With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls.
Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello
It’s World Poetry Day today and, for the UK, where the study of poetry and the other arts is increasingly the preserve of the wealthy and privileged, it should be moment not only for celebration but also for critical reflection and rigorous self-examination.
Research from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and Macmillan Children’s Books, published last week, found that schools in the UK have ‘limited poetry book stock’, with poetry read out loud less than once a week in 93 per cent of schools and children in 20 per cent of schools never having an opportunity to hear a poem read out loud.
Nearly a quarter of schools were found to teach poetry only once a year or less, partly due to a lack of training and support for teachers. Teachers were found to be most familiar with poets they themselves had studied at school. Most teachers surveyed said they did not have enough knowledge of poetry or experience of teaching it.
No one who knows anything about education policy in the UK will be in the smallest bit surprised by the findings of this survey. Decades of policymaking have reduced opportunities for all but the most advantaged to engage in any kind of study not related to either work or basic skills. The arts and humanities have been under attack across the state sector, at every level of education. Courses have been cut, departments closed, and curricula narrowed. Public libraries, a vital resource for people who don’t have access to books at home, have had their funding slashed too, despite rising demand.
A 2022 study by Heidi Ashton and David Ashton found that while arts education and culture play a central role in many European education systems, in England the state has, over the last two decades, ‘progressively marginalized the role of the arts in the public education system in the belief that the “market” does not value the arts’ at a time when leading private schools – often termed ‘public schools’ in the UK, a nod, I suppose, the significant public subsidy they are given by the government – are investing more in the arts.
The omission of arts as a measure of school performance and success in England, together with cuts in annual spending on state education imposed by government since the Conservatives gained power in 2010, have resulted in a reduction in opportunities for children in state schools to engage with the arts and culture and the growing marginalisation of arts education in state schools, Ashton and Ashton write. At the same time, they observe, private schools ‘have witnessed a growth in the importance and value attached to the arts and culture as part of the preparation of young people with the life skills necessary for effective participation in the society’s elite positions’ – an approach, they find, ‘more in line with that of many European countries’. I have never understood why people in the UK acquiesce so willingly in the second-class treatment of their own kids.
Unsurprisingly, over these past decades of regression, working class people have found it increasingly difficult to develop a career in the creative industries. An analysis of Office for National Statistics data reported here found that 16.4 per cent of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, compared to just 7.9 per cent for those born four decades later. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37 pent cent of the creative workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21 per cent.
These grim findings reflect the creativity crisis in UK education, but they are also indicative of a wider trend towards a two-system approach to education in UK, and in England in particular, what Ashton and Ashton and others term Britain’s ‘educational apartheid’. The dominance of people who attended elite private schools among the professions and in the creative industries now constitutes something of a closed shop. It is increasingly difficult to become a lawyer, doctor, academic, actor, musician or artist if you are from a working-class background. Your chances of joining these professions have more to do with who your parents are than with your talent, commitment or ambition.
Parent-funded state-subsidised private schools spend on average three times as much per pupil as do state schools in the UK, with the differential much higher between state schools and elite private schools such as Eton. And while private schools, which educate just 7 per cent of the population, are largely autonomous and subject to minimal state control, state schools and further education colleges are subject to regular high-stakes inspections, as part of an overbearing and punitive accountability regime, which constrains and inhibits effective educational leadership while doing little to improve the quality of education.
Over the past 30 years there has been a critical shift in publicly funded education – barely noticed by many but hugely significant when it comes to the kind of opportunities available to young people and adults, and to those from less advantaged backgrounds, in particular. It has changed the nature of educational provision as well as the language in which we talk about it. While just a few decades ago, government papers on education recognized ‘the creativity, enterprise and scholarship of all our people’, and the ‘wider contribution’ education makes to strengthening community and promoting active citizenship, while opening doors to an appreciation of music, art and literature, all we hear of now are the economic benefits of education and employment, the importance of getting a job and of contributing to growth and productivity.
The marketisation of education has been part of a wider assault on the public sector – its competence, its value and its budgets. The government recognizes only one solution to the problems we face, which is yet more of the things that have created the current crises, from water and energy to climate and welfare: more marketisation, more privatization, more private sector profiteering in every part of our lives, more erosion of the commons and of the public sector. And while this is often sold as delivering more choice and more efficiency, in reality it means what it has always meant: more wealth and power for the privileged, less control, democratic accountability or public scrutiny for the rest of us.
We talk now as though the only measures of educational success are future earnings or a worker’s economic contribution. But engagement with the arts and culture and with creative subjects is not a luxury, it is not something only the rich and privileged need or want; it is an essential part of a good life. But it is easy to see why a government whose power rests on division, the deliberate cultivation of culture war and the suppression of informed dissent might not want this. After all, as the 1998 green paper The Learning Age noted, exposure to the arts and humanities supports critical thinking, fosters active citizenship, makes us better parents, friends and colleagues, and supports community cohesion and engagement. It also gives us a sense of shared value and common humanity. We see more clearly what we are and what we are worth and are more likely to see the world as it is.
Poetry is one of the most important forms of this expression. It challenges us to think, to be critical and to be compassionate. It makes us more mindful of the world around us, more sensitive to nature, more empathetic and caring. There is care in the craft and the craft is itself an act of care. As Don Paterson writes in a poem written in answer to his son’s question, ‘Why do you stay up so late?’, the poet collects ‘the dull things of the day’ in which they ‘see some possibility’ and looks at them ‘until one thing makes a mirror in my eyes/then I paint it with the tear to make it bright’.
I have been rereading Barry Hines’ novel A kestrel for a knave, the story of Billy Casper, a bright, rebellious boy growing up in a mining town whose inner world is lit up when he finds and trains a kestrel. While his potential is clear and fleetingly recognized, his hopes are, in the end, casually and brutally dashed.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Billy. Probably the same thing that happens routinely to millions of working-class kids in Britain. Doors slam shut, chances dissipate. Routine, hard work and the need to continually chase money and keep the landlord at bay take care of the rest. All that potential, all that desire, quietly thwarted, again and again, for generations of people, when all that is required, often, is that the door be held open, just a little longer, just a little wider.
While, for working class kids in the UK, opportunities are few, resting, as they often do, on success in a high-stakes environment which rewards sameness and conformity and the willingness to jump without asking why, wealthy children get every chance, including the chance to try and fail, multiple times if they need to. Little wonder the creative arts and the professions, our key institutions and our chambers of democracy, are now swelled with so much well-spoken mediocrity.
Why do we stand tolerate an education system which routinely fails most of the people who pass through it, that denies most people the chance to find out who they are and what they love? We all deserve the chance to dive for the pearls that lie everywhere around us, waiting to be discovered, so charged with life. It is shameful that so many of us are denied that opportunity.
The Learning Age 