Improving social mobility will be booksmart Burnham's ultimate test - writes Tom Swarbrick
LBC's Tom Swarbrick has said that university is not the life-changing experience it once was
You can tell he’s an English graduate. There was the Prime Minister quoting Tony Harrison’s poem “V” in an interview the other day – predictably, perhaps, the line from Arthur Scargill about the need to master words.
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An apt poet to quote, though, given the early direction of the government.
One speaks for the North, championing working-class identity and the ambiguous power of a university education both to generate social mobility and to induce a sense of betrayal: the other is Andy Burnham.
Burnham will no doubt have studied Harrison’s poem “Book Ends”, a melancholic description of the tormented silence between son and father at the death of Harrison’s mother.
In that silence, the graduate and poet Harrison laments the gulf created by his university education between him and his father. He describes the difference between them as not the thirty years in age but “books, books, books”.
In a line that perhaps sums up both the socially mobilising upward force of university, and the “left behind” condition of parts of working-class England, as identified by Burnham, Harrison says: “The ‘scholar’, me, you, worn out on poor pay”.
This was written at a time when, as was the case for Burnham, a university education could transform the life-chances of many a working-class teenager. Understandable then the drive to get as many school leavers as wanted to - or felt they had to - go to university to give them the chance of a better life, of not being worn out on poor pay.
And yet.
What would Harrison write now of the graduates who make up 15% of the nation’s 1m unemployed young people? Unable to find what we used to call “starter jobs” in pubs, cafes, hotels or shops?
The terrible irony is that it now may well be the “scholars” stacking shelves, worn out on poor pay.
It is a terrible reflection of our time that a university education is not turbo-charging the engine of social mobility as it once did.
It’s a tragedy that 42% of 25-year-olds are still at home with mum and dad and that, while in the 90s, 43% of 25-year-olds owned their own home, that number is now just 18%.
Can the technical and vocational qualifications Burnham is championing create the kind of opportunities that saw bright working-class kids become scholars or Prime Ministers?
If it doesn’t, we will have a country that will have failed a generation.
Young people locked out of the housing market, unable to gain the experience of work, trained, expensively, for jobs that no longer exist or for employers who no longer want them. Educated in lecture halls for a world that doesn’t require them in the way they once did.
The betrayal Harrison wrote about, of an education that gentrified the clever working-class kids, one that dragged them away physically and socially from the areas they were brought up in, has morphed into a different kind of betrayal for a new generation. One which advertised a better job, a step-up, a sharp elbow on their way to success but that, for too many, has not materialised. Not just worn out on poor pay, these “scholars”, but saddled with gargantuan levels of debt too.
Harrison concluded that the divide between him and his father was created by his academic ascent to university. Burnham now sees the modern-day version of this divide. A chasm that has now grown between the traditional post-school educational route and the opportunity for many of those graduates to succeed. He, like Harrison, has concluded the divide is “books, books, books”.
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Listen to Tom Swarbrick at Drive, weekdays from 4-7pm on LBC.
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