Listen to headteacher’s lessons on social mobility

A well-heeled friend once told me she decided not to send her daughters to Dundee High School, her local, fee-paying secondary because they would just meet future doctors and lawyers.

How extraordinary, I thought; both that she wasn’t even contemplating her girls becoming doctors or lawyers themselves, and also that she felt their marriage prospects to professionals were beneath them.

Social mobility depends on where you’re starting from and for the privileged like my friend the only way up was bagging the son of an earl.

For the rest of us, though, doctors and lawyers represent solid middle-class achievement and aspiring towards such jobs is a worthy ambition.

But now, Britain’s social mobility tsar has said the working classes should be broader in their ambitions, and that meteoric social climbing for all is an unrealistic target.

Katharine Birbalsingh, the outspoken headmistress who was appointed to lead the government’s Social Mobility Commission last year, also said there was too much focus on Oxbridge, “making elite pathways for the few”.

“We want to move away from the notion that social mobility should just be about the “long” upward mobility from the bottom to the top – the person who is born into a family in social housing and becomes a banker or CEO,” she said in a speech to the Policy Exchange think tank on Thursday.

“We want to promote a broader view of social mobility, for a wider range of people, who want to improve their lives, sometimes in smaller steps.”

As usual, the teacher who was sacked for criticising the state of education in Britain and went on to found her own ground-breaking school dares to express opinions that are unfashionably rooted in common sense.

She ruffled feathers earlier this year when she said that girls might not wish to study physics because they disliked “hard maths”, and in 2010 she lost her job as a deputy head after telling the Conservative Party conference that state schools were “utterly chaotic”.

She will no doubt get into trouble again for seeming to suggest that some professions are beyond folk from some classes. But she is not saying that.

And she is certainly not saying that no child from a deprived background can ever hope to study medicine or law, and at Oxbridge, if they wish; there will always be exceptional individuals who soar above the hand fate deals them.

But for the majority, more modest outcomes can also signify success and it is unhelpful to impose the status symbols of the advantaged on the whole population.

This includes university. Arguing that higher education should be available to all youngsters should not imply, by default, that other options are in some way inferior.

Birbalsingh said widening university access has not always helped social mobility, another opinion that tends to excite controversy.

Yet we can see that worthless degrees (say, media studies) from so-so institutions raise expectations for competitive careers that remain out of reach, and therefore do little to advance social trajectories.

It would be better to equip school leavers with skills, through apprenticeships for instance, that will launch them faster into economic activity and self-reliance.

This goes for those children of the middle classes, too, who may not be academically inclined. It is not part of Birbalsingh’s remit, but there is social mobility downwards, where the offspring of doctors and lawyers (or the super moneyed) are discouraged from potentially well-paid trades and shoehorned into more socially acceptable professional roles for which they have no aptitude.

However, this demographic is, at least, more likely to have the safety net of parental support than those from underprivileged communities.

The key to lifting the most disadvantaged out of their circumstances is something Birbalsingh has long championed: a decent education.

Her Michaela Community School in Wembley, which she set up in 2014, has an intake almost entirely from challenging backgrounds but its exam results rank among the best in the country and Ofsted has rated it “outstanding” in all categories.

Birbalsingh, a notoriously strict head, insists on rigid behavioural rules, including a ban on mobile phones and on talking in corridors between lessons, and, according to reports, detentions are issued for minor infractions, such as forgetting to bring a pencil to school.

She also places great importance on the role of the family in educating children, urging parents to eat with their kids and make them do their homework.

By instilling what she calls her small “c” conservative values, which she has previously described as a belief in personal responsibility, respect for authority and a sense of duty towards others, she drives the children in her care to be the best they can be.

And that must be the ultimate goal of any government social mobility policy. If all schools operated under Michaela-type protocols – not so different from the original selective or grammar schools that weren’t dependent on affluent catchment areas and transported generations of poor children to higher plains – then we might not need a social mobility tsar at all.