Consumed: How Shopping Fed the Class System by Wallop Harry

Author:Wallop, Harry [Wallop, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-01-16T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

EDUCATION

Class war in the classroom. Can Britain ever be a classless society with a two-tier education system? We meet the Asda Mums again.

There are few Oxford colleges more elegant than Magdalen, which exudes an effortless, aristocratic superiority. It has its own deer park; a stunning bell tower from which its choir sings at daybreak on May Day morning; Edward VIII, Oscar Wilde, Lawrence of Arabia and C.S. Lewis are all alumni; the college can boast a greater number of Nobel Laureates than Ireland; it has won University Challenge more often than any other institution. It has never been the grandest of the colleges but there was always a sense that it was a cut above. It was a beautiful college for beautiful people.

So, there was an added spice when it emerged in the spring of 2000 that an application from an extremely bright, 17-year-old comprehensive school pupil from North Tyneside to read medicine at the college had been rejected. Her name was Laura Spence. And over the following months she was used by politicians and academics in an ill-tempered battle over elitism, Oxbridge and the standards of education. It was, and acknowledged to be so, outright class war. Toffs in their mortar boards and old school ties, sipping sherry, were ranged on one side, with ragged-trousered comp kids, waving the Communist Manifesto, on the other. Or so it seemed, so antagonistic were the arguments. It was not edifying, and came just three years after Tony Blair’s government had come to power with the key election manifesto ‘education, education, education’ and a promise that class divisions were well and truly over. But the Laura Spence affair, which had started off with just a small story in the local paper, underlined how the British education system could never be divorced from the question of class.

At first glance, it didn’t look good. Magdalen, which then had cocaine-snorting Lord Freddie Windsor as an undergraduate, had turned down Spence, who went to a comprehensive in Whitley Bay, a slightly down-at-heel coastal resort near Newcastle. Oxford’s undergraduate intake was made up of 47 per cent private school pupils, despite private schools only educating 7 per cent of schoolchildren. Spence was applying for medicine and appeared an ideal candidate to help redress the balance. She had already gained 10 A-starred GCSEs and was predicted to achieve straight As at A-level. She had, off her own bat, taken an Open University maths course to boost her chances. But it wasn’t to be, after she failed to shine in her interview, a notoriously tough exercise that favours, in the words of one Oxford academic, ‘middle-class bullshitters’.1 The rejection from Magdalen had come five months previously, but her headmaster, an American, persuaded her to feature in a local newspaper story after she had been offered a place and a £65,000 scholarship to Harvard following her A-levels. If America’s elite educational establishment could see her potential, why couldn’t Oxford? Her headmaster saw the case as simple, outright prejudice. ‘As an

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.