Making Choices
Sir Iain Hall

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Throughout life we make choices.

We decide who we should live with; where we should live; what the quality of our life will be like;
how we will spend our free time or, if we have any, how we spend our surplus money. We can
make, or even unmake, these choices as we pilot our journey through life. Sometimes events may
seem to overwhelm us, but even then, we can decide how to handle the situation.

However, there are four aspects of this journey in which we had no choice. We did not decide who
should be our parents; we did not decide our ethnicity; we did not decide our social class or our
gender. Each of these aspects of our starting points in life was decided for us. We had no say in
the matter despite these choices probably being the most important determinants of our future.
These determinants were, for us, an act of randomness.

It was if our start in life, to some extent, was the result of a large slot machine somewhere in a
distant galaxy, a slot machine with four giant rollers. The first roller would determine our
parentage. The second would determine our social class. The third roller would determine our
ethnicity, whilst the fourth would determine our gender. Far fetched? If you look at the starting
points of some of our students in our schools you may not think so. Are they where they are
through their own actions or has fate been a major player in their lives?

Let us try and imagine the consequences of a fictitious slot machine predicting our life chances.
Let’s pull the handle and see what we get.

Great result! You have scored stable family, middle class, white and a boy. The machine predicts
a good life ahead of you. By the age of three you will probably have a vocabulary some ten
months ahead of your peers. You will be twelve months ahead in the recognition of colour shape
and numbers. By the age of eighteen you are headed for university and, given a fair wind, a
successful life. It would not have mattered if you were not white or came up as female. The same
opportunities lie ahead.

Let’s try again. Send those reels spinning. English-Bangladeshi, working class, stable family and
female. By the age of five you will already be twelve months behind your peers in terms of school
readiness; you have a two in three chance of living below the poverty line; one in sixteen chance
of being unemployed when you leave school and, just to add more troubles, only ten percent of
our university students come from minority ethnic backgrounds. Good luck!

Not keen on the result. Let’s try again. Afro-Caribbean, single parent, male and working class.
Your proposed future seems somewhat difficult as well. Statistically, you have a one in four
chance of being delayed in your development; two in three chance of growing up in poverty; one
in six chance of being unemployed between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and, if you don’t
gain employment by then, a forty percent chance of being permanently unemployed until you are
at least twenty five.

If you have stayed with this so far it must be becoming quite dismal reading, but let’s try one last
spin. White, male, single parent and working class. The only difference between this and our first
spin is single parent and working class, yet statistically the odds are now stacked against you.
The greatest under-performers in our school system are white working class boys. Having a
single parent gives you a seventy percent chance of growing up in poverty; you have a one in
eight chance of being unemployed at the age of sixteen and the same chance of entering
university as our ethnic minorities. However, you will not be alone. In 2005 there were 220,000
young people who were not in education, training or employment, and forty two percent of our
unemployed people were under twenty five. Plenty of company but not much prospect of
predicted success.

These figures, obtained from the Rowntree Foundation, are a statistical analysis of the present
circumstances of the young people in this country. To some extent, we are where we are because
of where we started.

Despite this, not everyone accepts their fate. There are notable examples such as Alan Johnson,
Secretary of State for Health, Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Bill Morris, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal,
Anita Roddick , John Lennon and Freddie Mercury who all gained success from humble
beginnings. However, for each of these examples there are far too many of their peers who
remain trapped by their starting points in life.

I am sure that we believe that all young people have potential; the challenge that we face is in
ensuring that they achieve it! For those of us who have had better starting points or have broken
through the barriers it is time to pay back and help those, in the younger generations, to break
through themselves.

'Never doubt that a small number of thoughtful, committed people can
change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.’
Margaret Mead

Sir Iain Hall is one of NET’s Leading Thinkers. Respond to this article via office@nationaleducationtrust.net 

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