For years, discussions of equality policy in the UK have been accompanied by an agenda of “social mobility” — the idea that those born into the lower social classes should be able to break the class ceiling and, with sufficient grit and ability, have access to just the same amenities as their upper- or middle-class peers. It is the motivation behind Oxford, Cambridge and other leading universities aiming to admit more state-school applicants. It is also why prestigious companies, such as Lloyds, offer exclusive internships to lower-income students. The reality, however, is that social mobility initiatives are rarely about breaking the class ceiling. More often than not, they reduce class differences to only one thing — money.

Social mobility is popular because it is very palatable to both those on the left and on the right: on the left, because it promotes equality; on the right, because it does so without straying into the dreaded equality of outcome, which requires extensive wealth distribution as opposed to equality of opportunity. It envisages a world “where the circumstances of birth do not determine outcomes in life.” This is a noble aim. The UK’s class differences are very entrenched, and it has some of the worst wealth inequality in Europe; worse than countries such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Algeria. Only one in three senior judicial posts are filled by people who went to state schools, even though they are 93 per cent of the population. The government is so attuned to the problem that the Department for Work and Pensions used to have a dedicated Social Mobility Minister, and, in 2010, it set up the Social Mobility Commission.

I am very familiar with this because, soon after the Social Mobility Commission was established, I began attending a state secondary school in Dagenham. There, I was a part of numerous initiatives designed to encourage me to go to university and provide me with employable skills. For all those, I am very grateful, but the initiatives usually also centred around only a few particular vocations; medicine, business or “STEM” (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). At one assembly I attended, classics was used as an example of the ultimate undesirable subject.

I was very surprised when, upon getting into university, I found out that classics is, in fact, a very prestigious subject to study. Indeed, New College at Oxford explicitly calls it “Oxford’s most prestigious degree.” What is more, every classics student I met was very posh — but also much more cultured than the computer scientists or engineers.

Elite public schools do not push their students into finance and engineering. Rather, they teach them divinity and have them apply for classics. The class divide is at its most evident when you examine what university courses are popular with any given class. State school students dominate Oxbridge physics, maths, medicine, biology and computer science courses, but classics, music and even languages remain firmly in the domain of independent schools. There are few social mobility programmes for working-class pupils who are interested in Goethe, Aristotle or Chopin.

Of course, studying Chopin is not as conducive to a high-earning career as studying computer science. A graduate of medicine can expect to earn over twice as much as a music graduate within five years of their graduation. But differences in class are not merely differences in income; they are also differences in ideas, values, mannerisms and even the kinds of things you do for fun or find interesting. Public schools know it, and, instead of pushing students to do the subjects associated with employability, they focus on cultural subjects. All Year 9 boys at Eton study Latin, Divinity and two modern languages. They even have the option of studying ancient Greek.

Professions where one can pursue truth or beauty are dominated by the elites

Those kinds of options were not open to me when I was 14 — even though I would have loved to substitute them for ICT, business studies and food science. Rather than just thinking about what will land me the best-paid job, I was interested in learning more about morality, religion and ancient civilisation. I ended up studying philosophy and theology, but no social mobility programme I was part of had a pathway designed to help me with that. 

Consequently, professions where one can pursue truth or beauty are dominated by the elites. Most UK musicians, artists and academics are from private school backgrounds. UK politics, too, features a disproportionate number of privately educated individuals — and politicians would do well to be interested in the pursuit of truth.

The assumption behind the many social mobility programmes pushing working-class kids into IT or finance instead is either that working-class people are not interested in pursuing truth or beauty, and so there is no point giving them the opportunities to do it; or that they should not be doing it even if they are interested, because the pursuit of a high-paid career is what really matters in life. Indeed, the Social Mobility Commission is explicit about this. Its website defines social mobility as “the link between a person’s occupation or income and the occupation or income of their parents.” No mention of the many other markers of class difference.

This attitude towards social mobility is reflected in the educational policy debate today. The Conservatives’ fixation on scrapping “rip-off” degrees is illustrative. No interesting degree is a “rip-off” if you treat education as a way of learning more about the true and the beautiful — rather than simply as a way of maximising your lifetime earnings. A boy from Hackney going off to study classics is a much better example of social mobility than that same boy working in finance in the City. There may well be a case for scrapping uninteresting degrees, where students feel like they got nothing out of them — such as the business studies courses that have their graduates earning around £20,000 a year on average — but whether a degree in art or music is valuable or not does not depend entirely on the financial returns it produces.

Labour seems to get this. The then-Shadow Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, called the Tories’ plan to close university courses that do not produce a financial return “an attack on the aspirations of young people and their families by a Government that wants to reinforce the class ceiling, not smash it.” “With Labour, the arts and music will no longer be the preserve of a privileged few,” their 2024 manifesto reads. The jury will be out once the Labour Party enters government, but it at least seems to understand the problem. The same could not be said for the Tories — or for the tens of social mobility initiatives that wanted me to become a programmer.