Will these children succeed against the odds?
As social mobility stalls, Guy Kelly talks to the young stars of a new documentary to see what obstacles they face
Almost two years ago, Edmund Coulthard decided something ought to be done about social mobility in this country. The creative director of TV production company Blast! Films, Coulthard was reading endless news reports that all seemed to tell the same story: fewer and fewer British teenagers were choosing to go on to university, and the gap in opportunities between children from poor and well-off backgrounds was growing by the year. Social mobility had stalled.
“More than ever, it seemed like Britain was, and is, becoming a place where a child’s talent or ambition is secondary to their parents and their postcode in enabling success,” he says. “We thought about why that is, and how we could make a programme that would really understand the obstacles in front of them.”
The result is Generation Gifted, a landmark six-part documentary series beginning tomorrow on BBC Two. In it, the 57-year-old’s team follows the progress of six highly talented children from desperately low-income families (episode one the girls, episode two the boys) in some of the poorest parts of Britain, as they try to navigate what’s often thought of as the most crucial school years: from Year 9 to the end of Year 11.
It is an extraordinarily ambitious project, inspired by the pioneering 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which followed two Africanamerican high-school students in Chicago for five years as they attempted to become professional basketball players.
Narrated by Maxine Peake, Generation Gifted is the product of a year’s non-stop filming in six different towns and cities around Britain. In 2019, we will revisit the same children to check on their progress. Finally, in 2020, we will watch them take their GCSES, and find out what the future holds. For Coulthard, the series aims to answer a simple question: what does it take for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to succeed?
“We could have made a standard documentary about social mobility, but it’s always more interesting to see these things through the eyes of a child, and 13-15 are the key ages when they start thinking seriously about the future, and working out their aspirations,” he says.
The children featured in the series – who were cast after various auditions and assessments at their particular schools – are all “gifted” not in the sense of being child geniuses but in clearly having a talent that should, in a fair society, give them some success. For many, though, a lack of confidence and their circumstance dilute their sense of ambition.
We meet 14-year-old Shakira, for instance, who sings like Adele and draws beautifully, but living with her mother, stepfather and heavily disabled little brother in a flat in Tamworth, she has never known anybody who “works” as an artist, or who went to university, or who was time-rich enough to prioritise a creative pursuit over simply paying the bills. As a result, the whole family concludes that her best chance of making a living is as a tattoo artist.
It’s the same with the boys. Liam, a biology whizz from Newcastle, is clever enough to target a medical degree, according to his teachers, but he thinks his only option is to become a chef.
“Really, only by looking at that thought process do you understand what social mobility means,” Coulthard stresses. “Confidence, and being around their parents’ successful friends and so on, is something middle-class kids take for granted.”
In London, meanwhile, musician Jamarley has his promising future threatened when his father is deported. In the programme, we see staff at his school, Whitefield in Barnet, desperately hoping Jamarley maintains focus on his artistic talents, for his sake.
“We have a term here, ‘Rhinos’, meaning pupils that are ‘Really Here In Name Only’, which we are adamant about avoiding where we can,” says head teacher Liz Rymer. “We know kids have problems, so we want to know about every pupil’s family life and help them to keep going at what they’re good at. It’s about stepping up and out of being disadvantaged, and to do that you need the confidence that success in things like the arts and sport can provide.”
One of tomorrow night’s stars is certainly not short of confidence. Jada, a precocious, self-confessed “intelligent young lady” from Handsworth in Birmingham, aspires to attend a grammar school sixth form (depending on your views, the programme could be seen as supporting either side of the grammar school debate) and one day become a paediatrician. For the past five years, she has had to share a bed with her sister at her grandmother’s house, after her family was made homeless. Sitting on a swing set, she’s seen explaining social mobility to a friend.
“Expectations for us is that we go to Mcdonald’s and clean the toilets, do not get very far and do not do very well,” she says, clearly intent on proving that wrong. Her mother, 47-year-old Charmaine, tells me she encourages her children to dream of a better future.
“I always tell them to be a root out of dry ground. The image of this area might not be so wonderful, but you work with that. I truly believe that education is a way out of poverty, even if there are obstacles every step of the way,” she says. “My daughter plays netball against grammar school girls sometimes, and she notices that their mindset is to strive for excellence in everything. That’s a major difference, but I tell her to have that too.”
In Port Talbot, Anne-marie, a voracious reader and aspiring criminal psychologist whose eyes light up on a tour of Cardiff University (later she and her mother, Robyn, are flabbergasted when they find out fees are £9,250, they had reckoned on “around £500”) battles crippling under-confidence and her family’s financial struggles to try to make the most of her clearly supreme intelligence. Speaking to camera in tomorrow night’s episode, she too reflects on social mobility.
“If you want to become somebody great, you’ve got to work for it. You can’t just, like, go into school and be told, ‘you’re going to be prime minister one day, get ready…’” She checks herself for a moment, tying her hair up. “You know, if it is like that, then I think somebody needs to do something about the education system.”
By the end of the programme, which is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and air-punchingly inspiring, you will be rooting for all six case studies as if they’re your own children. In a just world, all the stars of Generation Gifted would have bright futures. Over the next three years, finding out if they get there will be captivating.