To All The Kids Who Think They're Not Good Enough For University (And The Teachers Who Agree)

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…

My Great-Grandfather and the Peaky Blinders

At the age of six I asked my mum for piano lessons and my parents were unsure where this aspiration had come from since most of my family were musically illiterate and had expressed no interest whatsoever in playing a musical instrument. Four years and many piano lessons later, I overhead my father mention in conversation with a neighbour that my great-grandfather James Aloysious (known as Curly) was very musical and he played the piano and the mandolin. When I asked my father about James he told me how my aunt would sit on James’s lap at the piano and put her tiny hands over his large hands while he played the keys. He mentioned how James's hands were rough and his knuckles were beaten up from the fights. 

I thought that was an odd thing to say, ‘from the fights’.

My father showed me a photograph of my great-grandfather in his later years and I was surprised to see that James was the absolute spitting image of my father and, in turn, of me. I felt a close connection with James and pestered my father to tell me more about James’s life. And the more that I discovered about him, the more I found him to be a fascinating individual.

James lived in Harborne, he was ex-army and a bare knuckle fighter at Smethwick market. Every Sunday morning he would walk from Harborne to Smethwick to fight and when he returned home he would give his wife Florie all the silver from the win money that he had earned and he kept the copper for himself as beer money. He seemed to make a fair living out of it. James and his family were well looked after because they were in with 'the right crowd' and knew 'the right people', although the company that James kept seemed very dubious indeed. A number of shady characters cropped up at various points in my father’s stories, such as the mysterious Italian Mr Mansini who found my grandfather a job when he came out of the army. Mr Mansini sent my grandfather to the local factory with a note simply saying that he had been sent by Mr Mansini - the note alone was a guarantee of a job and the gesture was made because my grandfather was Curly’s son and ‘Curly and his family were to be well looked after’. 

 

But the most memorable – and disturbing - thing that my father told me about James was this; if James went out for the day with his family then he would wear his ‘home cap’, but if he went out of the house on an evening wearing his ‘working cap’ then my great-grandmother would stay awake and wait up all night in the front bay window of the house until he came home. She would stay up and wait for him because if James went out wearing his working cap then she knew there was going to be trouble. When I asked about the significance of the caps, my father explained that the working cap had razor blades sewn in the rim which came in handy if there was ever a fight. And, by the sounds of it, there were lots of fights. James played the mandolin in the Green Man pub in Harborne and one evening there was a huge fight between his group of friends and the police. It seemed to have been some kind of sting operation targeting them all. James took out three policemen, he smashed his mandolin over the head of one policeman (thereby ending his musical career) and he threw another policeman through the front window of the pub into the horse road outside. The police took James to Steel House Lane police station where he 'fell down the steps of the police station' (he was beaten up) and my great-grandmother claimed that he was never the same again afterwards.

Note on the back of a photo of my great-grandfather

I remember this conversation well because I was not only shocked by the thought of slashing someone's face with razor blades (I must have been about 10yrs old at the time!), but also by the way in which my father spoke so matter-of-factly about it all and with such an oddly warm affection towards the men in the stories. I had heard both my father and my grandfather mention the words ‘peaky blinder’ before and I didn’t know, or much care at the time, who they were referring to. But now it all made sense. My father and grandfather spoke kindly about James and his friends because these individuals had ‘principals’ - they had a strong family-like bond, they would watch out for one another and their families and they were firmly ‘on our side’. I took comfort in knowing that, due to my surname, I would have nothing to fear had I encountered one of these suspicious characters on the street.

On the flip side of my family coin there is my great-grandfather on my mother’s side: Sam Richards. Sam’s portrait hung on the wall in my grandparents’ front room for many years and he was gentle-looking man wearing a sharp business suit, slicked-back hair and a kindly smile. Sam started out as a boxer, then he became a book maker and eventually the owner of a large boxing ring in Selly Oak.  Although he was neck-deep in dodgy book-making dealings, he presented a business-like front to his activities and he clearly had the police under his influence. The police would tip him off before a raid and when passing on their regular beat they would bang on the wall of the house whenever he needed to clear the house (which most often involved sending my grandmother down to the bottom of the garden with the betting slips in her dolls pram). Sam made a great deal of money, he bought a lot of local property, he was a freemason and he contributed to the community by buying shoes for local orphans. He certainly didn’t hide the fact that his business was lucrative and he once caused a stir in the community by buying my grandmother a silver-handled umbrella (which she subsequently left on a bus).

Sam (left) and business associates

My mother recalls that the words ‘peaky blinders’ were banded around the household when she was a child and she was aware that Sam mixed equally with both well-heeled individuals and shady groups who protected his business. The Curlys of the world were on Sam’s payroll rather than his drinking buddy in the pub - in fact it became a running joke in my household that my father’s family were on the rough-and-ready, 'practical' side of the Birmingham gangs, whereas my mother’s family were much more discreet with their dealings and ‘higher up the food chain’!

Sam Richards (centre) and his boxing ring

Wood block ID photo stamp used by Sam to get into the horse races

I remember vividly the stories that my grandparents told me about Birmingham in that era and I have portraits and photographs of James and Sam and assorted paraphernalia from their lives. Most of all I remember the houses, the smell of old wood and tobacco, the strange turns of phrase when they spoke, the way that humour intertwined with violence and the physicality of close friendships. I remember visiting my great-aunt who lived to be over one-hundred years old and seeing how she kept her old terraced house perfectly-preserved, with a rocking chair in front of an open fire, lace antimacassars on the armchairs and a freezing cold outside toilet. I remember my godfather Luigi and how friends would laugh at the idea of having an Italian godfather looking out for me. I remember the large men that regularly visited my grandad’s house, how well dressed and friendly they were yet so big and scary. How one of them would squeeze my knees to make me laugh every time he visited. It would really hurt and I could never wriggle away from him, but he made me laugh so much and he was always extremely polite to the women of the house.

 

But, aside from modernising our houses, things haven’t changed a great deal in some areas of Birmingham. I grew up on an estate in Birmingham not far from where Curly and Sam lived. It could be a violent place but the locals valued strong generational links forged between large, influential families that looked out for each other. Loyalty and family names still carry a great deal of weight around here and your reputation follows you around. I’ve worked in funeral parlours and mental asylums, swanned around masonic halls in ballgowns, listened to security experts lecture me on the latest developments in bio weaponry, held the keys to churches and gin bars, dated spies and had partners bring undercover police along to romantic nights out in case I wasn’t the friendly gal I promised to be. Sometimes your history can be both a blessing and a curse. One day I might be inclined to write about it all, maybe when I've finished living it...

 

Death threat, slipped into an enemy's pocket

So, as you may well imagine, when I heard that a TV series had been made about the peaky blinders I was filled with mixed emotions and expectations because I felt as though someone was making a documentary about a close friend or relative. A writer who was unfamiliar with the true spirit of the blinders could be tempted to ridicule them or cast them as heartless gangsters. However I wasn’t disappointed. In fact a great deal of content made me smile because it cut very close to home. Pretty bang-on in some cases. I’m pleased that the series didn't shy away from the brutal, frenetic violence that these men were predisposed to because that was certainly the case from the stories that I heard (and I still see it around me in some districts of Birmingham these days) but it also highlighted the strong allegiances, friendships and family ties between the gang members. The only thing I found lacking was the vicious humour that these men had - the constant joking around and the casual way that serious matters, such as injury, incarceration or even death, were laughed about and passed over. I saw this raw humour in my grandfather’s friends and older family members and these days I am chastised by friends for having exactly the same sense of humour and outlook on life. For this reason the character of Arthur is the most authentic by far, if only for the speed in which he switches between silly banter and vicious attack. 

A 19thC Small Heath pub token, use to pay for drinks and for groups to recompense the landlord for the use of recreational facilities and back rooms for group meetings

Sick Society token, entitling the bearer to financial support to see a doctor or help with burial costs for himself, wife or child

But the greatest accomplishment of Peaky Blinders is that it portrays the central characters as both hero and villain thereby giving the viewer the uneasy experience of both fearing and admiring them, which was the exact same uncomfortable feeling that I grappled with upon learning about my family connections with the blinders as a child. James’s working cap gave me more than a few nightmares as a child, but there are aspects of his personality and values that I admire and I see within myself these days. Perhaps the fondness that I have for James, Sam and their friends is borne out of a realisation that although they were violent men who sailed on the wrong side of the law, they also had strong family values, they were loyal to those who were loyal to them and they would protect their friends and loved ones at all costs – all values that our modern-day society would do well to aspire to.

(Interestingly, my auntie tells me that James’s death was quite a talking point. The story goes that a gypsy came into the Green Man pub in Harbourne and started reading palms. James paid her to read his palm, she took one look at his hand and refused, then left the pub straight away.  James died only days afterwards).

 

 

Helen Ingram (@drhingram)