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Meritocracy hasn’t worked in Britain – it’s time for a radical rethink | Abi Wilkinson

child poverty
‘Child poverty has risen in the aftermath of the recession, with about 30% of young people now classed as poor.’ Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

When the British sociologist Michael Young first coined the word meritocracy, he didn’t consider it an ideal to aspire towards. In a satirical novel, he mocked the tripartite system of education first adopted in Britain in the 1940s – wherein children were assessed via the 11-plus exam and sorted into either grammar, secondary technical or secondary modern schools.

Decades later, he expressed dismay that Tony Blair had adopted meritocracy as a defining philosophy of the New Labour project, writing in the Guardian: “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.”

In 2017, meritocracy is still central to political conceptions of fairness and social justice. While Blair pursued the goal with genuine vehemence, you get the impression that successive Conservative leaders were just going through the motions. Under David Cameron, funding was slashed for Sure Start centres, schools and child social services. Theresa May continued austerity, while also concocting a plan to bring back the grammar school system satirised by Young – which most educationalists consider a failure, even accepting the logic of meritocracy.

A report released today by the Social Mobility Commission has confirmed what many people in this country already know far too well: social mobility policies have failed to significantly reduce inequality between rich and poor despite 20 years of interventions by successive governments.

The Time for Change report looks at policies introduced between 1997 and 2017, and assesses the effectiveness of interventions at four broad life stages: early years, schools, young people and the world of work. Young people and the world of work are considered the stages where policy is most lacking, but early years and schools are also rated as inadequate.

It notes that child poverty has risen in the aftermath of the recession, with about 30% of young people now classed as poor. Graduate employment for disadvantaged students, meanwhile, has “barely improved”, even though widening access to university is seen as a success for social mobility policies. It also observes that wages have stagnated in real terms, particularly for young people, and that the poorest are most affected by falling living standards.

The report recommends various measures to improve social mobility policy in the future and urges future governments to create a strategic, cross-departmental social mobility plan with 10-year targets. I can’t help wondering if a narrow focus on “social mobility” ensures that any such strategy is doomed to fail according to its own criteria.

When we talk about social mobility, we’re talking about movement between the strata of our social class system. (Generally upwards movement – nobody seems to want to discuss the fact that making room for people from poorer backwards at the top might necessitate others, born into privilege, travelling in the opposite direction.)

The ideology is meritocratic. It’s assumed that hard work and aptitude should be the only factors determining your future prospects. The goal of improving baseline living standards is framed mainly as a method of improving the opportunities of individuals born into poverty.

As long as class stratification continues to exist, though, opportunities can never be truly equal. The Time for Change report discusses the impact poverty has on children’s ability to learn but also notes that the best-paid jobs remain “deeply elitist”. Employers continue to hire in their own image, assuming that people like them will “fit in” with clients and the workplace culture. People continue to use their connections to give their children a leg up.

No amount of targeted social mobility or anti-poverty policy can truly mitigate the ability of class privilege to perpetuate through generations. And there’s a whole other moral conundrum around meritocracy that is another column in itself – about whether natural aptitude should mean you deserve a nicer life.

Instead of helping a portion of academically gifted children escape the constraints of their class, why shouldn’t we aim to reduce inequality across the board? That could mean expanding our conception of what should be considered a universal right – as the Attlee government did with the National Health Service Act of 1946. It might also involve working to create mixed communities, rather than continuing housing policies that geographically separate rich and poor.

More ambitiously, we could try to reimagine our economic system in a way that removes or decreases the power imbalance between people in possession of capital and those who need to sell their labour to survive – while also recognising the issues of stratification within each category. The Alternative Models of Ownership report produced by the Labour party offers some ideas about how this may be achieved.

Focusing narrowly on social mobility is like affixing a fraying rope ladder between the branches of a tree, when in reality the trunk is rotting from the inside and the whole thing needs chopping down. The British Social Attitudes Survey, also released today, has found increased support for state intervention and redistribution through higher taxes. More and more of us are recognising that the current system is broken – this feels like the perfect time for a radical rethink.