s I neared the end of my time in the early Eighties at Dulwich College, the south London public school, I was told by my careers master that I should aim for a job as an auctioneer. JG Dewes – a former English cricketer who opened the batting for Middlesex in 1947 and for England against Australia in 1951 – must have spotted that I was quite ballsy, probably good on a platform, unafraid of the limelight, a bit noisy, and good at selling things.
All of those traits were identified, nurtured and promoted at Dulwich College. I owe that school an enormous debt. It looked and felt like one of the great classical public-school institutions such as Westminster School or Eton College. But Dulwich was different. During the Forties, under a Labour government, the college began a scheme called “the Dulwich Experiment”. The scheme was devised to educate able children from poor backgrounds, where their school fees would be met by the local authorities.
My first impression of the Dulwich Experiment hit me in my first full year at the school in 1975. The social mix was quite extraordinary. There were boys like me – white, middle class, whose fathers worked in the City – but there were also a huge number of boys who had won scholarships and bursaries covered by the local authorities.
It wasn’t just the ethnic mix. Because Dulwich is a south London school with very few boarders, unlike most public schools, it attracted boys from all over London and parts of the south-east.
I remember my first class quite vividly. Sitting on one side of me was the son of the chief executive of a global company, who was enormously rich. They had a huge house in Farnborough Park in Kent, with staff. On the other side of me was a boy who would become a good friend and whose
father was a coal merchant in Penge, south-east London.
Exactly 25 years after me, my eldest son went there. It was in many ways even better for him. The quality of the teaching was much higher – in my day a number of the teachers were terribly good old chaps and they had had a good war, but were hardly cutting-edge teachers. There is another vital difference.
When my son was there, the social mix was entirely different from my day. When Sam reached the sixth form, he was the boy who came from the poorest family by far. When I was at Dulwich, rich families had holiday homes in Salcombe or Cornwall. When Sam was there, rich families had holiday homes with yachts in St Lucia. The change reflected how the professional rich – the lawyers, fund managers and accountants – had become massively, massively richer over the past 25 years.
And there was no boy in Sam’s year whose father was a coal merchant in Penge, because successive governments, after I left, began to take away the local authority grants to pay for able, poor kids to go to Dulwich. The college did try to build its scholarship system up, but could not get the numbers to the previous scale because of the cost. In reality, Dulwich just could not match the sheer volume of money that was coming from the government. Now, the government spends the same amount of money to send kids to schools where they achieve far less of their true potential.
The grants system started to go under the Tories but Labour did nothing to fight for it either. What I see in the comparative experiences of the school for me and Sam, I see replicated in what happened to British society over the past 25 years – a shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of opportunity to attain their best. As a country, we are underselling ourselves.
Dulwich also taught me how to mix with people. I can genuinely go up to anyone and have a conversation with them, regardless of their background. To be fair, the City also helped with that. I look at other politicians and see how awkward they are around people they don’t know. The likes of Cameron and Clegg have only ever mixed with a very narrow social strata of society. I think that is also why people find it difficult to pinhole me – am I posh or not? They just don’t know.
Having the benefit of a Dulwich schooling really helped form my views on education. Getting rid of the grammar school system was a wicked thing to do; selective schools help kids from poor backgrounds achieve higher levels of attainment.
For decades, the grammar school was one of the most effective vehicles of getting poor children out of poverty and making something of themselves. The lack of a state system of selective schools has created a terrible apartheid of those given opportunity and those who only get opportunities if they are extremely lucky.
I remember visiting Dulwich just after the 2009 European elections. My old headmaster, David Emms, was there. He had long taken the view when I was at school that I was bloody-minded and difficult.
He always saw that I was a wind-up merchant and wrote in my leaver’s report that the school would never be quite the same without me, in an “upside-down sort of way”. But he also told me often that he had tremendous confidence in me. That day, visiting the school 25 years later, he told me he had voted for me in the 2009 European elections. That meant a lot.