The last edition of Radio 4's Thinking Allowed covered issues of class and social mobility. In particular, it focused on access to higher education and the experience of a number of academics who came from a working class background. "The middle classes still make up the majority of University students. Does education provide a means to social mobility? Has society ignored class barriers in favour of focussing on identity politics?". Towards the end of the recording (which you can access at the moment here) was a brief comment on whether education is transactional or transformative. Ideally both, you would hope. However, given the last few year's emphasis on the transactional side by state policy it's probably well past time for a bit more transformative. Given the state of the climate, the financial and economic system and the revelations that MPs view of a transaction was largely around creative expense claims, it's likely that the drive for transformational learning will have to come from people themselves.
At the same time, there is interesting information available around these issues from government. The Department of Communities and Local Government's Places Database is very useful in showing patterns of disadvantage by place - down to very local levels. For example, you can see the percentage of people with a higher education qualification down to ward level. So, in the WEA, we can see where we would want to prioritise our work. There are probably few surprises in this and an adult education organisation that is well established within communities will know this anyway. It does confirm that the introduction of disadvantage uplift based on postcodes in the mid-90s FEFC made sense and that places are as important in education as individuals.
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