I don’t want you to end up with nothing.”

Lam smiles about it now, but she looks back at her mother’s efforts with admiration. She supported her family by working long hours waitressing at restaurants. She insisted that Lam and her brother – now studying psychology at university – attend Mandarin school on Sundays. She took them to church – even though she was not religious – because it was a way for her children to meet people and learn values.

Thinking back, Lam didn’t feel she missed out on much – a government program helped pay for school excursions, for instance. She remembers a primary school drama and music teacher who took an interest in her, encouraging her to form dance groups and perform publicly.

“It’s definitely harder if you’re working class … when your friends have gadgets and you don’t, you kind of go, ‘Oh, I wish I had that’, but I guess I was a sensible child. OK, we can’t afford it, it is what it is.”

Bowman says the belief in education as transformative is powerful in Australia, but it’s complicated. The latest study identifies “smooth” and “rocky” pathways into work, and those pathways are linked to disadvantage.

It wasn’t just the economic privileges that helped those from high-income families, but the social and cultural capital – the assumptions that higher education was within reach and the connections that could help. Some young adults had experienced challenges – such as divorce or illness – but they had resources to cushion the impact.

Those who had a rocky pathway were more likely to have come from low-income families, possibly with unemployed parents, and to have missed out on extracurricular activities. They were also more likely to be men, with an equal distribution between Australian-born and non-English speaking parents.

Hard work matters, but there are those in the study who are smart and had family support but have been knocked around by circumstances. Bowman mentions one young man who had to contribute money to his family and so had to stop studying. Others have had housing problems and family breakdowns.

“Education is really important, it can be transformational, but the point is, it’s not transactional,” Bowman said. “It’s not OK to think, ‘I’ll go to uni and get a good job’.

“It doesn’t work like that. It’s all those other forms of knowledge, resources and networks that you need as well.”

Attitudes towards education varied, too. For poorer students, the study identified that higher education was a means to get a job, a pathway to economic security. For those from better-off families, university was part of a long-term strategy, to network, to understand the “rules of the game” towards a career. They were more likely to take time off to travel and study abroad.

‘I feel very lucky’

Nick Manzoni is on the phone from China where he is on a scholarship, studying a master of laws with contemporary Chinese studies. He’s here for a purpose. He and a friend, Eric Huang, run an online travel management company and they have ambitions to appeal to more mainland Chinese tourists. The course is as much about networking as the subject material.

Manzoni knows he has had advantages. “In Australia, yes, I’m a little bit privileged, but compared to say, coming over here to China and other people from all over the world, very privileged.”

He describes his parents, Alex, an academic, and Jenny, an occupational therapist, as hippies from North Fitzroy. His was a home water birth and, while the assumption was that he and his sister would attend university, there was no pressure. The children could be individuals – he dyed his hair blue until he was a teenager. “They (my parents) were very open-minded about letting me sort of experience my own mistakes and letting me learn from that.”

He began Mandarin lessons before he started school, played tennis and loved martial arts. And his parents could afford to set up a scholarship fund when the children were young, which helped Manzoni travel when he was at university. He attended a government primary school, then Wesley College, a prestigious and progressive independent school. He studied science at the University of Melbourne.

Manzoni says he has worked hard and forged his own path, but he acknowledges his parents’ contribution. When he was setting up his business, he lived at home, and last year build a self-contained studio on his parents’ property in North Fitzroy.

“I feel very lucky” he says. “I can compare myself and my opportunities and experiences to a lot of other people my age or older than me, and I just see how much easier it is. But how much I’m able to do, I guess, is about is my ability to get things done (and) I think that’s quite high.”

Bowman says one of the interesting things about the study is how rarely the young adults consider structural issues when describing their chances in life.

“We think it’s because they’ve grown up in an era where it’s all on the individual – the shift of risk and responsibility has been onto individuals. Working hard is really important, trying is important, no-one would deny that, but there are many people who work hard, try hard, but still can’t succeed because the odds are stacked against them.”

The structural factors include a transformed labor market, where entry level jobs are harder to get, and employers assume applicants will have higher qualifications. Under-employment and insecure jobs are common.

Then there are relatively new pressures, such as housing.

“The issue around home ownership, housing affordability, these are things that reinforce inequality because if you’re lucky enough to be able to live with your parents in an inner-city house, that’s quite a different circumstance from your parents renting, or if you haven’t got anything to fall back on.”

She also notes that the idea of adulthood has changed. Even in their mid to late 20s, many of the study’s subjects are just beginning their careers, having worked in casual jobs for many years.

The study has been able to keep in contact with 135 people in the original group of 167 babies – a good retention rate – and will keep going as long as the participants are willing to talk about their lives twice a year and if funding can be secured.

There is nothing else like it in Australia, Bowman says. It’s not representative, because it only recruited families from inner-city Melbourne, although many have moved interstate or to the country. But it does give a longitudinal picture of people’s lives, what they started with, and how that influenced their chances.

A child with a family that has financial resources has always had a leg up, but Life Chances shows how and why, and what can make a difference for those without those early advantages. It points to which policies can smooth the path – a good education and health system, quality mentoring and career advice, and housing policies that don’t add stress to people already overcoming hardships.

The risks, and the pathways, are there, Bowman says.

“It’s undeniable that investment in people pays off.”