mobile can abandon the values of their upbringing and fully internalize those of the elites they have joined, feeling only pity or contempt for those they left behind. Or they can take up causes and become champions for their gender or race or the class they were born into.
Social mobility has many narratives—narratives of dreams and struggle, of alienation and insecurity, and of deal-with-it defiance. American memoirs of social mobility tend to be heroic, up-by-the-bootstraps stories of surviving poverty, chaos, and even outright abuse to reach the pinnacles of achievement and acceptance. British narratives are more ambivalent and angst ridden. They are more typically about being caught uneasily between two cultures and not properly belonging to one or the other. If the British-born part of me starts to articulate the stresses and strains involved in being upwardly mobile, my U.S. friends retort, “But, Andy, don’t you see? You’re the complete embodiment of the American Dream!”
Some people, including me, actually experience a maelstrom of multiple narratives of what to do and who to be that involves a whole range of more and less noble emotions at one time or another—the humility of remembering where we came from alternating with guilty relief about our own success; defiance in the face of obstacles and authorities one minute and cringeworthy anxiety at a gathering of elites the next; outrage when the class or culture of our origins is insulted or ignored by intellectual and political elites, alongside frustration with the racial intolerance and xenophobia that persist amongst pro-Brexit relatives and lifelong friends. In Curtis Mayfield’s words, where social mobility is concerned, from time to time, there are definitely complications.
Part of these complications is that mobility doesn’t walk alone. Its pursuit of equality and equality of opportunity isn’t undertaken in isolation. Social mobility has two stalwart companions. One is the struggle for acceptance, identity, and belonging amongst people who move from one culture to another. It’s about fraternity or sorority. The other is the pursuit of liberty—the quest for freedom, autonomy, and dignity against unbending institutions and unwarranted authority that block the efforts to be mobile or to achieve self-realization. Sometimes these things run together, like a modern re-enactment of the French Revolution. Liberty, fraternity, and equal opportunity! At other times, like in the 1960s’ British student counterculture, freedom in the face of authority can fly off at an anarchic tangent, without much concern for social-class equality and mobility or even for any abiding sense of community and belonging.
These are the many ways that social mobility can play out, then—leading to moral struggles for greater equality, libertarian pursuits of freedom, or drives to achieve success as acts of vindication or even revenge against the elites who try to hold people back. But this book is not, primarily, an academic analysis of social mobility. It is a window into the phenomenon of social mobility that hinges on my own personal experience of it. It documents how social mobility has affected and still affects me, especially through education, and it connects this personal narrative of opportunity and identity to the issues and major research studies of the past and of the present day.
A lot of the book is grounded in my own lived experience. The book claims to be no better or worse than those of others who have written about their own experiences of mobility. Journalist Lynsey Hanley had to strive to succeed while growing up in the 1980s on a vast Midlands council estate in England.8 Distinguished education professor and former teacher Diane Reay was the eldest of eight children from a mining family on another Midlands council estate in the 1960s.9 Novelist Jeanette Winterson was raised in the same small mill town of Accrington as me, by strict religious fundamentalists.10 Darren McGarvey somehow survived alcoholism, substance abuse, and homelessness to escape from the poverty of the Glasgow Gorbals in the 1990s and become a prominent advocate for poor families everywhere.11 Bestselling U.S. author J. D. Vance grew up and away from the hillbillies of Appalachia and Ohio to go to Yale and beyond.12 And Tara Westover completed a doctorate at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom after escaping the clutches of her strict and sometimes violent family of Mormon scrap-metal dealers in Idaho.13
We share similarities of class but also differences of gender, generation, country, upbringing, and much more besides. Yet, one way or another, these are all still stories of mobility, identity, and liberty. They are part of what Hanley recounts from the 1950s’ writings of U.K. cultural theorist Richard Hoggart as being an experience of moving up, up, and away, emotionally as well as physically, with every certificate gained and hurdle overcome.14
Then there are others, of course, who are less endearing to the literati, who didn’t take up causes, fight against injustices, or become the individualistic and lost literary souls who appeal to modern-day social scientists, quality journalists, and top-notch educators. But self-made business entrepreneurs who started with nothing and achieved everything themselves have undergone social mobility too. They are the likes of Duncan Bannatyne, multimillionaire health-club and property entrepreneur and former star of the U.K. TV series Dragons’ Den (the forerunner of the U.S. Shark Tank). He only got going when he bought an ice-cream van at the age of thirty, following a Glasgow childhood raised with six families in one house and a dishonourable discharge from the navy for throwing an officer overboard. Bannatyne’s heroic business narrative and self-help motto is the title of his first autobiography, Anyone Can Do It: My Story.15 As a self-proclaimed, self-made, street-fighting man, Bannatyne probably wouldn’t have much sympathy for what might strike him as self-indulgent whining amongst an oversensitive bunch of upwardly mobile milquetoasts.
My own narrative is meant to add to this collection and to the genre as a whole. It draws on my own and other people’s memories, family stories, genealogical details, and official records from my old schools, to connect my own lived experiences to the experiences that others were undergoing at the same time, as they were recorded in key studies and intellectual arguments of the day. In this sense, the book is about me and others both like and unlike me in the working-class communities of Northwest England. (For readers who don’t come from my part of the world, it is important to point out that this is why the book is written not only with British spellings but also in the idiomatic language and occasional dialect of the community that raised me.) It is also about a moment when there was more social mobility than at any other time in modern history, before or since.16
The book is also about how the educational issues arising from and impacting on social mobility still retain importance for so many people. They encompass:
➤ The ways people deal with leaving one culture to join another
➤ The nature and effects of early selection by tested ability
➤ The impact of high-stakes testing on students from disadvantaged homes
➤ The strengths and weaknesses of whole-child education as a way to engage working-class and minority students with educational opportunity
➤ The consequences of some young people becoming socially mobile while their neighbours or siblings are left behind
➤ The question of whether attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a distraction that needs intervention or an expression of creativity that challenges traditional methods of classroom control
This is a memoir about the public systems that create or hinder opportunity, as well as a personal narrative of benefitting and not benefitting from that opportunity. It is about public investment, personal struggle, social class, educational reform, and, here and there, little bits of luck as well.
What’s Worth Writing For
For a long time, I thought my life was not worth writing about. In fact, I didn’t even consider writing or not writing about it as an issue. I’ve spent a lot of my career writing about other people’s lives—mainly in schools and workplaces—but I didn’t feel I was much to write home about myself. I’m not a celebrity chef, athlete, politician, rock musician, or reality-TV star. I don’t come from royalty, I have an unspectacular ancestry, and I never had a life or a job where I hung around the rich and famous.
At the same time, I’m