The best education begins in the home
Howard Williamson
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
A number of issues have converged for me in recent months. There was the Rowntree report on family relationships, and the Sutton Trust report on social mobility - or rather, the shocking lack of it. The German EU presidency culminated this summer in a congress on young people and strategies for social cohesion. And, just the other weekend, Lewis Hamilton came within a point of being crowned Formula One champion in his first season. This could almost be a quiz question: what is the connection?
When I was a student the concept of "social mobility" was a hot topic. The expansion of higher education and the introduction of comprehensive schools in the 1960s opened new doors of opportunity for young people, despite the persistence of barriers such as finance and family "culture". Education was the great hope.
This was echoed this summer in Leipzig inGermany, where the discussions I attended focused on improving equality of educational opportunity in some of the new EU countries, such as Poland.
Yet it became clear that policy rhetoric and new action plans to promote such equality were often undermined by commitments to the "marketing" of education. Government aspirations to provide equal access to decent educational experiences continue to be thwarted, in part, by the strategic activities of families who strive to maximise the life chances of their children. For example, they move neighbourhoods to a better catchment area; they support extra-curricular activity; they assist additional learning in the home. In short, they provide the right framework and engender greater competence and motivation when it comes to their children's education.
And this is where our new national hero and Formula One championship runner-up Hamilton comes in. It should be surprising that someone of his background should have made it this far, this quickly. His parents split up when he was two years old, but they both remained committed to his welfare and development. It is his father, Anthony, to whom he turns immediately after his racetrack successes.
The Rowntree report suggested that low achievement is attributable only to a small extent to the quality of schooling. The Sutton Trust argued that children from disadvantaged backgrounds start slipping behind even before school starts. If, therefore, we are not going to revisit the trajectories of contemporary education policy, this is compelling evidence for shifting our attention to supporting families.
- Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan, and a member of the Youth Justice Board. Email howard.williamson@haymarket.com.
