We know that social mobility does happen, but not all that much:
Children in England who receive free school meals go on to earn less than their peers, even when they achieve the same qualifications, with half of them earning £17,000 or less at the age of 30, according to research.
So, folk who are defined as poor at one stage of life are likely to be so at another. We might even wish this to be different. But it is, and it’s largely the same everywhere too.
Stop free school meals then – simples!
When I was a lad the kids on free school meals were those from single parent families. What are the criteria now? Low incomes, unemployeds, people with massive broods I would think. Seems to me there’ll be a lot of confounding variables.
Gosh, it’s almost as if there was some mystical quality that made offspring resemble their parents.
I propose that we call it an inherited characteristic. Can I have my Nobel prize now please?
What Tim the Coder said, in spades. So, now can the government please stop wasting our money on useless ‘social mobility’ schemes?
I have mailed Tim the Coder his well-deserved Nobel Prize for his excellent discovery of genetic inheritance influencing success in life.
I suspect the schools,being run by Marxists also suppress any aspirations that the youngsters might have.
I lived quite near the school, so went home at lunchtime and ate beans on toast, otherwise I’d have had free school meals.
I suspect the schools,being run by Marxists also suppress any aspirations that the youngsters might have.
There was a woman I knew in the Fatcher years. Taught what would have been infants back in my schooldays, in Haringey N London. Multi-ethnic area. She was proud of concentrating on teaching the kids poetry, painting pictures & other arty stuff. Reckoned there wasn’t any point in teaching them arithmetic etc because they’d never have jobs anyway. Although she, being in my experience functionally innumerate, would seem to prove otherwise. She was technically at the top of her profession ( although I presume that’s on a years counted metric). Met a few of her teacher friends at the time & they all seemed much the same. And yes, Otto. Card carrying Young Communist turned Labour councillor.
So those will be the kids now turning up on surveys as having failed to be socially mobile.
“achieve the same qualifications”: is that in the sense that A-levels in Maths, Physics, and Chemistry are the same as A-levels in drama, dance, and dreaming?
As a nipper I went home for lunch. But then Mum went back to her teaching job so I had to have school meals. They were the most disgusting slop outside of the Gulag, together with fearsome dinner ladies to make sure you ate every mouthful. Not a fun time.
Aha, here’s a social mobility tale.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/19433961/keir-starmer-hid-secret-land/
I was born in North West England and my parents had me at 19 (Mum) and 21 (Dad). Mum had been training as a nurse before I was born but gave up for full time parenting. My Dad was a welder which wasn’t well paid (he should have trained in pipe fitting as well which would have been more money).
We lived in a static caravan when I was born before moving to council housing. In school I was on free meals.
I went to Uni (as did my two younger siblings) and got a decent STEM degree. By the time I was 30 my annual remuneration was £66k which when inflation adjusted is £117k in today’s money.
You could say I was one of the lucky ones, but I think it’s more down to upbringing – my maternal grandparents were working class but worked hard. Paternal grandparents were Irish farmers. They brought up their kids in an era when you didn’t claim everything off the state and saved for things you wanted. They brought up their kids with the same values.
If my parents couldn’t afford something for us, we didn’t get it (no expensive trainers and the like). When we were old enough, Mum went back to college, trained in a medical field and went to work in the NHS until retirement age.
I hate working with a vengeance and I’ll be retiring ASAP (roll on 55!). Along with that I have a visceral hatred of the waste in the public sector when I’ve been taxed so much through my working life. Often think I should have just not bothered and tossed it off on benefits instead.
They could fix this problem by giving all these socially immobile folk senior jobs in Whitehall. They couldn’t do any worse, and it would teach the present incumbents a lesson.
Dearieme – I took “even when they achieve the same qualifications” to mean that GCSEs and A levels are worthless in the job market.
What’s not remarked upon in the article is whether despite the earnings gap did the lower earning kid get ahead in life. It’s long been understood that the rich kid who went to prestigious schools will likely earn more during their life than the working class kid who went to state schools, but the test is whether the working class kid moved further along than he would have otherwise. Ironically, the rich kid may well earn less than his parents who were able to afford to send him to such schools, possibly making him downwardly mobile, though who really cares? It’s the working class kid who might be more likely upwardly mobile.
Guardian shocked to discover that throwing free meals at poor kids doesn’t solve all the problems they face.
Progressives really are morons.
Of course they could stop the middle class job creation scheme that is mass tertiary education which coupled with its allied ‘you must have a degree to work above this level of the organisation’ ethos, prevents the bright working classes ‘getting on’ via actually doing a job and being spotted as talented and working their way up the organisation from within, with some part time (evening classes) education along the way. But that would expose the dim middle classes to competition from the clever working classes, and that would never do. Just as the middle classes made sure the grammar schools were abolished so the working classes could be kept away from any decent education, they have now ensured that credentialism is the only way to get into the ‘good’ jobs, and thus ensure the oiks are kept in their place.
Jim
Agreed, credentialism is a scourge. A PPE degree (sociology akshuallly) should disqualify anyone from anything, let alone being Tory PM. (Both candidates, groan.)
Interestingly, a lot of software firms refuse to hire anyone with a “computer science” degree. Good for them. Hope others will follow their example.
@Dearieme
Labour love to embarrass Tories who don’t know the price of a pint of milk; perhaps there’ll be less of that now that their leader has admitted not knowing the value of his own seven acre development site, sorry donkey field, in Surrey.
Philip: Having done a Computing Science degree and having spent three years wondering “when are we going to do some, yknow, *actual* computing?” after having spent the previous six years building my own computer hardware and programs, I agree. I was really puzzled by the absence of similar “computing” enthusiasm as me in my fellow students.
It was only years afterwards that I realsed that “computing science” is essentially “office admin” – how to type, today’s equivalent of 19th century “how to use a pen”. “To get a job you’ll need to know how to C19th:read C21st:type”. What I and my contemporaries (and the bloddy careers teacher) called “computing” we should have been calling something like, well I still don’t know. But we thought we knew. To us designing and writing *computer* code, building *computer* hardware, was “computing”. And NOBODY TOLD US OTHERWISE.
I was gobsmacked years later when I realised that what I should have done at uni was anything called Engineering, specifically *ELECTRICAL* engineering. Yerwot?!?!?!?!? I don’t want to go to uni to be an electrician, I want to program computers!
But that’s the problem. “Programming computers” isn’t “computer science”. “Computer science” is how to *USE* the bloddy things, not how to *create* them. Who on earth at the age of 18 thinking “I wanna ‘do’ computing” would be looking in the prospectus underneath “electrical”?
I really want to find a time machine and go back and beat academics with a big stick and get them to name their degree courses correctly.
“As a nipper I went home for lunch. But then Mum went back to her teaching job so I had to have school meals. They were the most disgusting slop outside of the Gulag…”
I ate seconds … truth be told, would have eaten thirds.
Mathematicians make the best programmers in any case.
phillip,
“Interestingly, a lot of software firms refuse to hire anyone with a “computer science” degree. Good for them. Hope others will follow their example.”
I’ve never heard of that, or gone that far, but I’m sceptical about it as a subject. Most graduates aren’t taught by practitioners, but academic, and a lot of the subject matter is irrelevant to 90+% of software development. I’ve seen degree courses that teach C++ or the mathematics of public key crypto and sure, there are people who need this but most software developers don’t.
Software development should be like chefs who go and do a year at catering college, learn the fundamentals and then go and work in a company and grow that way. You need about a year to learn the fundamentals of computing, how to program, how to test software etc. The degrees can never prepare people for work because it’s so different depending on the domain. Like, for low-energy solar-powered systems is different to massive cloud computing. If your software can kill people (like avionics) that’s a whole different world to building lolcats.
Philip, jgh: I could not agree more.
At the start of the 1980s serious universities refused to offer computer science undergraduate degrees because it was felt that the discipline lacked enough substantive knowledge to occupy three years of rigorous academic study.
By the mid 1990s, when I was an aspiring practitioner (a one eyed man in the Kingdom of the Blind), I was shocked to discover that former polytechnics(*) were teaching object oriented programming in C++ to classes composed mostly of students who had not grasped basic algorithmic thinking. These naive, execrably-taught students would go through rain dance rituals (“now I need to define my getters and setters…”) when they completely lacked the ability to write (or even read) a Pascal-style program anywhere near large or complex enough to recognise the (scale-driven) motivation for the C++ features in which they were being drilled.
Perhaps the underlying principle is that the definition of a mature discipline is one for which historical recapitulation has ceased to be the obviously optimal pedagogic strategy.
(*) Hatfield Polytechnic (University of Hertfordshire) was the sole honorable exception in my experience.
My computer science degree involved a fair amount of maths (formal logic and numeric computing), operational research (travelling salesman problem) as well as programming (starting with Pascal) but also a long list of others – C, Lisp, SmallTalk, Fortran, Ada, Occam and others.
What it wasn’t was a programming course – for that you’d probably have wanted something with “software” in the course title.
As for the “science” part – where do you suppose a lot of the research into the likes of computer vision (ANPR for example) and machine learning came from?
@ Philip
Degree courses always teach things of little value to most students. Computer Science isn’t going to be any different.
I do however wonder how a new computer science graduate would respond if asked what must happen in an executing C or C++ program before main() starts.
@ AndyF
They’d probably say “why does it matter” and if pushed, go to StackOverflow for the answer – https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53570678/what-happens-before-main-in-c
My late missus did Comp Sci in the late 1970s early 80a at the Technical Uni in Vienna. She learnt Ada and Cobol as well as the mathematical structure for proper logic constructs and a lot of philosophy. I still have her dissertation somewhere, she had to design a word processor for a /390 style block oriented mainframe. It is bloody clever stuff, leaves me in the dust.
Thanks everyone.
I was getting a bit freaked out by son 3, who turned down an offer for aeronautical engineering, and now looks like skipping a level 6 apprenticeship with BT. (Hard to get, when they stopped the programme for 2 years due to you know what.)
Now hustling software development work, says it’s going OK, making more than his older brothers. (?)
Anyone looking for a contractor for a project, get in touch via Timmy. Be assured he has no formal qualifications whatsoever, apart from the bacc.
‘Computing’: as jgh says a fancy name for modern office work.
‘Programming’: a craft best learnt by apprenticeship though the very best tend to be self-started if not self-taught.
‘Computer Science’: mostly a form of applied mathematics but with better chances of funding.
Long ago in undergraduate days: I and a couple of classmates were being driven somewhere by a chum who was studying Civil Engineering. He interrupted our conversation about something we’d recently been lectured on. “All very scientific” said he “but there’s no point being as scientific in Civil Engineering. However clever your calculations you have to remember it’s Paddy who builds it.”
Can anyone can suggest a more Woke way of making his point?
What if, for kids at the junior/senior high school level, they’re given some odd jobs to do right after school for one hour at a wage substantial enough to afford breakfast and lunch the next day?
I can imagine the left would have a field day with the “exploitation” accusations, or arguments from the labor unions about taking work away from janitors, etc., but simply having the students help with cleaning the cafeteria, mopping the hallways, filing in the administrative office would be a good way of reducing the shame of getting free meals. They could just pay with cash instead of an embarrassing card or ticket.
These jobs could be available to anyone who wants it, not just students from low-income families, so there would be less isolation from other classmates. And in dangerous neighborhoods, it can keep at-risk kids off the streets a little longer. Most importantly, it gives them their first job so they can have a track record before going into the real workforce. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some schools already using this idea. I remember working at the school concession store during a portion of lunch period back in high school, though I only received credit for marketing class instead of actual wages.
As for our cafeteria food, we had any awesome fast food you could want. Pizza Hut pizza, chicken patty sandwiches, pizza burgers, fried fish sandwiches, pierogis, bagels with cream cheese, spaghetti and meatballs…and that’s before you get to the healthy stuff. Thank God I went to school before Obama came along. Kids were posting images of their lunches online, Michelle’s initiatives failed so miserably:
Just Google Image “Michelle Obama school lunch.”
Dearieme
A few years ago I met up with an old pal from undergrad days who was a Civil Engineer and had been working in Bongo Bongo Land. We told him about the IT project that we were on and what a disaster it was ( we got it working, but it was really really badly designed ).
So he wanted to know why these projects were all crap. One of the other guys had this sussed.
“Well, if you have a valley, you know its width and what the ground is like and there are set calculations you use to build a bridge over it. With IT there are two fundamental questions that have to be answered every time a project starts –
The Wheel : what does it do and what shape should it be ? “
Ottokring,
There are 3 big problems with IT projects
1) Bad scope/requirements. Users go into it without a good grasp on what they want built, keep changing their mind
2) CV Building. There’s incentives for software developers/managers to use the latest stuff to build software with. They will aim to work with the cool new thing to boost their CV, if possible. This is very wasteful as they’re on learning curves.
3) Overabstraction. People who don’t just build what the customer asked for, but try and build their own personal glorious thing.
What smacks my gob is that I work with people in their 20s who have been told to spend 30 grand getting a “computing” degree in order to go into a job changing printer toners and resetting passwords.
‘Programming’: a craft best learnt by apprenticeship though the very best tend to be self-started if not self-taught.
Fully agree. If you haven’t already been doing self-taught projects for years before you start, you’re complete unsuited. I was amazed that almost all the people on my “computing” course had never touched a computer before starting.
If you want to be a vet you need to have spent your teens hanging around the local vet’s doing vetty dogsbody stuff, if you want to be a chef you should have been enthusiastically cooking for your friends and family, if you want to be a writer/artist/musician you should have been writing loads of writing/painting/music. I spent three summers before univerity doing work experience in the local hospital medical physics department actually building actual computer hardware and actually writing actual computer code to manage it, building on the self-built stuff I’d been doing for four years before.
And Agile is for monkeys.
(If you’re not a software developer it mightn’t mean much to you. Take it to mean that the rot doesn’t stop at graduation.)
@ Ottokring
One of the best programmers I knew was a Chemical Engineer
@ dearieme
You still need to be scientific when designing a civil engineering job, but you the Victorians then added in a safety margin of c.100%, not so much for Paddy who usually worked hard for his beer as for the variable quality of the materials (I’m not referring to idiots using flettons instead of engineering bricks but for the varying strength of the stone blocks, steel girders, timber, and especially things like the lower strength of concrete poured when it’s raining).
So the answer is that “Precision is not the same as accuracy and you need to build in a safety margin to allow for errors in your data.”
@ Tim
According to the article, guys who went to Independent Schools earn more but only after the age of 22, when the cleverest ones complete their second degree (and those who took a “gap year” complete their first).
What does this tell us? That the upper-middle class give, on average, more priority to completing/optimising their education than leaving it in order to start earning money.
The Grauniad tries to put a spin on the data, but the shape of the graphs show it is wrong.
(*) Hatfield Polytechnic (University of Hertfordshire) was the sole honorable exception in my experience.
Seconded.