Introduction

My mother and father are both intelligent people who grew up in the East End of London. They both left school young, with few formal qualifications. Although they have had happy and fulfilled lives, I think they have both wondered at various points in their life what might have been if they had been pushed and encouraged at school. I see people of my parents’ age in the news all the time who are no more innately intelligent than them, but who, thanks to different circumstances of birth and education, have had many more opportunities in life. Education matters. And in modern Britain, all the statistics tell us that we are not much closer to a fair distribution of educational opportunity than we were in my parents’ day. For example, a 2010 report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission states that ‘educational attainment continues to be strongly associated with socio-economic background’, that ‘students eligible for FSM [free school meals] are only half as likely to have good GCSE results as those who are not’ and that ‘the proportion of young people entering higher education from lower socio-economic groups … remains substantially below that of those from professional backgrounds’. ¹