[Mrluvaluva]

From The Independent.

Brian and Chanelle are products of a school system that gave them neither knowledge nor aspiration
Published: 02 August 2007
Gordon Brown should be watching Big Brother. Series after series, the jeered-at, sneered-at reality show dramatises the latent tensions and tribulations within our culture - on class, race, gender - better than any David Hare play or Ken Loach film. This year, the programme has shown in cool 24/7 vision one of the trickiest problems facing the British education system - and if Brown is going to achieve his shimmering goal of "helping everyone to become the best they can be", he will have to take it on.

The two most educationally intriguing housemates, Chanelle Hayes and Brian Belo, were both 19 when they entered the house. They are the children of the schools system that Thatcher, Major and Blair built. Both have had grinding, bitter backgrounds: Chanelle's mother was a prostitute who was murdered by one of her "clients", and Brian's parents were too poor and distressed to care for him properly so they sent him into a succession of foster homes.

The press has picked out some of the most glaring gaps in Chanelle and Brian's knowledge and presented them as thick: Brian didn't know who Shakespeare was, and Chanelle seemed to think people could have kept dinosaurs as pets. But the reality is more complex - and more depressing. Actually, they are both unusually smart. In the intelligence tests given to all the housemates, they came up near the top, outperforming the average man in the street by a skip, a leap and a jump. They have shown throughout the series that in addition to being kind, gentle, decent people, they have a sharp intuitive intelligence.

The problem isn't their intellect. It's that they have been almost entirely failed by the schools system and the wider culture. Not only have they not been given knowledge, they haven't been given aspirations. Both could make great contributions in their lives, but Chanelle has been encouraged to think her highest aspiration should be "to be exactly like Victoria Beckham", a tedious, talentless stick insect who brags she has never read a book.

Brian has lower ambitions, still. He recently said: "I'd rather kill myself than watch a programme about politics." It reminded me of something the great war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once wrote: "People will often say, with pride: 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.'" Brian does care about those things, but he has not been equipped by the schools system or the culture - that's us - to see how they are connected to the arid thing he thinks of as "politics".

These aren't freak-show exceptions. I've recently been going to reunions for some of my schools (the joys of Facebook!) and finding out that too many of the clever, ambitious children and teenagers I knew have had their potential rolled up and packed away by a cultural climate that devalues and even derides intellectual success, along with the Thatcher-triggered collapse of social mobility. I can already see it happening with my oldest nephew who is just nine, growing up on a sink estate in the North: he is being discouraged by an anti-intellectual cultural cul-de-sac from developing his brain.

You can see this dynamic playing out in the Big Brother house: the delightful 31-year-old Greek housemate, Gerry Stergiopoulos, loves learning and is always trying to teach the other housemates interesting things, from Greek mythology to stories about the Second World War. He was initially bemused by the housemates' lack of curiosity about the world; then he was affronted when some of them started to call him "boring" and aggressively rejected new forms of knowledge, as if they were an insult.

So what went wrong for Chanelle, Brian and so many of the people I was at primary school with? The biggest problem is class polarisation in our schools, which has created a swollen subculture of anti-aspirational, anti-intellectual playgrounds at the bottom. We call our system "comprehensive schooling", but, except in a few isolated areas, it is not.

The children of the wealthy are educated in successful schools that select by mortgage price, and they encourage their students to aim high. The children of the poor - the Chanelles and Brians - are ring-fenced away in warehouse schools, where the sheer concentration of kids from disadvantaged and troubled families creates a resentful culture that shuns learning. The dynamic that you see in the house - sneering at Gerry's intelligence, and encouraging Chanelle and Brian to suppress theirs - happens on a grand scale in these schools.

One of the arguments for genuinely comprehensive schools - with a mixture of rich, middle-income and poor children - is that it prevents this culture from taking hold. My parents grew up in poverty and left school at 15, but the local schools they went to had all the local kids, of all backgrounds, so a ghetto mindset never set in. As a result, they were encouraged to respect and revere learning, even if they (scandalously) couldn't afford to pursue it, and it stayed with them throughout their lives. Where there are genuinely comprehensive schools like this in Britain today, like in Grampian, they get the best overall results. Where the schools are most socially segregated, in Kent, with its slew of grammar schools, the results are the worst, with the largest number of schools in special measures.

The reforms introduced by the Conservatives in the late-1980s then added another layer of injustice on to this socially segregated school system. They brought in financial rewards for the schools that got the highest league table results. This meant the schools with the richest children, scoring the best marks, received even more cash, and the schools with the poorest kids and the highest needs were given less money. In this bogus comprehensive system, the Government spent far less on the education of Brian and Chanelle than on two posh kids going to a leafy "comp" in Muswell Hill.

Labour has moved a few small steps in the right direction on the question of how money is distributed through the schools system, but on the more urgent challenge of reintegrating our schools - making sure that poor children and rich children end up in the same classrooms - they have done almost nothing. It was backbench rebels who managed to smuggle into Tony Blair's final education Bill the only nod in this direction: the option to allow councils to open the catchment areas for the best schools to poor areas, and select by lottery, not mortgage. Only Brighton has been brave enough to do it. The Government should be going further - and considering bussing to ensure a proper social mix.

The way to help the next generation of Chanelles and Brians to "be the best they can be" is to make sure they are educated in genuinely comprehensive schools - not the cruel, poverty-filled parodies of them they are offered too often today.

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