7/8/2008 6:55:00 AM
Andy Green and Lorna Unwin; The Guardian 8 July
The curse of English education," wrote Labour historian RH Tawney in 1931, "is its organisation along the lines of social class." Today, inequalities in skills and opportunities still jeopardise economic performance, individual life chances and social cohesion. Yet governments have let divisions grow. Britain has deregulated its labour and financial markets more than most countries and thus allowed free rein to market pressures that increase incomes differentials and inflate housing prices on the back of household debt. Education is meant to be the great engine of universal opportunity. Not in the UK. The, largely untold, story behind Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) - the OECD's repeated survey of literacy and numeracy skills among 15-year-olds - is the scale of educational inequality. In the 2006 survey, the UK had the third highest variation in tested scores among 29 OECD countries. Perhaps more damning still is what the survey tells us about how social background influences achievement. The impact of social origins on individual scores in the UK was greater than in all but four of the 35 countries. English schools, it seems, do more to lock in intergenerational inequality than to promote social mobility. Educational inequality is closely correlated with measures of societal cohesion, such as trust in people and institutions, civic cooperation and (inversely) crime. Countries with more equal outcomes in education, and narrower distributions of adult skills, such as the Nordic and east Asian states, tend to have lower rates of crime, and higher levels of trust and civic cooperation.Guardian
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