Recently though the British Government have published a report on the lack of social mobility in the UK, and offered recommendations for changing that situation. But what it found is relevant to the situation here because of the current ‘education’ debate with FF politicians saying that access to third level here has ‘mushroomed’ in the last couple of decades. What the Irish Times survey is about is access to ‘professional’ education and in turn, professional jobs.

Some of the key findings of the report include:

# Tomorrow’s professional is growing up in a family that is better off than 7 out of 10 families in Britain.
# The typical doctor or lawyer of the future will today be growing up in a family better off than 5 in 6 of all families in the UK.
# The typical journalist or accountant of the future will today be growing up in a family better off than 3 in 4 of all families in the UK.
# The typical engineer or teacher of the future will today be growing up in a family better off than 2 in 3 of all families in the future.
# Over half of professional occupations such as law and finance are currently dominated by people from independent schools which are attended by just 7% of the population. 75% of judges and 45% of top civil servants were independently schooled.
# A typical professional born in 1958 came from a family that earned 17% more than the average family income; but by 1970 the family income gap between those who went on to pursue a professional career and the average family had risen to 27% with journalism – along with accountancy – seeing the biggest shift to more social exclusivity.

Full report here.

It discussed in a recent Thinking Allowed show, with Richard Reeves, Director of Demos saying:

The one profession you didn’t mention that is dominated by independentally schooled workers is of course journalism the only area that had increased over that time. Even among…the discussion around this is controlled by people from that background.

Topic starts at 12.05. Reeves comment is at 17.40
Thinking Allowed

What I find remarkable is how terms like ‘feeder schools’ are common currency and used unreflectively (to talk about top feeder schools is also to talk about bottom feeder schools), as though children were some sort of raw materials to be processed in order to ‘feed’ the university system. This is nothing new, it should be said. Pearse noted in The Murder Machine that ‘Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions’. He was also observed that ‘The modern school is a State-controlled institution designed to produce workers for the State, and is in the same category with a dockyard or any other State-controlled institution which produces articles necessary to the progress, well-being, and defence of the State.’.

And that was more than 90 years ago.

As a teacher in a less “dominant” cachement area I’m sceptical that lists like these have any value at all. In the case of the IT list and this “comprehensive” adaptation It’s clear that its value is very narrow and in my view very calculated.

In my opinion these lists are created, designed, skewed and presented with one purpose only: To convince the average middle class IT reader that;

a) The fees they’re paying will get their kids into the universities that they value (UCD and TCD)

b) To convince those who are outside of that system and cachement area that the status that fees buy is worthwhile.

In other words making those shelling out feel better about doing it and those not shelling out feel bad about themselves. In a word: Marketing.