I have class confusion. I was born into a working-class family and definitely feel like I’m working class, but I own stuff and do stuff and like stuff that reeks of the middle classes. Is that bad? I feel like it is but I don’t know why…

I knew what class I was when I was a kid. I went to an all-girls private school (on a poor folk scholarship) and I considered almost everyone else to be posh compared to us. Most had skiing holidays and ponies and parents who drank gin and tonics. I had lots of lovely friends there, but always felt aware that I experienced life through a different lens to them.

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Working hard

That’s when I fell in love with the idea of meritocracy. For a long time, I truly believed that if you work hard, there was no reason why you couldn’t get at least some of the things you aspired to, regardless of where you were born and who you were born to. Meritocracy is the cornerstone of social mobility, that thing we all used to bang on about until it dawned on us that being mobile means you can go down the ladder as well as up it.

Meritocracy was surely the reason that my parents, born into varying degrees of poverty, both having left school at 15 with no qualifications, both went on to build their own businesses (plumber and hairdresser) and have a daughter with a very successful career who got a degree from Cambridge (in addition to the other daughter - me). It was all about meritocracy. The cream rising to the top.

Was it, though, or was it something else?

The most obvious demonstration that meritocracy is a myth is the composition of the government, with over two-thirds having gone to fee-paying private schools. Even more so is the commonality in the background of our prime ministers. Since the Second World War, a third of them went to the exact same school. Imagine how batshit bonkers that would seem if the school in question was a local secondary. Would it be as easily accepted that any other institution could simply churn out a conveyor belt of global leaders, or would questions be asked?

Social, cultural and economic capital

I mean, does anyone really think that the current prime minister would be in his position if he grew up on a council estate rather than a country estate, especially considering his skill set and his personality? During this pandemic so many people have wished that we had a leader like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern in this country - the thing is, we’ve probably got loads of them, they just didn’t get a look in.

One of the biggest themes that has influenced my thinking over the past few years is that of capital - social and cultural, as well as economic. After reading the work of Bourdieu, then learning from pals on Twitter such as Jill Westerman, Dr Peter Shukie, Dr VickyDuckworth, Kay Sidebottom and Diana Tremayne to name just a few, the whole swirling mess of ideas - meritocracy, class, power, education, family - started to make sense to me. Social, cultural, economic and a load of other versions of capital were the magic door openers. And education offers the means to discover what you need to know to amass at least some of that capital.

I was recently reminded of differences in capital by a young adult student who had no qualifications, very low literacy due to her late-diagnosed dyslexia, little family support and lived in extreme poverty. She also had a quick-fire brain, a keen sense of curiosity and was acutely self aware. She knew she should be on a different life path. She knew she had the intellect to be somewhere else. She also knew she had been let down by family, by teachers, and that her behaviour had levelled down to meet what she thought was assumed of her.

She knew that there was this seemingly secret set of things to know and things to be, to lead her out of her life and towards the one she wanted. She also knew she didn’t have to capacity at that time to search for that path as her mental health was precarious. It was heartbreaking.

Looking back to my own start, I can see that what my family lacked in money and status, we made up for in the assumption of fair entitlement that was given to us by ambitious and determined parents. The capital we had was our supportive family background and a culture of aspiration, though it’d be naive to believe that attending a private school didn’t give us another leg up. If I hadn’t had those things, I might have got myself a career and all the middle class flimflammery I’ve picked up along the way, but who knows…Maybe not.