In America, and here too, I think, boxing is a way out of the ghetto. It certainly worked for Nicola Adams (‘Nicola Adams Now Eighth Hardest Woman in Leeds’). But there are other ways our youngsters can have a crack at escaping the class and caste-based regimes they are born into.
Education is one. But as with so much else, your educational chances will largely depend on where you are born, because that will determine how much the government is willing to spend on you. If you’re a London child, you get the jackpot, with an annual education spend of £8,384. If you are born in East England, well, bad luck, your education is marked down a third, at a budget £5,633.
Oh, doubtless there’ll be some sort of a ‘Green Book’ justification why Britain’s children should start their education carrying these handicaps. There always is. After all, just look at the results!
If Britain’s next generation - which means Britain itself - is going to escape this formal education handicap, we cannot wait for the political system to reform itself. We’re going to have to do it ourselves. For now, this is social democratic politics.
But we’re in luck, because the fortunes of the future will be built on data, which requires less of the hard infrastructure the British government is so reluctant to expand or even maintain outside the Southeast (see Diane Coyle on the Green Book again). Doesn’t matter whether you’re in London, or Ipswich, or Scarborough, or Gateshead - coding skills can be mastered anywhere. Coding skills can be deployed anywhere.
Imagine a future where everyone knows that the best coding skills are to be found in Wolverhampton! Or that it’s an open secret that if you really want to accelerate your games platform, you’d best bet is Kendal! You want to get your de-fi company in business - get over to Norwich! Best space-industry data-support? Newcastle, never doubt it.
The big-ticket way to do this is to establish mass-market coding academies around the country. (Not in London, obviously, since travel and residence costs mean it is a gated community for most of the rest of the county.)
Any millionaire who wants their money to really generate positive change should think about establishing a stable of coding academies. Maybe go and talk to Guido van Rossum - the man who invented Python (the-code-eating-the-world).
So here’s a direct challenge to any budding philanthropist out there: “Let our youngsters get their hands on the tools of the future. Let them eat Python.”
In London, there are plenty of state schools which achieve great results: partly because of wealthy/motivated parents, and partly because of their privileged funding. There are also the odd state school in the north which achieved great results - I'm thinking of Greenhead College in Huddersfield.
If you abolished private schools, you can be absolutely certain that you'd find elite state schools populated by the offspring of the ruling elite. In fact, you already do: Holland Park, Grey Coat Hospital, Fulham Oratory etc. Ditto the Dragon School in Oxford. There's always a way.
I suspect and fear that the great hurdle is the squashing of expectations, bred over generations. Parents in Dewsbury should have a reason to have the same expectations of their local school as they do in Hampstead. Since governments seem unable to even conceive of this, success will only come by swerving the system. Hence the idea of coding academies. But maybe I'm wrong. . . wouldn't be the first time.
You don't need the state to learn to code, just as you don't need the state to learn to play football or to wipe your nose. The state would only offer a dumbed down Python class which everyone would pass and nobody would value. AAA grades for print("Hello World")
What you do need is interest and aptitude - one of the people who took the Python course I enrolled in lives in an Afghan village with one internet cafe - now he works (remotely) for Google.