Why Do People Pretend to Be Working Class? (Your Radical Questions with Sophie Pender)

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0:47Amol Rajan:Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions. This is where I put your questions to one of our supreme radical guests. And this is my last radical guest on this podcast and it's a really special one. It's your chance, by the way, to engage really directly with the super smart, interesting, influential people that we have on this podcast and ask them about their radical ideas for the future. And here on my last day, I'm thrilled to report. You've probably heard her on Thursday's episode. If you haven't, you've got to go back and listen to it because it was fantastic. It's the founder and chief executive of the 93 % Club, Sophie Pender.

1:22Amol Rajan:Hello. How are you? Back again. Back again for more. Can't get enough. The 93 % Club is named after the approximately 93 % of the British population that is educated in state schools rather than in private institutions. Its aim is to basically empower that 93 % of people in the same way that alumni of private schools have traditionally done by providing career networks, a supportive community, social capital to help people break into top professions and perhaps as a result to make the idea that we should phase out and eventually abolish private schools go from being radical to mainstream. If you want to hear us talk about those issues, as well as bigger things around class and family and privilege and networking and education and Sophie's amazing story, please do go back and listen to Thursday's episode.

2:06Amol Rajan:But now for the last time from me, I would like to say to my guest, Sophie, are you ready for some radical listeners? Ready for it. Well, our first question, this is special because this comes from someone that I didn't even know he was going to send in this voice note, but that's how joined up we are. Someone, a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, very influential academic who I mentioned on Thursday's episode. He is the author of two books, co-author of a book called The Class Ceiling and co-author of a book called Born to Rule. It's a professor at the London School of Economics who I featured in my documentaries.

2:38Amol Rajan:It's Sam Friedman, whose book Born to Rule does some data analysis tracking the British upper class from the 1890s to the present day. And this is Sam Friedman. Hi, Sophie. Hi, Amal. Thank you, Sophie, for all your great work in this space. My question is about the disconnect between class and social mobility is something we measure and monitor. and class and social mobility is something we feel as an identity. And Britain's really interesting in this regard. Despite people like us revealing the various barriers that those from working class backgrounds face in getting on, working class identities remain really popular.

3:16Amol Rajan:In fact, we know that even among people in middle class professional jobs whose parents also did similar middle class jobs, around a quarter still curiously see themselves as working class. And this is even more acute among our elites. In our recent book, we found that over 40 % of people who told us they're from working class backgrounds actually come from solidly middle class backgrounds. Now, some of this obviously reflects the messiness of class identities, personal histories. But my question is whether Sophie thinks that this also maybe partially reflects a tendency among many in the UK, whether conscious or not, to deflect or downplay their privilege, to cast their own trajectory in a more meritocratic light.

4:00Amol Rajan:And if so, whether she thinks this might skew our understanding of the state of social mobility in the country. Thanks. He's just got that gorgeous lecturer voice, doesn't he? Sam is such a... He's got such a lecturer voice. He is such a smart guy. And his two books, I mean, you'll know I recommend them because my name's on at least one of them. And I think maybe the back of the other. It's a really interesting thing about how people project themselves. Let's just pick up the end of that. This idea that basically there's a tendency among many in the UK, whether conscious or not, to deflect or downplay their privilege to cast their own trajectory in a more meritocratic light.

4:36Amol Rajan:Have you seen that? I think the unkind answer would be that we're just a little more interested, aren't we? Background-wise. No, that's the unkind answer. But it's changed historically. The point of Born to Rule, which I really recommend Sam's book, is that it used to be that you kind of talk up your kind of credentials. You talk up your kind of class appurtenances, whereas now quite a lot of posh people talk them down and say, oh, I'm into football too. Yeah, so when I went to Bristol, everyone was wearing it. They'd shop in the charity shops. And I'd be like, I know you're rich. And I'm there in my little Ted Baker bag that I've saved up my salary for.

5:07Yeah, I think the sort of the, I guess the more empathetic answer is, I think, firstly, as Sam has said, class is incredibly messy and complicated. And I think this is really interesting when you come from a really big family. So just to take a, let's just take a scenario where you've got two grandparents who grew up working class, let's assume blue collar jobs. They have four kids who then grow up working class as well. But one of them breaks the cycle and goes on and gets a job as a lawyer. Let's just say that. then that set of kids has kids themselves and then you have one set of kids in the family that have grown up I guess solidly middle class with parents who have professional jobs but grandparents who grew up working class and then maybe the other three children didn't break the cycle of poverty and they also went on to have blue collar jobs so you can it's really possible that you have a scenario where you get a middle class family extended family and then an extended working class family and actually you grow up with your cousins and maybe like you know some of your summer holidays to Clacton because that's all you can afford.

6:07So class is really, really messy. Fluid.

6:11Amol Rajan:Fluid. But why would it, is it almost a sign of progress in your view that if, to take Sam's extraordinary statistic, in our recent book, he says, which is Born to Rule, we found that over 40 % of people who told us they're from working class backgrounds actually come from solidly middle class backgrounds. In other words, middle class people pretend that they're working class. Now that could be done for naive reasons. They might think they're hard up and actually it's like, well, no, you're not. but it could also be that it's somehow cool. There's a kind of cultural prestige or power to sort of cast yourself as being more working class than you actually are.

6:44Amol Rajan:Is there something almost admirable about that? That for years in Britain, Hyacinth Bouquet of Keeping Up Appearances fame wanted to be slightly richer and sound posher than she was. It was, you know, famously, she would say, the Bouquet residence, the lady of the house speaking, and it's like, your surname's actually Bucket. But like, actually now from Sam's work, people want to say, actually, I'm a little bit more, you know, rough around the edges. Yeah, I feel like if you get to take that, you don't actually get the poverty attached to it. It's probably doesn't feel great for working class people.

7:11But I do think to come back to the topics we explored on the podcast, it is a problem with we've got a segregated society where people who are middle class don't mix with people who are working class. And when VAT on private schools came out, I had so many debates of people who were saying, well, it's the ultra wealthy will stay in the private schools and it's driving the middle classes out. And my argument for that is that's good. If you've got a mortgage in this country and you have a car and, you know, you can afford to send your kids to private school and you're just on the cusp, you are still so much better off than people who are working class in this country.

7:45Like, I actually don't think the extent of poverty in this country is understood.

7:49Amol Rajan:Oh, it's four million kids in poverty. And there's millions of children that are hungry in this country that have mould bubbling away on their walls. It's amazing that we don't talk about them more often. are there any advantages to being working class better sense of humor

8:07Amol Rajan:maybe is it also is it also that i don't know if you ascend if you ascend the class ladder if you end up earning a six-figure salary in your 20s you've got a better story to tell you don't need to feel guilty about it maybe but i definitely would have taken the money growing up over a nice story it's not fun to not have money i don't know i i do think it's funny when people go if you're from a working class background you know if you're from a working class background like it's it's so people say well what does class even mean right and there's the really kind of you know the sorts of stuff that sam will talk about which is a really sociological stuff like parental occupation age 14 and you know what your parents did and where you're on free school meals and that i shouldn't do it in a funny voice because that's all like very sound stuff but there is also the cultural element right like when i went to uni what shows do you watch what uh radio channel where'd you go on holiday where'd you go on holiday what sort of things do you talk about how do you address people do you buy a round of drinks for people at the pub are you stingy are you not it's a cultural thing as much as it is so i do i you know i wouldn't change that culture for the world i think working class people are the most generous fun great group of people not to say middle class people aren't but it's just a different vibe entirely so i think there are definitely pros of being working class but you know money is always really nice and also it costs a lot of money being poor right you know these the way it costs to be poor yeah the way those disadvantages compound is huge sam thank you so much wonderful to hear from you mate and um best luck with the next book whatever it might be on um let's have another question from dr sue dunn hi sophie and amol i think the concept of social mobility should be unpacked a little sophie is clearly campaigning to increase the social capital of students from state schools at prestigious universities so that they can compete more effectively with privately educated graduates for higher status graduate jobs.

10:02Amol Rajan:However, many state school educated students come from well-to-do professional families, achieve well at A-level and enter good universities. So how does Sophie define social mobility and is it possible that the support her organisation provides benefits already advantaged students. Sue, thank you so much. So that's Dr. Sue Dunn. On the slippery concept of social mobility, very weird idea, very, very weird phrase. How do you define it? And is it possible that your 93 % club provides benefits to already advantaged students? Yeah, so glad this has been brought up because there's this new phenomena of people calling themselves socially mobile as if it's an identity characteristic and it's not.

10:45I really need to stop this. And actually I was guilty of this because I did a TEDx talk where I said how to become socially mobile. And that was stupid. I think I've accidentally caused a problem here. So social mobility is effectively the movement of people through social classes. And the best way to measure it is, you know, in terms of your life outcomes and chances, how do they look different to your parents, right? And if they're really similar, then you would say that you have low social mobility. And if they look wildly different, you would say you have high social mobility. The key thing about social mobility is that it's meant to work both up and down.

11:17We only ever talk about social mobility in terms of upward social mobility because people don't like the idea of people coming down. But we have a real problem in this country of actually the reason why social mobility is so stagnating is because people with influence and power already rarely ever fail.

11:33Amol Rajan:So this is what people talk about in terms of a sticky floor and a sticky ceiling. And all of the evidence suggests, and you get lots of evidence from Scandinavia in particular, that the countries that have the most social mobility are actually the most equal. Because if you like, the rungs on the ladder are closer together. but it is just a fact that for if you're going to have what they think of as zero-sum social mobility because you get different types for some people to move up others would have to move down there's another kind of social mobility which is what we had in this country in the post-war years which was changes to the labor market basically the whole of the economy seemed to move up you had the entry of women into the workplace you had all sorts of other revolutions going on and basically you could have the whole you know a rising tide could lift all boats as economists would say But zero-sum social mobility, where you have stagnation, which is what we definitely have in this country, for some people to move up, others must move down, which is awkward.

12:22Amol Rajan:Yeah, very awkward. And no one likes to say that, right? Yeah, yeah. Middle-class people have got to lose part of their perch, or rich people do. Does your organisation provide benefits to already advantaged students? Well, maybe. Maybe some of them is the blunt answer. When we look at our data, we have an overwhelming majority of students from state comprehensive, from free school meals and the key thing about 93 club is that the way that we market is for people that don't have networks so naturally we see a draw of people who have like historically felt isolated from communities so we actually have clubs up and down the country so it's not just russell group but i think it's really important to point out that we do tend to find more russell group students joining because if you think about it from their perspective they've done literally everything that they were told to do from a social mobility perspective and they get to uni and they're called a chav so they naturally feel more of a draw to join the 93 % club than for example some of my mates from home probably wouldn't join the 93 % club because they haven't lost their community yeah I think that's really key right is that our ideal membership are people who feel like they've lost their community and I think the other point is is that my interest in this subject comes from having mixed socioeconomic communities so if i just had a group of working class kids all together yes i think the collective progress would be stronger but actually it's way stronger when you bring in people that already have privilege okay um sue thank you very much indeed dr dunn here's a question from kate paradine again someone who i happen to know of a little bit though I've never met Kate because she is the boss of a remarkable charity called Voice 21 which works on something which I have taken a public position on which is the importance of oracy and particularly why how you speak and speaking clearly and confidently and fluently is something that can benefit kids from poorer backgrounds so Kate's question as the boss of Voice 21 a brilliant charity is about teaching.

14:23Hi Amel it's Kate Parazine CEO of the National oracy education charity voice 21 we believe that every child should be taught the speaking listening and communication skills they need to thrive in school work and life and to be able to speak with confidence in their own authentic voice what does sophie think needs to change about the way children are taught in state schools to make sure that the 93 can all fulfill their

14:49Amol Rajan:potential sophie pender oracy should it be taught i think it should be taught i think the government just introduced that to the curriculum. I think it's going to take a while to come in. Is it 2028, I think, is it coming in? No, no, but it is. 2028. Part of their plans, yeah. Part of their plan. Part of their plan. Part of their plan. Part of their plan. I think I should say, just in spirit of full, honestly, that's partly because of the campaigning by people like Kate Paradine. Yeah. And also, yeah, I mean, Voice21 is an incredible charity that we work closely with. Their founding CEO, Becky Earnshaw, is a very close friend of the 93 % Club and Kate does incredible work as well.

15:20Amol Rajan:Why teach RSC to kids from poorer backgrounds? Well, I think so much about, I mean one of the big problems that poor kids have and again you explored that in your documentary but this is why I said we could co-host this because I feel like you know as much about this as I do but one of the things that is prevalent in working-class communities is honestly the inability to put your point across and advocate for yourself and I've been thinking about this a lot like why is this are we just all like because working-class kids are not inherently less confident than middle-class kids right it's a different kind of confidence whereas middle-class kids know how to work a room working-class kids don't really see authority in the same way because we're not taught hierarchies like we don't really see people in that way um and when i went to university one of the things i really struggled with was that kind of seminar tutorial setup where you have to for the first time ever verbally say what you think about something and i think it's also you hadn't been doing that around the dining table with your parents exactly like no one had asked me what my opinion was in like years other than in a written format because if you start i mean if you ask if you ask the kids in my school like what's your opinion on things are you know nothing's ever going to get done because we're all just like excitable and shouting things out so yeah i think oracy is really important i will say firstly i do i i do take issue with the idea of you know what can state school teachers do better like those guys are dealing with some serious complex i mean as we've established like very big class sizes yeah well it's not just big class sizes but they're being social workers they're being told of you just do your job better and they're dealing with you know a huge kind of thing so oracy is obviously very important i think what we need to be mindful of and i'm not saying this is what oracy does i think it is hugely important again coming back to your documentary uh when i watched that excerpt of the kids who were being taught to balance books on their heads and talk a certain way and cross their legs a certain way to get that's different that's etiquette it is that etiquette etiquette is a form of social enforcement you don't get etiquette from poor people you get habits that poor people have etiquette is kind of what rich people expect in certain situations oracy is something slightly different which is fluency and communication which is just obviously necessary wherever you go whether you're going to go work for a law firm you're going to work yeah on the radio or you're going to you know or in a dressing room because you're a footballer and you want england to win the world cup if it were going to be taught something else is going to be cut right you know perhaps something else has got to go but would it be worth it because the value of kids i mean you got 3a stars and yet when you went to a seminar at bristol university it was a shock when someone said what you think yeah i also got rejected from oxford university so i sat with oxford you sit an exam so they do it opposite to cambridge so cambridge you get the interview and then you sit exams there oxford they do it the other way they filter you out first so you get um and i did that for other reasons i won't explain in terms of why i picked oxford rather than cambridge but i um sat the exam and submitted the written work and i got through to the final stage of oxford when there was 11 and you get um you have to meet the other people you're being interviewed with in this weird hazing where you stay there for three days and um there's 11 of us I think there were nine spaces on the course.

18:18So you really had to balls up to not get a spot. And they sat down and they asked me, well, what are you reading at the moment? And just the like the broadness of that question totally threw me. And I started talking about Harry Potter and the Lovely Bones, which was the honest answer. Anyway, the reason I say this is because I got four out of 10 that give you the marks that, you know, if you ask for feedback. And they basically were like, this was a car crash.

18:43Amol Rajan:Oxbridge colleges now would say they take tremendous efforts to try and make sure they don't discriminate against kids from state schools. Do you think this progress has been made there?

18:59I'm sorry. Yes. We'll take that as an answer.

19:04Amol Rajan:Why do you think Oxbridge colleges have not made tremendous progress on state school applicants? I mean, the numbers have improved. The numbers have improved. They're not 93 and 7. No, we're looking, I think it's like 34 % private school, 28 % private school and one or the other. I think Cambridge maybe is slightly lower, which is still over representative, by the way, which we seem to forget. I think it's a cultural problem. A lot of our students on campus really struggle with the culture because even though, even at Bristol, it was 40 % private school, 60 % state school. Like the, just how that culture can affect everyone else in terms of how you have to fall in line is really, it's really insidious.

19:40Amol Rajan:It's still terrifying for lots of people. I mean you come from some state schools you go to these colleges they just look imposing and terrifying and you meet people who are kind of imposing and terrifying you're told you're not allowed to work while you're there when I went for my interview we got showed around by someone who was a student there and obviously I had two part-time jobs at this point and they told me before I went into my interview oh by the way you won't be allowed to have a part-time job that will affect your studies and so obviously in my head I'm thinking how am I going to be on meal stamps and like I don't know how am I going to afford to live here so there's so much mental baggage doesn't put you in a great state of mind when they ask you what you're reading and then you give an honest answer rather than saying Chaucer or Tostoevsky.

20:13Amol Rajan:We're going to take a final question. This is the final, final, final question which I'm going to put to one of our radical guests during my tenure and it comes from Elizabeth Kent from Hampshire. Thank you, Elizabeth and I hereby bestow you the honour of being the final question and Elizabeth sent this in by email. Hi, Mo and Sophie. I've got two questions. Okay, two questions. First, when grammar schools are shown to provide strong educational benefits for bright children from poor families giving them the confidence of sound knowledge and the ability to learn and interact in a wide range of working environments, why was it made illegal to found new grammar schools in many counties in the UK?

20:48Amol Rajan:And also, when the UK has workforce shortages of highly skilled workers in technical and practical roles, why were the polytechnic institutions changed into universities? So, grammars and polytechnics. Grammar schools, Sophie Pender. Grammar schools. Well, I think it was at 5-6 % of the country go to grammar schools. So we're really talking about a small minority. and the original reason why they were, I guess, abolished or you couldn't make any new ones was this idea that you had a two-tier system where actually, again, thinking about brain drain, we spoke about that in the main episode, you were getting, I don't know, well, in theory, you'd get working class kids going on to learn at these better schools and then it would leave an effect of kids who maybe didn't pass the exams being left in these schools that weren't up for standards.

21:29But also you actually had a situation where a lot of the kids ended up going to grammar schools and the data still reflects this, do tend to come from more affluent backgrounds because there's an exam involved and you can chuck money at the problem. So I can...

21:42Amol Rajan:But grammar schools are not the solution now where they might have been in the past. Yeah, and I think there probably was a world where grammar schools were needed, right? Because you had a... Again, and a lot of these things, if you look at economics, right? People make choices. It's a bit like when smoking was banned and they set up the vape and then now you've got a vape crisis, right? People throughout time have tried to create solutions that then cause other problems and we're just playing whack-a-mole trying to solve things. So there definitely was a place for the grammar schools. I don't necessarily think grammar schools are the way forward because I think we need to be thinking about how do we create productivity in the entirety of the population, not just those who happen to be intelligent at that point.

22:19I don't know if I would have passed a grammar school at sort of 10 years old.

22:23Amol Rajan:But you went on to get three A stars, didn't you? Exactly. So I think there's loads of examples of people who, through early child development, take a bit longer to catch up. And so actually we need to be thinking about not separating kids further. So the cliff edge is not the way to go. What about this happened towards the end of the 20th century, the kind of mass transformation of many polytechnics into universities. People say not only are they sort of not universities in the sense that they don't necessarily be to the same academic subjects, but actually there was a kind of implied rebuke to vocational education there.

22:53Amol Rajan:There's an implied thing of saying, you know, it's not cool to do technical stuff. Shouldn't polytechnics be polytechnics? I think that's what Elizabeth's getting at. Well, I think the reason they turned them into universities again was that there was like a two tier system where if you were said to go to a polytechnic, you were seen as a second class citizen. So it all again comes back to snobbery in this country. I think that, you know, I don't know if we should turn those universities back into polytechnics because I actually think those universities are now offering. I mean, what were the universities that used to be polytechnics?

23:21I think some of them are actually pretty good universities. Right. So I wouldn't suggest they need to all be turned back into blue collar trade things. But what I would say in this country is that we don't have, we do have some vocational training, but actually, you know, what distinguishes us from America is America has a huge focus on adult learning, community colleges, technical skills. And that's because their economy looks different to us. We've historically been a services industry. So I think that that's not the solution. But I do think there is a world where we probably need to do more vocational training.

23:53But it shouldn't be along class lines. It should be along people who don't necessarily get along with the education system.

23:58Amol Rajan:It should be aptitude, not origins. Aptitude, yeah. That's a motto. Or people who just don't, you know, you can be a smart person who just doesn't like learning in a classroom and actually prefers being, you know, you want to be an electrician. That's fine. That's all right. Or a plumber. Or a plumber. Hairdresser. Hairdresser. Anything. Yeah, a lot of these things. Something you actually enjoy. Yeah, a lot of my mates who do those jobs, they're like really smart people. They're not, but smart in their own way. And actually they just enjoy not sitting behind a desk and getting, you know, back problems and all the sort.