Xylophones have a lot to answer for in terms of my
educational development.
I was obsessed with the xylophone when I was a child. I didn’t
possess the confidence to sing, I wouldn’t be seen dead with a tambourine and
the recorder required far too much effort, so the xylophone was the perfect
choice to satisfy the minimum energy required to make a substantially disruptive
noise in my primary school assemblies. It was during one of these assemblies
that the local vicar, who was tasked with directing our cacophonous shambles of
a school band, noticed the wild enthusiasm with which I bashed the xylophone
bars and asked me whether I had ever considered playing the piano. I was
completely enamoured with the idea and promptly began pestering my parents for
a piano and piano lessons. My mum was a housewife and my dad worked shifts in a
foundry so this wasn’t something that they could easily afford, but they
eventually caved against my persistent nagging and approached my class teacher
at a parents’ evening to ask whether the school had any provision for music
lessons. The teacher consulted with Mrs. Guest, my strict and rather rotund and
red-faced headmistress, to ask whether piano lessons could be arranged and Mrs.
Guest’s answer was sharp and to the point: children from my council estate 'did
not do things like learning to play the piano' and it was ridiculous of my
parents to encourage a child like me to aspire to do such things.
My parents accepted this response and broke the bad news to
me. I was devastated. However the school vicar was not going to allow me give
up on my dreams that easily. He arranged for me to have piano lessons from an
elderly lady who lived locally (she charged very little for lessons because she
lived alone and enjoyed the company of visitors) and my parents bought me a
second-hand piano which we shoehorned into my tiny bedroom in our two-bed
council house. When I passed my Grade 3 piano, my mother confided in me that she
was pleased that I had persevered with my lessons because my parents had
thought (hoped, I would imagine) that my musical ambitions were a passing
phase. She also told me what Mrs. Guest had said to them when they had enquired
about piano lessons.
My headmistress’s comments were like a red rag to a bull –
how dare she say that my friends and I shouldn’t aspire to achieve our dreams
just because we live in a deprived area! I tell people now that I rattled
through my piano grades so that I could entertain the masses, teach a new
generation of pianists and learn a skill that would enhance my cognitive
development, but my main, if not sole, motivation was to prove my headmistress
wrong. I have a distinction in Grade 8 piano. Fuck you Mrs. Guest.
Growing up on a council estate in Birmingham, I encountered
the ‘children who shouldn’t aspire’ attitude numerous times throughout my
school life. My high school hit the very bottom of the league tables while I
was in my final GCSE year and it was widely expected amongst both the staff and
students alike that the girls would fail their GCSEs and banging out a dozen babies
while sitting on the dole and the boys would fail their GCSEs and become career
criminals, winding up in trouble with the police or locked up. One teacher even
told my class that we should start planning a family early because infant
mortality was high in the area due to its deprived nature, so there was a
good chance that some of our babies would die…
It was when the children on the estate challenged these
preconceptions that things got really interesting. My best friend at high
school desperately wanted to be a lawyer and she needed A-Levels in order to
apply to university, so we bravely asked our teachers if it would be possible
to study for an A-Level together. No kids in my school had ever taken an A-Level
let alone applied to university before so the teachers thought that we were
crazy and completely out of our depth. Nevertheless they agreed to let us sit
A-Level English Literature on the condition that we did the required reading ourselves,
with some guidance from a business teacher who had experience in teaching A-Level
courses. I took the class solely to support my friend and I had no intention of
applying for university myself – after all, my parents certainly couldn’t
afford the fees - but when I began accompanying my friend to various university
open days I liked what I saw and started thinking seriously about whether I
wanted to pursue the same educational path…
I enrolled on a series of A-Level evening classes at a
nearby college and cobbled together a mishmash of grades that made me a pretty
poor candidate for a red brick university, but I bit the bullet and applied to
the University of Birmingham. The admissions tutor was tethered firmly by the
entry requirement grades, but after a short interview he surprised me by saying
that he would make an exception in my case because ‘I had a something about
me’. Throughout the entire first year of my undergraduate course I felt as
though I had broken into the place or stolen a legitimate student’s identity
and I suffered great anxieties about whether I was ‘good enough’. Some students
had come from well-performing schools where they had been rigorously trained to
perform to a high standard, but there were also a few students from less
privileged backgrounds in or around Birmingham who had similar educational experiences
to mine. By the end of my first year, it was clear that some of the high
performing students were struggling to function outside a
controlled, classroom environment. They could absorb and regurgitate
information but they could not think for themselves and many of them started to
drop out of the course as a result. On the other hand, those of us who had been
previously cast adrift with our educational development and who were frequently required to think for
ourselves were thriving in this environment and most of our group achieved a
2:1 or higher. This ‘child that shouldn’t aspire’ arrived with a dismal set of
A-Level grades and graduated with a high first class degree (the only first in
my year), winning a series of prestigious scholarships, moving quickly onto an
MPhil and finally completing a PhD. I suspect that the ‘something’ about me
that the admissions tutor had spotted was the same ‘something’ that each one of
us in the less educationally privileged group of students possessed; namely the
ability to think for ourselves and to cope when left alone to conduct research
and develop our own arguments, independently of direction from a teacher or
classroom environment.
But it’s not just the hidden abilities of the ‘child that
shouldn’t aspire’ to achieve academic qualifications that I wanted to address,
it’s their experience of the university environment too. I am now on the senior
professional management team of the same university department in which I was a
student and I have day-to-day dealings with students that started out exactly
like me. I see the same hesitations and anxieties in them that I had when I
first arrived. So where do these anxieties come from? If I was to turn back the
clock and speak to every child who wants to go to university but has concerns about
how they will be perceived then I would tell them this: don't be put off by
thoughts of inadequacy based on perceptions of higher education that you might
have in your head. I spent years passing by the red brick wall of the
University of Birmingham and believing that the Hogwarts-like building in the
distance was full of pompous professors who wouldn’t give disadvantaged
students a second glance and wouldn't know real struggle and hard work if it
bit them on the ass. But once I stepped inside the red brick wall as an
undergraduate student I quickly realised that my university is nowhere near the snooty
bastion of pomp and ceremony that I expected it to be and any feelings of
inadequacy had completely dissolved by the time I reached graduation. Most
people that I encounter on campus are lovely, down-to-earth people who have a
lot of time for students from all backgrounds and I regularly speak to
colleagues and students who have had similar educational experiences to mine (I
currently work with a very talented doctoral researcher who grew up on murder
mile in Hackney!). Now I’m one of those people behind that red brick wall and
let me assure you, I’m very much still in touch with that little girl who
played the xylophone in school assemblies and I know what it’s like to dream
big, work hard and have real monsters stand in your way. I am no monster and
neither are my colleagues - you have no need to be afraid of us. If you’re
still unsure then book onto an open day and speak to some of the staff and
students about what it’s like to study at their institution. Hopefully just
taking the first physical step inside the wall and engaging with the people behind
it will eliminate a great deal of your fears. And take it from me; do not be
intimidated by class perceptions or how someone looks, behaves or speaks in a
higher education environment because these things are certainly no indicator of
intellectual ability. I have seen pipe-smoking, plum-mouthed professors
struggle to open a door or operate the simplest mobile phone. Intelligence doesn’t
have a face, tone of voice or tweed suit.
I would also like to address the kids who feel that they are
being pushed into higher education when it really isn’t their thing. Parents
and educational authorities alike can be guilty of this. We freely encourage every
child to fulfil their educational potential but we struggle to admit that some
children just don’t possess the capacity for academic study. There are always
going to be things that children – and adults too, for that matter - are good at
and things that we are bad at. For instance, I can play the piano very well but
there are lots of other things that I’m absolutely hopeless at - I can’t swim,
I can’t play the guitar (despite trying to teach myself hundreds of times) and
I can’t run long distances without collapsing in a sweaty heap. I accept that I
do well in some things but I’m awful in others. Likewise academic ability is
something that you either possess or you don’t and some school leavers are just
not cut out for higher education in the same way that I’m not cut out to swim
the channel. Simple as. There is no shame in accepting that you are not
academically minded and many students leave school without qualifications and develop
specialised and valuable practical skills that allow them to take up practical
roles and become experts in their craft. These practical roles tend to be
undervalued due to our obsession with pushing all students down the path of
higher education, even when the student feels that it isn’t a good fit for
them. As a graduate I find this obsession with the pursuit of higher education
at the expense of practical skills difficult to understand because university
education is *not* the be-all-and-end-all that some people talk it up to be, it
is not a guaranteed open door to a dream job and it certainly doesn’t make you
any more superior to the next person. I have witnessed how the professors in my
department are genuinely grateful when an IT person arrives to fix their
computer or a maintenance person comes to fix a light or repaint their office.
No matter how academically qualified you are you will always depend upon and
value those around you with practical skills.
In addition to the academically minded and the practically
minded, there is a third type of school leaver that educational bodies need to
be aware of: the chancer. Thinking back
to the student cohort at my school, there were a number of kids who exhibited a
genuine flair for study or practical skills, but alongside these students there
were also out-and-out chancers who wanted a piece of the same opportunities and
achievements without putting in any effort or hard work whatsoever. They had no interest in gaining qualifications or skills, but they were acutely interested in avoiding employment. And coming
from a disadvantaged background gave them a claim to preferential treatment and
the free pass that they were looking for. Dangers arise when admitting these
free-pass-grabbing students to a higher education institution just to tick a
quota box or feel like you’re helping the disadvantaged in some patronising and
self-righteous way. If every single school leaver, regardless of academic
ability, demands equal access to higher education then we will end up with a
quagmire of students who blindly dredge their way through a course of education
that they care very little about, dragging the genuinely capable students down
with their indifference and leaving with the same copycat qualifications.
Employers will struggle to differentiate between a job application from a
genuinely capable student and a chancer and eventually the qualifications that
they both possess will become worthless. If we give trophies to everyone who
runs a race then how are we going to pick out the ones that we should train to
be Olympians? As gratifying as it would have been to see everyone in my high
school class achieve a university place and prove the Mrs. Guests of the world
wrong, I’m also a realist and I’m well aware that amongst the genuine students
seeking help there are also chancers looking to take advantage of freely
available opportunities and milk them for all they're worth. If a student from
a disadvantaged background pleads for special treatment and expects to be
handed a qualification on a plate with no application of hard work or effort whatsoever
then there is a very good chance that they will fail. And educators should not
feel guilty or responsible when that happens. It's tough, but that’s life.
To my former teachers and those teachers who still advocate
the Mrs. Guest approach to educational privilege, I would say this: resist
predicting the growth potential of students based entirely upon their parent’s
occupation or whether a student comes from an impoverished or affluent area because,
at best, you’re going to show your age. Gone are the days when library access
was restricted to wealthy schools and knowledge was largely passed down from
parent to child; we are living in the age of Google where children are growing
up with access to more information at their fingertips than ever before. Young
people are taking control of their own educational development and it is very
difficult, if not impossible, to restrict knowledge to a social class or
geographical location. With instant access to an extensive world of knowledge, it
is a child’s personal motivation and inner drive that will determine what they
do with it. My undergraduate university experience taught me that battery-farming
students in a well-performing school is no guaranteed indicator of success and
‘children that shouldn’t aspire’ can be just as capable, if not more capable,
than the children that are naturally expected to succeed. I would suggest that
children who work independently to achieve something that they desperately want
for themselves are often the ones that are best equipped to persevere with a
course of study, to be intensely self-motivated and survive the challenging
times that all students face. A tough skin and dogged determination cannot be
taught in a classroom and yet these are essential tools when pursuing a
university education. And please stop pushing all school leavers into academic
study at the expense of practical skills. We should be celebrating and
empowering those who are gifted with practical skills rather than viewing them
as somehow incapable of higher education. I would much prefer to live in a
world filled with people that can build houses than a world full of people who ruminate
on how to build a house…
My final point is directed to those who, like me, have
followed an unconventional route through higher education and still work within
it. Talk to the kids out there who show academic potential and express an
interest in applying to university but have had their confidence knocked by
poor educators or feel somehow inadequate at the thought of attending
university alongside the privileged kids. Tell them about the scholarships and
resources that are available to help them to gain access to courses (I am
living proof that these work) and give them the confidence that they need to go
to open days and submit applications. And, most importantly, show them that
there are no monsters behind the red brick wall and many of us in university
departments are just like them. Who knows, they might just end up running the
place…
