Social mobility is for the elite
Media tart and social mobility tsarina Katharine Birbalsingh says that working class kids should aim lower than Oxbridge.
My parents were born into British working class families. They passed the old 11-plus exam and went to grammar schools, within which they excelled academically. From there they 'went up' to Oxford, and graduated with flying colours. This is an example of social mobility in an age when only a tiny minority could achieve such things.
When my family split up in the early 70s, my mother and I were penniless, living on welfare benefits in a council apartment. Our local authority abandoned me to the secondary modern education system. I spent my final three years of full-time education in a southeast London sink school, and left at age 16 with no qualifications. This is an example of downward social mobility.
Notable during my final years of schooling were those who urged me to keep my head down and abandon any ambition I had to follow in my parents' academic footsteps. I followed this advice, it damaged me immeasurably, and it took me until age 26 to sort myself out and get into university as a mature student. In the end I was awarded a PhD in physics, and it was all downhill from there.
Today we have the infamous media tart and sometime "headmistress" Katharine Birbalsingh, whose latest gig is as the Tory government's social mobility chief. The new chair of the Social Mobility Commission says that children from working class families should take "smaller steps" than aiming for Oxford and Cambridge.
Other fine universities are indeed available, and for me Aberystwyth is a shining example of an old university with high academic standards, founded on the penny subscriptions of ordinary working Welsh folk.
One shouldn't get obsessed with Oxbridge, but that is not the point of Birbalsingh's latest emission into the public domain. She is an old-school conservative who wishes to preserve the class system and systemic inequalities that go with it. Birbalsingh makes a handsome second living from political contrarianism, and I wish a pox on the wretched woman.
My only advice to young people is to aim as high as you like, do what thou wilt, and never let the bastards grind you down!