Lower-income families may prioritise children’s happiness, but academic achievement helps create the economic circumstances that foster it
Daily Telegraph
If you’re interested in cultural differences within the British population, the work of the Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes is essential reading. Its polling, focus groups and interviews with white working-class children and their parents, reveals a fundamental cultural outlook that explains a great deal, not just about the educational and economic performance of those children, but about Britain’s current economic and political condition.
The key finding is that white working-class children and their parents are much less likely than everyone else in the country to think that passing exams and doing well at school is important. This is a class issue. Fifty-seven per cent of white ABC1 parents, otherwise known as the middle classes, say that achieving good grades is a key part of success. Only 34 per cent of white working-class parents say the same thing. The gulf of culture between those two groups is large and important.
In affluent and aspirational parts of the country, education is the true religion. Middle-class parents, almost always themselves degree-educated and employed in higher-income office-based jobs, will do almost anything to ensure that their children follow a similar path. How else to explain that despite the imposition of VAT on private school fees, demand for places at those schools has only fallen by 5 per cent or so?
This comes down to an eternal question: how important is it to be happy? The commission’s research showed that white working-class children and their parents place a greater weight on happiness than on educational success. “We [white working class parents] are more inclined for our kids to be happy than push them to be a doctor or dentist or a professional,” a West Midlands mother said in a commission focus group.
Strikingly, this prioritisation is shared by the people who teach the white working class. Eighty per cent of staff in predominantly white working-class schools named “being happy” as a sign of success, compared to 70 per cent of those working in other schools.
This is a challenging, even troubling stuff for members of the sharp-elbowed aspirational middle class. Would you rather that your children or grandchildren were successful in passing exams and getting good jobs, or would you prefer them just to be happy?
The pursuit of happiness in the lives of young people in Britain deserves more attention. There is a welter of evidence that our children are increasingly unhappy and unhappier than their peers in comparable countries.
This week sees the launch of the Back Young People Now campaign, created by the LSE academic Richard Layard, calling for greater emphasis on happiness in the lives of the young. In its inaugural report, the campaign describes schools becoming “exam factories – this ever-greater focus on test results is one reason why our children are becoming less happy”.
This is not hippy nonsense from anti-establishment radicals. Layard sits in the House of Lords and he is backed by Gus O’Donnell, a former Cabinet secretary. Many of the country’s most expensive private schools are keen to tell fee-paying parents that their money goes to support their children’s happiness and wellbeing, as well as a battery of A* grades.
There may even be a creeping convergence between the worldviews of the classes. For a growing number of members of the aspirational educational class, there are now creeping doubts about the value of passing all those exams to get into those prestigious universities, because this is no longer the guaranteed path to professional success and security. Is it really worth it any longer?
A combination of Britain’s sluggish economic growth and the arrival of artificial intelligence in corporate life has narrowed the pathway from good universities into secure, well-paid professional careers. Meanwhile, a glance across the Atlantic at the physical infrastructure required for the AI revolution suggests that it is the electricians and builders and heat engineers who build and maintain data centres who are the future of employment and aspiration.
If we really are heading into an AI-driven utopia (or hellscape, depending on your perspective) where tech does more and more high-skilled thinking work, then it is those who have practical vocational skills rather than degree certificates who will thrive? Maybe white working-class parents who place less emphasis on exam results are just ahead of the artificial intelligence-driven curve here. What’s the point of passing exams and getting a degree in a world where AI has eaten all the good jobs?
That is certainly a tempting narrative to accept. But still, we must reject it, as individuals and as a country. For all the uncertainty of AI and the economic outlook, it remains the case that people with higher qualifications earn more; that will remain so, even if some wage premiums are eroded by AI.
And as an advanced economy, it would be quixotic, bordering on mad, to respond to the economic changes delivered by an advanced technology by concluding that we don’t need to worry about increasing the skills and qualifications of our workforce. If anything, the AI challenge means we should be aiming higher still for current and future workers.
This does not mean more misery. Passing exams might not always lead to higher earnings, and higher earnings do not always make people happier. But being poor reliably makes them unhappier.
In Britain, on average, the poorer a child is, the more likely that child is to be unhappy. The OECD Pisa survey shows that the gap in happiness between economically comfortable and deprived children is widest in the UK of any European country. There is also considerable academic research to show that financial insecurity in childhood leads to lifelong unhappiness.
And for as long as it remains the case that passing exams and getting qualifications leads to higher incomes and more wealth, we should surely accept that academic success should be a higher priority for the education system than happiness, because success will help create the economic circumstances that foster happiness.
Seen from this perspective, then the cultural indifference to academic success among white working-class parents is not just a social problem for Britain, but an economic one. While we have a significant number of families who encourage their children to believe that it is not important to pass exams and climb the ladder of qualifications and earnings, our economy will underperform.
No politician will rush to say something so unpardonably middle-class and elitist, but changing the attitude of white working-class parents towards education and aspiration should be a national priority.
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