Who gets the best jobs? Err, the best people

Unless you purposefully position yourself as some kind of crusading polemicist like Michael Moore, I believe it's reasonably common practice in a documentary to present balanced debate, or at least outline the opposition to your premise, if you have one. Every now and again, though, you see something which works so hard to show the opposite point of view that they seem to undermine their own argument.

I thought this was almost true of Richard Bilton's "Who gets the best jobs?", shown on the Beeb last week. He started out by claiming we're a society increasingly divided by privilege or the lack thereof, that we're retrenching to some kind of immediate post-Victorian position, even drawing comparisons early in the piece to "Upstairs Downstairs". He says that he thought that we were a society where jobs were given to those most talented and best suited to do them, but said that, "Evidence suggests I was wrong."

But some of the stats he quotes, and some of his case he studies, seemed to counter his argument to me. He states, for example, that while only 7% of children go to private schools, 60% of barristers went to 'independent schools'. Firstly, an independent school is not necessarily a fee-paying one any longer, so that's changed already and fuzzies the statistic, which needs better clarification to carry any weight. Secondly, while this does seem like a disproportionate number in that profession, it nonetheless means that 40% of them did not go to independent schools, a state of affairs I cannot believe to have been the case between the wars, for example. The Bar Council also now offers training to barristers to try to limit the tendency to go for applicants from better-off backgrounds, and 1,000 barristers per year go into state schools to try to demystify the profession.

He also cited PR companies, where as many as 30% of the staff of any given London PR firm can be entirely unpaid interns. He says, rightly, that living in London and working for nothing restricts the opportunities to people who can afford to bear that sort of expense in the first place. But that, I would suggest, is not a deliberate policy of the PR companies to 'weed out' poor people. I suspect they don't give a damn where their free labour comes from, provided they pull their weight - this is circumstance, not policy. And, in any case, so few of these interns go on to get a paid job at the end of their internship that they can hardly be said to be getting the 'best jobs'.

So, though he had powerful argument in his favour from the likes of Alan Milburn, I rather think he went too far in stating the opposite view. There was, of course, one thing in this programme which absolutely staggered me, and was quite the stand-out moment of the whole hour. A certain Peter Saunders, author of a book called "Social Mobility Myths" said at first, and entirely reasonably, "If you're bright, motivated and work hard, you will be, to a large extent, successful, almost irrespective of what kind of family you come from."

So far, so fair. It does rather back up what I'm saying about Mr Bilton's interviewees not really making his case for him, but then Mr Saunders went on to say, and I quote,

"There is an ability distribution across the social classes. On average you will find the ability level of children being born into middle class homes is higher, and that is what's driving the difference in occupational outcomes."

Now, despite this utterly stupefying comment completely contradicting what he'd just said, and in a weird, twisted way backing up the programme's central premise, this rather left Mr Bilton dumbfounded. Well it would, wouldn't it? It's completely fatuous to make such a claim. Now I freely admit to not having read his book, and am therefore making the huge error of commenting on his findings without seeing his methodology, but frankly, I don't care, because I seriously doubt there's any way of measuring this before the kids' circumstances have defined their achievements.

When the hell is this class-defined 'ability' being measured? Is it very young, before their education or lack thereof has kicked in? Because if it is, it's meaningless. Kids develop at different rates, so a seemingly dull toddler may blossom into a very bright teenager, and vice-versa, depending on their circumstances.

Which measure of 'ability' is he using? Intelligence comes in many forms, whether it's artistic, vocational or academic, and dismissing a kid who becomes an adult who lays bricks beautifully but can't quote Shakespeare or play the piano is extremely stupid. He may never have sat in front of a piano or been given the opportunity to read the classics. If you take a bright kid from a well-off family and dump him/her into a violent, poorly-performing state school, I seriously doubt his 'ability' would measure the same as if you'd put him through private school, and the same is no doubt true of the reverse.

As scientific claims go, this is a horrible one, and I can't believe it has any basis in fact - it's right up there with phrenology, astrology and the like and I find myself entirely unwilling to believe it. I can, frankly, imagine an entry in Mr Saunders' CV:

"1970 - Applied for position of Professor of Eugenics at University of Berlin, only to find the Chancellor had been forcibly removed some 25 years earlier and the course was no longer being taught."

So, to go back to Mr Bilton. By using nutters like that to back up (or not) his theory, and by showing too many examples of kids who've overcome their perceived disadvantages to do well, and professions trying to widen access, he thankfully left my belief that the best jobs go to the best people intact at the end of his programme.