The idea of ‘levelling up’ is based on the enduring fairytale of meritocracy in Britain, as if there is indefinite space at the top of society for everyone prepared to make enough effort to get there.

Despite the rhetoric, the depressing irony is that in twenty-first century Britain, there is far more room at the bottom of society rather than at the top, and it is an increasingly harsh place to be. Britain is not producing enough graduate jobs for all the graduates its universities are churning out. Instead, the real growth in jobs has been in traditional low-skilled, and often low-paid, jobs.

Moreover, the meritocracy argument overlooks the ongoing ‘levelling down’ of the working classes in our education system. This is evident in state schools in disadvantaged areas which are the most under-resourced; the most likely to have buckets collecting water from unrepaired roofs, to have foodbanks operating in their school halls, to have the narrowest curriculum, an impoverished pedagogy, the strongest focus on discipline, and the least SEND resources.

Instead of compensating for the poverty of the children attending their schools, the norm is now for the schools themselves to reflect the poverty of their locality rather than being enabled to redress it, thereby compounding social and educational inequalities. Recently, the Education Policy Institute (EPI) concluded that the government’s efforts to ‘level up’ school funding in England would benefit better-off students more than their poorer peers.

When education went online due to the pandemic it was the poorest, who were disproportionately from BAME backgrounds, who were the most adversely affected. While more than 70% of advantaged secondary school students had access to online learning, only 40% of their disadvantaged peers had the same access. Such a ‘digital divide’ has severely widened the social class attainment gap. This was swiftly followed by the A-level debacle in August 2020, which resulted in a government attempt to ‘level down’ grades for working-class students not once but twice. Only a public outcry forced the government to U-turn.

Then there’s the government’s rescue package for the 2020-’21 school year, which will see a majority of the money go to the unregulated private tutor industry, to deliver individual and small-group tuition, rather than investing in state education by funding extra teachers and teaching assistants in working class schools. The remaining money going to schools is £80 per student – still 3% below its level in 2010 in real terms. The initiative may be a failure in terms of ‘levelling up,’ but it is a successful venture in terms of further privatising our state educational system.

The wider processes of ‘levelling down’ in the form of growing child poverty is inflicting the most enduring damage on working class children and young people. Of the twenty-four European countries surveyed by Pisa between 2015 and 2018, the UK had the largest growth in child poverty at 4%; this is at a time when poverty was falling across Europe by 2% on average.

The preoccupation with ‘levelling up’ focuses attention on how the bottom of British society might become more like the top, but a more productive dialogue would be about how to make the bottom a good, secure and valued place to be. Even better would be a focus on reducing hierarchy, and the social distance between different class groupings in British society, to the point where discussions about top and bottom do not make sense anymore. That would be a levelling worth having.

A better, and less slippery, language than that of ‘levelling up’ would speak of two things: firstly, eradicating poverty across Britain, and secondly, the removal of all forms of special privilege in education. The first requires combining policies to make our education system fairer with progressive changes to our economy.

As well as a socially just, redistributive tax system, we need regional regeneration of disadvantaged areas across all regions of the country. Implementing the Real Living Wage across all sectors of the economy should be matched by a level of Universal Credit that works as a safeguard against poverty alongside adequate funding to local government and other support services for children and families. The second would entail the abolition of private schools but also the elitism that pervades the state sector and the elimination of practices of getting the best for one’s child if it is at the expense of other people’s children.

Of course, there also needs to be a whole raft of policies to deal with the present crisis and address the consequences of austerity. Restoring funding to at least 2010 levels across the UK, plus instituting an equity principle of earmarking funding for the most deprived schools to receive funding first would be the bare minimum. Any serious attempts to ‘level up’ would also provide free broadband for poorer students, ensure every child had a laptop of their own, as well as providing all year free school meals. 

We should be demanding high-quality nursery provision by highly-trained nursery practitioners instead of the low-standard warehousing of children by low-paid workers so that parents can work. The UK spends a mere 0.1% of GDP on early childhood education and care compared with an OECD average of 0.7%. This has resulted in a fragmented system of small-scale private providers that results in a postcode lottery in terms of availability and quality, and it is poorer parents who experience the worst provision.

But many things would also need to change in classrooms. Crucially, the implementation of a broad and balanced curriculum that integrated the vocational with the academic from nursery onwards, which would enable far more children across differences of social class to experience educational success. We need a curriculum that includes learning about democracy, equality, environmental, social and political awareness for children from the ages of 3 and 4. This would ensure that critical thinking skills are at the core of children’s learning in place of the current remorseless focus on repetition, memorisation and routine learning.

Furthermore, replacing the culture of toxic hyper-competition with values and skills of cooperation, trust, compassion, collegiality and caring would make children’s educational experiences both happier and more harmonious. This would necessitate getting rid of SATS, league tables, setting, and Ofsted. Research shows that all children benefit, but working-class children benefit the most, when the ethos of the classroom is underpinned by collaboration rather than competition.