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During the hour he was required to stay in the room for his English GCSE, Dave* ate four, maybe five pages of his exam paper. 

I taught Dave in a unit for students who had been kicked out of mainstream school. He knew he shouldn’t eat his exam paper. He also knew he was odds-on to fail. I knew that, too, but I’d made him sit the exam anyway.

I’d treated Dave like a mug, but - good for him - he was having none of it. 

Dave understood something in that moment that I didn’t. He recognised that our qualifications system is an outrageous confidence trick, and he knew that “I ate my exam” was going to be a better story than “I tried and failed”. By refusing to play the game, he was refusing to be humiliated by it.

This experience unsettled me. I’d always considered myself compassionate, but here I’d been nothing but an accomplice. I’d unwittingly tried to get Dave to buy into one of the biggest cons in education.

You see, our qualifications system is a bit like the card trick “three-card monte”. It’s a classic con: the trickster starts by showing three playing cards to the audience, one of which is a queen. He then places the cards face down, shuffles them around, and invites the audience to bet on which one is the queen. Like all cons, the game is built on a simple basic premise: anyone can win, all they must do is concentrate hard and follow the queen.

Often the audience might be sceptical, so the trickster will let someone win a few times - this is known as the “convincer”. What the audience don’t realise, however, is that once they have placed their bets, the trickster will use sleight of hand to ensure he always wins. The entire game is rigged.

There isn’t exactly a single trickster in our education system, but there is, as the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith theorised, “an invisible hand” directing the rich and powerful towards “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires”. And the game is underpinned by an equally simple (though ultimately misleading) premise as three-card monte: anyone can succeed, if they work hard enough and get a good education. 

This is the central tenet of the social mobility con - and, unfortunately, education has fallen for it.

How has this happened? For 20 years, Labour and Conservative governments have told us that qualifications are the route out of poverty, and the figures seem to bear this out: according to Office for National Statistics figures from 2017, those with degrees, on average, earn 2.3 times more than those with no qualifications.

However, many students don’t get anywhere near a degree. In fact, almost 20 per cent of students leave school without basic qualifications. 

Statistics such as this one were what motivated me to spend much of my 20-odd years of teaching working with students on the margins. I soon realised that helping these students wasn’t simple. Only 4 per cent of students in alternative provision pass English and maths, and the places where I worked were no different. 

There are many reasons for this: poverty, poor physical health, poor mental health, drug problems, domestic violence, sexual abuse, being the victims of crime, being the criminals, learning disabilities, being young carers, being looked-after children - the list of challenges that these young people face can feel endless.

Nevertheless, my coworkers and I sought every type of intervention we could find. To fund them, we made applications to innumerable charities and grants, and even investigated Social Impact Bonds, but we were bailing out a very leaky boat.

The situation felt hopeless. But despite my suspicions, there were a few “convincers”, people who had “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps”. People like, for example, former shadow schools minister Peter Kyle, who, despite severe dyslexia and a reading age of 8, demonstrated an incredible work ethic and climbed his way to the corridors of power.

People like this seemed to be living proof that anyone could become a master in something with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

For years, I didn’t reject the idea of social mobility, thinking there was just a funding problem. But the incident with Dave shed light on an insidious ambiguity lurking in the idea that anyone can succeed with hard work and a good education. That little word “can” is the sleight of hand. Does it mean that through effort and education, people acquire the ability to succeed or that they acquire the permission to succeed?

In 2010, Michael Gove, who was then education secretary, said: “I don’t want to see another generation of poor children travel through school only to leave at the end without qualifications, without a place at college, without hope.”

The implication here is that these children would have hope if only they could acquire the right abilities. But in a wealthy country such as the UK, people are not poor because nature is unjust - they are poor because people and their decisions are unjust. Social mobility looks like it’s about acquiring abilities, but really it’s about acquiring permission.

For instance, some have argued that our examination system is designed to fail a third, and that this is unfair. Defenders of the exams system reply that, even with cohort referencing, it is in principle possible for an entire cohort to pass. They say GCSE exams “reveal” that a third have failed.

By using this language, we are deliberately obscuring the rigged nature of the game. It is people who decide what counts as a pass and what that pass means. GCSEs don’t reveal that a third of students have failed - they artificially define a third of students as failures.

There is a deeply embedded belief within our society that life is a zero-sum game, that there must be winners and losers - hence the fear of grade inflation. Just like the Bank of England’s job is to control inflation, Ofqual’s job is “to maintain standards and confidence in qualifications”. 

But I wonder to what extent our concern about “standards” is actually just another sleight of hand, designed to disguise our own prejudices? 

After all, qualifications have no inherent value beyond being a symbol of pride for successful students (or the nutritional value of the exam paper in Dave’s case). But a market has been created for them by discriminating against those who don’t have them.

For all the talk about social mobility, there are not, and never have been, the educational opportunities available to allow Dave, or people in his position, to flourish.

I want to be clear: I’m not arguing that we should scrap exams or replace them with coursework, teacher-assessed grades or anything else. Qualifications and exams have their place. My argument is more serious: our education system has been so corrupted by the myth of social mobility that it is no longer fit for purpose.

So, what can be done? 

1. Put mental health first

Any government that was serious about providing all students with opportunity would properly fund Surestart and SEND provision, and do something about the UK’s underfunded mental health services. Even before the pandemic, the situation was dire: of the children referred to child and adolescent mental health services in 2017, less than a third received treatment within the year. Around 75 per cent of young people experiencing a mental health problem have to wait so long that their condition gets worse or they are unable to access any treatment at all. 

Until the systems in the UK, at the very least, meets the standards outlined in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Mental Health Performance Framework - and I don’t believe it currently does - we can’t seriously talk about opportunities for every child.

2. Treat every child with dignity

Even with extra support around mental health and social care, it is a sad fact of life that some children do not have any advantages or luck. Peter Kyle, for example, despite having severe dyslexia, scored in the top 1 per cent for many skills involved in communication. Dave had no such economically rewarding hidden talents (as far as we knew).

Every human being must be respected in their dignity. This is unconditional and unrelated to our effort, our talents or our economic contribution. Often politicians appear more concerned with the welfare of the economy than with that of their fellow human beings. But the economy no more has welfare than a rock has dreams. The economy exists for us, not vice versa.

Looking back, I’m embarrassed by my misplaced priorities. I wrongly thought Dave must sit that exam, whatever the cost. I now know that was wrong.

The most common complaint I heard from students about mainstream school was being “mugged off”: having values imposed on them, being lied to or bullshitted to, spoken down to. Too often, they were not treated with dignity, as human beings - people with hopes and fears, preferences and reasons, choices and responsibilities, who are worthy of attention and an honest explanation.

In teaching a young person, we recognise their humanity. This is why the value we place on social mobility must be replaced by a commitment to dignity, whatever the cost - even if that means redefining what we consider to be success.

And if, for Dave, the cost of preserving his dignity was allowing him not to sit his GCSE English exam, so be it.

3. Reassess our priorities

While the 2010 Equality Act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone because of their race, sex, disability, age or sexual orientation, it does not make it illegal to discriminate against someone because of their social background. This is borne out by the fact that people from working-class backgrounds earn less than those from middle-class backgrounds, even when they have the same qualifications and do the same type of job. 

We need to interrogate our priorities here. For example, is suggesting that we should only accept “received pronunciation” in schools advocating for increased cultural capital? Or is it a form of victim blaming?

I believe we need to add social class to the list of protected characteristics - or at least behave as if we have done. 

4. Provide better funding for vocational education

In over a decade of Conservative rule, spending on further education in England has dropped and the UK now spends embarrassingly little on vocational education. 

According to the OECD, we spend 0.3 per cent of GDP on vocational programmes. In comparison, Belgium spends 1 per cent, the Netherlands spends 0.9 per cent, Finland spends 0.8 per cent and Norway spends 0.7 per cent. These countries are among the most economically equal in the world - they have some of the lowest Gini coefficients (a measure of statistical dispersion that represents the wealth inequality within a nation).

In the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson has promised a “high-wage, high-skill” and “low-tax economy”, and boasts about allocating £2.5 billion to the national skills fund and £1.5 billion to upgrade further education buildings. But this is nowhere near enough. To be on a par with Belgium, the UK would need to increase funding for vocational education by about £14 billion.

5. Overhaul Ofsted and the accountability system

At the heart of the social mobility con is a corruption of values, made possible because of the bizarre way in which our schools are held accountable - a curious mix of market forces and the ballot box.

You cannot incentivise someone to value something, as this will lead them to value the incentive rather than the thing. For instance, if you try incentivising a school to improve education by focusing on exam results, it will value exam results rather than improving education.

What do we do about this? Firstly, we must separate students’ qualifications from accountability measures. Government measures of school performance should be based on some method of sampling besides exam grades - ideally, as Becky Allen, professor of education at the University of Brighton, has said, something that is “ungameable”.

Secondly, our accountability system must engage with moral debates, so it is not only concerned with the question “what works?” but also with the question “for what?”. 

Thus, the scope of Ofsted inspections should be reduced to just the protective remits, like safeguarding, health and safety and the financials.

The rest of Ofsted should be devoted to becoming a dispute resolution system for anyone with an interest in education: parents, headteachers, teachers, multi-academy trust CEOs and so on. Through these disputes, which should be encouraged and not avoided, our collective understanding of what counts as good education could be revealed and developed through something akin to case law. 

These problems require big political changes - I am aware that many of the solutions I have outlined go above and beyond the remit of schools themselves. 

So, you might be thinking: what can I, as a teacher, do within the system that we have? This is a question that I have asked myself many times. 

There is a simple answer here: we have to tell students the truth. 

Of course, we should help them to get the grades they want, but peddling propaganda about the emancipating powers of education, while knowing the system is rigged, won’t help anyone but the politicians and the rich. We have a duty to help students see through the con, rather than get caught up in it. 

Above all, we must remember that it isn’t the game itself that gives our job meaning but the relationships we form and the lessons we learn from them.

There is nothing worth doing that violates the dignity of a child. Teachers must raise our voices and stand up to those in authority if they try to demand allegiance or pass off their personal preferences as moral values. 

On occasion, standing up requires courage. Unfortunately, as my experience with Dave shows, courage isn’t my strong suit. 

Dave was courageous, though. And I hope he continues to be so. 

I hope that, if anyone else ever tries to humiliate him with an exam, he eats it, burns it, writes his shopping list on it, does a concertina fold on it and uses it as a fan. I hope he does anything but completes the damned thing. 

Bernard Andrews is a secondary school philosophy teacher in Valencia, Spain. He tweets @DrBARAndrews

*Name has been changed

This article originally appeared in the 17 December 2021 issue under the headline “The big social mobility con…and how we fell for it”