The stigma of being the poor child in class is far worse today than it was when I was at school 40 years ago. And instead of diminishing inequality, Cameron seeks to increase it.
You never forget them. The children who were marked apart. In our class at primary school, they were called “Bugsy”, all three of them. The children who turned up bedraggled, a bit whiffy and wearing only a rough approximation of school uniform. You’d hear the bolder, more domineering children talking about them. “So-and-so smells.” “So-and-so wears gutties [plimsolls] instead of shoes.” “So-and-so’s Bugsy.”
With some encouragement from their neat, scrubbed peers, these remorseless critics would tease and bully the Bugsy kids. Even if you didn’t take part in the taunting yourself, even if it horrified you, you stayed out of it – not actively contributing to the misery of these pariah children, but safely beyond the exclusion zone that they lived in all the same.
Vivienne Westwood, in her autobiography, remembers such a child in her own class at primary school. “He smelt and his blond hair was so dirty, poor little Edward, that I thought, you know, I would rescue him. So I decided I would do this by announcing he was my boyfriend. (We were six.) He was horrified. I can see him now, pink beneath the grime: the worst day of his life. Everyone laughed at him. And me.”
That’s exactly what it was like. However sorry you felt for those kids, you couldn’t show it. Voluntarily associating yourself with such misfortune was seen as far more foolish than having it imposed upon you by adults. You never heard from them what it was like, being that distinctive sort of outsider, because you never spoke to them. Those children were despised and feared, as if their poverty was infectious.
But this week, more than 40 years on, I finally did hear, first-hand, from children who have to turn up at school under such stress, every day. In a new report, Through Young Eyes [click to download pdf], children in this situation were interviewed by the Children’s Commission on Poverty.
“If your shirt, like mine, has got tags with a different name … they automatically know that it’s handed down from someone else,” said one child. The report says that some state-funded secondary schools have uniforms costing as much as £500. These are schools, surely, that use uniform policy as a way of keeping out the riff-raff.
In this, and many other ways, things are worse now, not better, than they were in my day. There was stigma attached to being on free school meals then, as there is now. But there was nothing for individual sale in the school canteen, so the kids on free school meals weren’t excluded from getting the extra treats that kids buy now.
Other expectations have changed in recent decades, too. There’s a lot more stuff to not have. Testimony from children saying that they couldn’t do their homework properly, because the computer at home was old, or that they were discouraged from taking art because they didn’t have their own camera – these were issues that simply didn’t come up during my school days.
As for school trips – they were modest affairs. The vogue for school trips abroad was only just coming in, and I never went on one myself. It was normal never to have been abroad. Today’s children talk of having to listen to their classmates returning from trips that are far beyond the means of their own parents, and having to endure enthusiastic references to the experience for months to come.
What makes the heart ache is the stress of having to endure endless worry and discomfort, in a place that should be safe and nurturing. How can a child thrive while lugging such a burden? Even if you accept that the poor bring it on themselves, with their fecklessness and their bad choices – which I certainly don’t – it’s surely clear that such blame should not be visited on children.
There has been massive investment in schools since 1997, when the last Conservative government fell (at that point, many schools were literally falling down, too). The children who benefited from this investment are now young adults. What any number of surveys about this generation show is that, despite the challenges that face them, they are less likely to undertake criminal acts, abuse alcohol and drugs, or have children while still in their teens. It’s hard to believe that vastly improved schooling hasn’t made a significant contribution towards that. This report makes it clear that further improvements must be made to improve the life chances of those who need it the most.
This week David Cameron has spoken of cutting taxes being a “moral duty”, a duty he is prepared to carry out if his party wins the next general election. Far from wishing to diminish inequality, he seeks to increase it. The number of children living in poverty in the UK has gone up from 24% to 25.6% since 2008, according to Unicef. If Cameron is allowed to carry out his “moral duty”, there will be more poor schoolchildren, suffering greater stigma, instead of what we should all want – for no child to face economic alienation at school at all.
