Two housing nations

It was not only high teacher turnover and low professional morale that were at fault; housing and other policy trends had invisibly sabotaged the urban classroom. Unperceived by teachers and shrugged off by urban sociologists, a demographic landslide undermined city schools and community life. ¹ It was the same in urban school systems all over the advanced world; social class drift, not straightforward population movement out of the cities for employment and housing in new towns or regions, was the unpublicized villain behind the urban classroom crisis. In Britain government strategy for relieving city stress or over-population by diverting jobs to the ‘grey areas’ of traditional social neglect and chronic unemployment seriously misfired. Planners, housing experts and teachers unwittingly reinforced the concept of social mobility through housing and schools. In doing so they set off a population exodus which impoverished the cities and larger towns. ² London suffered the planned loss of one million people and several hundred thousand manufacturing jobs. ³ The capital remained an expanding market for office or services employment, for secretaries or bus drivers; but those were not the jobs the remaining workers wanted or had the skills to do. Other British cities losing jobs offered no alternative employment. Ensuring employment growth in Britain's depressed regions or populating new towns meant firmly discouraging business and industry from setting up or expanding in older cities. Government subsidies for developing economic life, Industrial Development Certificates (IDCs) or Office Development Permits (ODPs) became almost unobtainable. ⁴