Why children born now have less chance of bettering their lives than those born in 1946
That’s the irrefutable – and devastating – conclusion of a 70-year study that shames our political elite
ALITTLE girl called Patricia Palmer came into the world in a basement flat in the Cotswold town of Cheltenham. And although she could hardly have known it, her birth meant she was part of perhaps the greatest scientific experiment in modern British history.
Patricia’s father was a building labourer. Her mother, like so many women back then, in March 1946, was a full-time housewife. They lived in a world that was pre- computer, premobile phones and where the British Empire was still going strong. The Soviet Union was one of the planet’s greatest powers and space travel mere science fiction.
Patricia’s parents had a lavatory in the yard and no indoor bathroom. They were people of old-fashioned tastes; if her mother had a culinary speciality, it was that national favourite, spotted dick.
But though none of them realised it at the time, Patricia was special.
Her mother had signed up for a pioneering study, designed to record in great detail the lives of an entire cohort of British babies, born in a single week in March 1946. In total, 13,687 mothers agreed to take part, representing more than nine out of ten births in Britain that week. Even today, almost 70 years on, scientists are still following the lives of 5,362 of those 1946 babies — the most studied and best understood generation in our history.
As the science journalist Helen Pearson explains in a fascinating new book, no survey has ever cast a more unsparing light on the realities of class and health in Britain, or had a profound impact on the way we live now.
It was the study of 1946 — as well as subsequent studies in 1958, 1970, 1991 and 2000 — that laid bare the shocking extent of inequality in this country. As these reports showed beyond doubt, class and income affected almost every aspect of daily life — from the age a child learned to read to its chances of dropping dead of a heart attack.
Thanks to the so-called Life Project, we know that children’s lives can be blighted for ever if their mothers smoke while pregnant. We know, too, that their lungs can never recover if they grow up amid intense air pollution, that babies are less likely to suffer cot-death if they sleep on their backs, and that nothing threatens children’s life-chances more than the collapse of their parents’ marriage.
For years, these were controversial theories. Even today, people still argue about them, not least because there are notable exceptions to every rule. But thanks to the Life Project, the facts are there for all to see.
Above all, though, the project has laid devastatingly bare the collapse of social mobility in the past few decades — a phenomenon for which, sadly, none of our political parties seems inclined to offer a lasting solution.
The project’s origins go back to the 1930s, when many of the country’s politicians were anxious that falling birth rates were threatening the survival of the British Empire. But it was not until March 1946, when a battleweary, bomb-ravaged nation was struggling to rebuild from the sacrifices of World War II, that the first study got off the ground.
Its founding father was a rangy, viola-playing doctor called James Douglas, who believed that if the authorities were armed with the true facts about daily life in Britain, they would have the tools to improve the lives of millions.
Even Douglas was shocked by the first findings.
For Britain, in 1946, was not merely hidebound by post-war austerity, it was a country haunted by astoundingly stark class differences.
Never before had any survey reflected the truth about life in Britain with such pitiless honesty.
Babies with the poorest parents were a shocking 70 per cent more likely to be stillborn than those with the richest parents, as well as much more likely to be born prematurely.
Working- class mothers were also much less likely to be given pain relief during child-birth, almost certainly because doctors tended to ignore what poor, badly educated women were telling them.
Today, the conventional wisdom holds that such inequalities were swept away by the advent of the NHS and the Welfare State. But the Life Project proved that this was not true at all.
Even in 1958, more than a decade after the introduction of the Welfare State, labourers’ babies were far more likely to die than professional parents’ children — a result not just of endemic poor health, but of bad diet, terrible housing conditions and medical inattention.
And even in the early Seventies — often feted as the golden age of the Welfare State, before cuts started to bite later in the decade — the survey found that working- class children were far behind their rich counterparts at school, were six times more likely to have speech difficulties, and were even more than an inch shorter, on average. T oDAy, we look back at this period as the heyday of post-war social mobility, driven by full employment and the Welfare State. It was also the heyday of grammar schools and the 11-plus — the former remembered fondly today, the latter often recalled with a shudder.
Patricia Palmer grew up and sat her 11-plus in March 1958, on her birthday. As a working- class child, she was expected to fail: when the teacher saw her writing the same date twice on her exam paper (because she had to give both her date of birth and the date of the test) he hit her across the head and snarled: ‘I don’t know why you’re sitting this.’
She did fail, as it turned out. But she was far from alone. For as the Life Project data showed, fewer than one in four working-class children passed the 11-plus, compared with more than half of upper-middle-class children.
This was the dirty little secret of the 11-plus. Indeed, this was one of the reasons that even many Conservative-controlled education authorities embraced comprehensive schools in the Sixties, claiming that they would become ‘grammar schools for all’.
We know, sadly, how that turned out. For although the reformers claimed to be marching beneath the banner of class equality, social mobility actually went into reverse in the mid-Seventies and has never recovered.
Almost 20 years later, the economist Leon Feinstein pored over decades of data on children born in 1970 to produce some devastating findings. At some point between the ages of five and ten, he showed, dim, rich children almost always overtook clever poor ones in standard school tests.
The bright poor children never recovered. In other words, Britain had become a country ruled by a narrow, self-selected elite, based not on brains and hard work but on birth and breeding.
And as if Feinstein’s findings weren’t bad enough, there was worse to come. For it turned out that working-class children born in 1970 were far less likely to have made progress than children born in 1958.
The reasons, of course, are pretty obvious. Ever since the Seventies, generations of British children have grown up in a world of high unemployment, under-achieving schools, shambolic education policies, a threadbare manufacturing base and a grossly distorted property market. N EvEr in our post-war history has it been harder to escape the poverty trap. Indeed, never in modern times has political and professional success been confined to such a tiny upper-class elite.
once again, the statistics tell the story right up to today. A study from the Sutton Trust this week shows that 67 per cent of British oscar winners went to private schools. These include Eddie redmayne (Eton) and Kate Winslet (redroofs). It was the same in most other professions — 74 per cent of judges and 71 per cent of senior military officers were privately educated.
Previously, a survey in 2007 showed more than half of all the major figures in law, politics, medicine, journalism and business went to expensive private schools — which educate barely 7 per cent of the entire population!
To return to showbusiness, few surely dispute that the redmayne, or many others such as old Harrovian Benedict Cumberbatch, are fine actors.
But the fact that so many of our current Tv and film stars were educated at the most expensive schools speaks volumes about the failings of the state system, the shameful collapse of social mobility and the enduring — and worse, increasing — dominance of the old upper-class elite.
yet the really shocking thing, as the Life Project shows, is that the gulf becomes apparent when children are so young. Even before they start school, there are already marked disparities in health, height, social confidence and reading ability between rich and poor — and from then on they only get worse.
And yet there is, perhaps, a chink of light. For as the Life Project also shows, poor children are not necessarily doomed to fail, as so many Left-wing observers often claim.
Good schools make a difference — and goodness knows there are not enough of them. But on the evidence of the Life Project, the two factors that really matter are not schools and teachers, but parental encouragement and individual self-motivation.
The plain fact is that thousands of poor children have already fallen behind well before they start school. Even at the age of just three, children from the poorest families are already as much as a year behind their counterparts.
yet poor children whose parents read and sing to them, take them on trips and teach them painting and drawing are much less likely to be sucked into the abyss of underachievement and unemployment.
And since the statistics show beyond doubt that parents are much more important than teachers, perhaps David Cameron was right last month when he floated plans for a ‘parenting classes voucher scheme’.
And if more people were aware of the project’s findings on the devastating impact of divorce, then I wonder whether they would be quite so keen to break up their families.
Divorce is one of the great social epidemics of our age. As late as the Fifties, there were fewer than 25,000 divorces a year. Today, there are
almost 120,000, while more than 40 per cent of all marriages fail.
As Pearson writes, children from broken homes are ‘more likely to do poorly at school and suffer behavioural problems’.
but there is worse to come. Shockingly, divorce has an even more negative impact on children’s life chances than a parent’s death.
As adults, the children of divorced parents are ‘more likely to be unemployed, earn less, suffer mental health problems, fall sick, drink too much and see their own relationships crumble’. yet, again, the news is not all bleak. Indeed, perhaps the most heartening conclusion from Pearson’s book is that even with bad parenting and bad schools, no one is doomed to failure. the figures show, she writes, that ‘with enough motivation and support, people can step up at any time in their lives’.
the story of Steve Christmas, one of the 1958 cohort, provides a wonderful example. born to an alcoholic father, he grew up in poverty, failed his 11plus and left school with no qualifications. but he never stopped trying to get on. After a spell as a bouncer, he became a doortodoor insurance agent, carefully saved money and registered for computing and bookkeeping classes.
Eventually, Steve became an independent financial adviser, and a walking advert for the importance of selfmotivation, selfimprovement and sheer hard work.
the trick, he says, is never to give up: ‘If I can’t do something, I’ll keep going until I do it right.’
not everybody, alas, shares Steve Christmas’s sense of personal responsibility.
Indeed, perhaps nothing says more about modern britain than the fact that today the Life Project seems destined for the scrapheap — a victim not of government cuts, but of public indifference.
Although the toryLib Dem Coalition found almost £34 million for a new study, the project died almost as soon as it was born. the team had hoped to recruit some 16,000 mothers. but only 249 signed up in the first six months and eventually, with numbers catastrophically low, the authorities had little choice but to pull the plug.
that was a tragedy not just for the scientists, but for us as a society as a whole. If previous form is any guide, the 2015 study would have been vitally important to help us understand the barriers to social mobility, as well as providing findings that would have given us healthier and happier lives.
there could hardly be a more damning indictment of the selfabsorption of today’s timepressured britons, or a more striking contrast with the publicspiritedness of their predecessors, who happily gave up so much of their time in the name of the common good.
And perhaps that fact alone sums up what has happened to our country since that cold week in March 1946, when a little group of inspired researchers set out to find out what was really happening at the heart of the british family — and, in doing so, helped to change our country for ever.
THe Life Project: The extraordinary story of our ordinary Lives by Helen Pearson is published by Penguin, priced £20. To buy a copy for £15 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. offer until february 27, p&p is free on orders over £12.