There is something extraordinarily liberating about doing away with shoes. On a beach, with miles of golden sands beckoning, the attraction is obvious. On a damp urban street, in autumn, it may be less so. But, as a child of the 1960s, there were a few months in which I tied ribbons round my toes, hung beads around my neck and joined other teenagers trilling happily about heading off to San Francisco.
There were drugs around, but most of us in the Midlands town where I lived were fuelled simply by optimism. Anything seemed possible.
The power of that hope produced a jolt of recollection as Sir Keir Starmer delivered his conference speech. He spoke of that “nagging voice saying ‘no, this isn’t for you’” and his wish to banish that to secure “a country where you don’t have to change who you are just to get on”. Absolutely right! Go for it, Keir.
I was almost reaching for my ribbons again, but the call to arms, when it eventually came, was somewhat muted. Changes to planning laws are Starmer’s answer to rekindling that sense of optimism that is so lacking in today’s UK.
Owning that pebble-dash semi clearly was very important to the Starmer family’s self-esteem, but only in the UK is the weight of a mortgage deemed so important in contributing to wellbeing. It is the sense that opportunities are available for all that is surely crucial. That is what has drawn so many migrants to the UK over generations and why, increasingly, those migrants are admitting that they were mistaken and are heading back home.
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the latest census data suggests that perhaps as many as one million EU citizens in England and Wales who had applied to the post-Brexit EU Settlement Scheme were no longer in the UK by the end of last year.
For the UK is not a country of equal opportunities. One obvious dividing line is in education. Labour is committed to charging VAT on independent school fees, but there is another divisive aspect of our education system: the grammar schools.
I was a beneficiary of these and, until relatively recently, could not imagine ever advocating hauling up the drawbridge that had made my route to university so straightforward. But while grammar schools undoubtedly do confer some advantages on their students, they impoverish other local students.
It was the Labour government of Harold Wilson which, in the early 1970s, decreed comprehensive schools to be the way forward. This was not revolutionary, but was already demonstrably a successful formula in Europe. Some UK local authorities, however, were adamantly opposed to the comprehensive system. Decades later, they continue to hang on to their two-tier system and I have seen it in operation in local schools in Kent. There is no denying that, for those children who succeed in winning places at the grammar schools, the selection process brings them advantages in some cases as great as, and sometimes more than, they attain from the private sector. It is the losers who concern me, and the losers are those who, aged 11, are judged failures.
When the 11-plus exam was the norm, a pass siphoned off children to the rarefied atmosphere of the grammar school and the rest were parcelled off to a variety of “secondary modern” schools, some very secondary and some not very modern. Today, the term “secondary modern” is rarely used officially, but it can still colour thinking in the staff room.
For the fact is that the grammar schools do not just suck up the talent, which isn’t always clear at age 11, but they also sap the aspiration. The scale of the damage can vary by region: the pass mark for the 11-plus alters depending on the number of available grammar school places.
In one school I visited before the pandemic, the headmaster confided that he did not see his primary role as educating the children in his care. “My first task,” he said, “is to try and provide them with a sense of stability.”
Such is the scale of the task facing our teachers. As another school year got under way last month, we heard again from teachers confronting reception classes with children still in nappies; barely able to speak, because they have barely been spoken to, and unused to walking, because parents have found it easier to get them from A to B in a pushchair rather than persevering with the more long-winded effort of walking with a four-year-old.
Even with the most dedicated teachers, children with such a disadvantaged start will struggle to catch up with those from less difficult backgrounds. Baking in the division at 11 risks consigning them to a cycle of continuing deprivation. A lack of good-quality housing undoubtedly contributes to the difficulties many families have to deal with. But it is hard to look at the problems facing the UK today and conclude that the planning system is key to putting them right.
The optimism that abounded along with the beads back in the 1960s came from a degree of confidence that anything was possible. Sir Keir must think big if he is to retrieve that.
