Social justice is the rising tide that lifts all ships through equal opportunity - Matt Bromley

What we want instead, I said, is social justice, which is about celebrating people’s roots, while simultaneously ensuring those roots don’t take a stranglehold of their life chances.

Social justice is about ensuring opportunities are earned not inherited. And that’s never been more important – especially in education.

We live in an increasingly unequal, fractured society and schools, as microcosms of that society, are becoming increasingly unequal, fractured institutions. Schools cannot solve all of society’s ills, of course and nor should they be expected to, but they can do more to ensure a child’s birth is not also their destiny.

Currently, disadvantaged children – whether that be those living in poverty, those from underrepresented cultures, ethnicities and backgrounds, those with transient lives, or those with special educational needs and disabilities – start school behind their peers and schools fail to close the gap.

In fact, that gap widens as children travel through the education system, in part because knowledge begets knowledge: those children who start out behind, find it harder than their peers to access the school curriculum and achieve, and thus they fall further and further behind.

Covid exacerbated the problem. There’s been a marked rise in absenteeism since the pandemic and disadvantaged children are more than twice as likely to be persistently or severely absent as their peers. Disadvantaged children are more likely to experience mental health issues.

The school curriculum often fails to talk to disadvantaged children’s lived experiences and, because they do not see themselves reflected in the school curriculum, they do not feel it is for them. Furthermore, they often lack the background knowledge and word power needed to access the full curriculum and so fail to achieve their potential.

It is not that these children are less able than their peers, nor that they do not exert the same amount of effort; it is the knowledge and skills gaps (what we might reductively call ‘cultural capital’) which result from their circumstances that pose a barrier to their success at school and then in later life.

This is the focus of my new book, Why School Doesn’t Work for Every Child, which – as they say – is available in all good bookshops. It explores ways of removing those barriers and providing a more equitable education to all; it provides practical strategies to help schools include the excluded and mitigate some of the effects of an unequal, fractured society.

Anyway, enough of the shameless plug. What we need if we are to achieve social justice is better representation of all peoples in all aspects of society.

For example, if working class children, or minority ethnic children, or children with SEND can’t see people like them in positions of respect and authority, they might assume they don’t belong and that there’s no route into those careers for them. Representation matters.

It matters, too, because the more diverse our workforce, the more diverse our thinking. And diversity of thought leads to better decision-making.

Social justice, then, is about being proud of who you are and where you come from, whilst not being barred from certain pursuits because of that background.

Which brings me to Lorraine Kelly who recently said that working-class people are being ‘left behind’ in TV. Kelly comes from a working-class background and says that, while gender and racial diversity are rightly receiving attention, socioeconomic diversity is often left out of the conversation.

I agree. Indeed, I wrote about it in this very newspaper last month. If you ask me, social class should be the 10th protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 because working-class people do not get the same opportunities as more affluent, middle-class people and that’s discriminatory.

But it is more complex than Kelly suggests. Risk factors are intersectional. Disadvantaged children are more likely to have SEND. Minority ethnic children are more likely to live in poverty. And so forth.

So, social justice is the key. A rising tide lifts all ships, as they say. We should indeed focus on working class children and ensure they have equitable chances of success. But it’s not a zero-sum game.

Matt Bromley is CEO of bee and chair of the Building Equity in Education Campaign. Find out more at http://bee-online.uk. Why School Doesn’t Work for Every Child is published by Routledge and is out now.