You’re likely to see an onslaught of pushy mums and dads at your next parents’ evening. They’ll have been buoyed up by a new study which claims that middle-class pupils do better at school than their working-class peers because of “intensiveparenting” . Private tutors and moving in the right social circles both play their part in getting middle-class kids into high- status universities and then into a good career. And it seems that mother really does know best. The study, conducted by education expert Professor Stephen Ball, found that it was mums that were doing most of the pushing.