That is why I was delighted when Andy asked me to write this foreword to his memoir, particularly as he writes so powerfully about a subject close to my heart: the unique ability of education to transform lives and to provide every child and young person with the same opportunity to succeed.
It is still the case that children’s circumstances—where they live and their family background—can have a disproportionate impact on their chances of success. That is why I have made excellence and equity in Scottish education the defining mission of my government.
Andy’s book sets out clearly the difference that a good education has made to his life, taking him from a working-class childhood in Accrington to emeritus professor at Boston College, a period as president of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement, and educational adviser to my own government. However, what really makes this book stand out is that Andy can look at education not only from the point of view of someone who benefitted from a first-class education but also as a teacher who worked in a range of schools and saw first-hand the impact that poverty can have on educational attainment. This understanding of the impact of poverty is strongest when speaking about his early teaching experiences in socially disadvantaged areas:
Being a good teacher was no longer a matter of making learning interesting or boring, of succeeding or failing at the job. It was now a matter of making a difference to children who were on the wrong end of class inequality, and this was something I now felt driven to do.
His growing realization that there is more to teaching than enabling children to pass exams, and the importance of educating the whole child, is clearly established in chapter 7, where Andy is “confronting a more deep-rooted approach to teaching and learning and the curriculum in schools that suited students from privileged families more than those whose parents or guardians were economically impoverished or culturally marginalized.”
However, the point at which this book began truly to resonate with me is at the beginning of chapter 3, when Andy begins to discuss his education and says, “Beyond playing outside, though, my biggest memories were of school. Teachers must be careful what they do with their students. The memories of it can last a lifetime.” The absolutely crucial role that good teachers can play in the life of every child is something that I too recognize, as someone who has also experienced the kind of social mobility that Andy describes throughout his book. I believe that young people have the right to a first-class education, and the most fundamental element of that is ensuring that we have an outstanding and empowered teaching profession. That is why Andy’s work as a leading educator and proponent of educational improvement is so important.
The book’s message to me, as a political leader, is that “social mobility is too important to be left to individual effort, ingenuity, luck, or chance. Systems and governments must play their part as well.”
1. The foreword was licensed under the Open Government Licence.
CHAPTER 1
Move On Up
Such a boy is between two worlds of school and home; and they meet at few points.
—Richard Hoggart
I’m going to a university award ceremony at the top of a hill to receive first prize in a national competition. I’m not the only person who’s going. Many cars, shiny black classic ones, are heading up there in front of me. Looking down, I realize I’m not in the same kind of vehicle as theirs. I’m lying on my stomach, arms out in front of me, pulling my car and myself up the hill with my hands. It’s incredibly hard work. I look up. The other cars are getting away from me. So I pull harder, dragging myself forward, knuckles bleeding. Suddenly, I feel a surge of power in my arms. Improbably, I start to catch up. Then I overtake them. When I reach the summit, I’m the first to arrive.
It’s surreal. Literally. Then, the dream—for that’s what it is—turns into a back-and-forth composite of two scenes. In one, I’m surrounded by ethereal academics—Oxbridge and Harvard types—in an oak-beamed room. They’re asking me pointed questions about esoteric aspects of art, literature, and history. One shows me the parchment of a classic poem written by a famous ancestor of his, with barely discernible words in Latin, that he presumes I can interpret. I’m mystified by this and by other questions from his colleagues, and I clumsily bluff my way through them, acutely aware that he and the others may catch me out at any moment. These donnish scholars assume and almost insist I must already know all the answers to the competition I won, that it was all part of the cultured person I’m supposed to be. But they don’t know I looked up all the answers, spending hour after hour, day after day, deliberately memorizing what they imagined I should already have possessed. I succeeded illegitimately, it seems, and any moment now, someone will find out and my award will be null and void.
Meanwhile, in a parallel scene, a distinguished school superintendent on the selection committee is peering over his spectacles and sounding off about impractical education professors, their heads in the clouds, with no understanding of how to operate in schools in the real world. Somehow, I sense, these derisory remarks are directed at me and others like me. In this scene, I’ll get my award, but it won’t be deserved or worth anything to those I’m supposed to serve in the field.
This isn’t a fictional dream. When I was putting the final touches to this book, it’s one that woke me up, sweating, in the middle of the night. It doesn’t take a doctorate in psychoanalysis to interpret it. It’s about the experience of social mobility. Like Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 lyrics about the African American community that urges them to “move on up toward your destination, though you may find from time to time complications,” it’s a dream about a kind of progress that doesn’t come without personal struggle—without, in Mayfield’s words, having to “keep on pushing.”6
As many women, African Americans, impoverished immigrants, and people who come up from the working class know only too well, moving on up means pulling twice as hard with half as much as most of the others around you to make any kind of progress at all. And then, when you get there, wherever it is, even at the very top, there remains a feeling that you still may never be fully accepted or truly belong.
Narratives of Mobility
What happens to people who, against considerable odds, do reach the top? How do they experience, express, and explain their success? Somehow, as in my own case, others may convey a distinct feeling that the rewards are not merited, that they have been achieved by fraudulent means, and that all of us who have received them are impostors whose shabby secret of sheer hard work is about to be revealed at any moment.
Sometimes, those who are upwardly mobile will internalize these messages and feel, as I can be inclined to do, that being invited onto some austere panel of distinguished minds has only happened because someone else wasn’t available, or has died, or didn’t fit some odd category (the token Brit on a U.S. roster, perhaps) they may happen to represent. In my own case, for example, after the vice president of Scandinavia’s oldest university, Uppsala, called to inform me I was being awarded an honorary doctorate, and explained that previous recipients included Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, and Nelson Mandela, I spent the next week checking out whether an old mate of mine had got a friend of his to put on a Swedish accent to play a practical joke on me!
Other people can and do respond to social mobility differently. They may adopt the defiant stance of Canadian rap star Drake, who sings, “Started from the bottom, now my whole team f——ing here.” Having come from a modest upbringing, Drake gets the irony of it all. “Now I’m on the road,” he snarls, “half