Polly

Nearly thirty years ago now, well, let's call it 25, were Halcyon days for female readers of the Guardian, or Grauniad as we affectionately called it - in the days before desktop publishing and all that goes with that, spellcheck for one, the Guardian was notorious for its typos.

The Guardian's women's page was a showcase for leftwing female writers. Monday was redeemed as a day because of the line-up. The late Jill Tweedie wrote her 'Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist' column and Posy Simmonds' cartoon, 'Posy' ran on that day. Michelle Hansen was in there somewhere as was Molly Parkin.

I can't remember if Polly Toynbee particularly published on a Monday, nor even whether she was necessarily on the women's page, but her writing and journalism were then as now, second to none.

This week there was an article by Polly about Britain's attempt to deal with Child Poverty. It is objective, inclusive and informative. Rather than join the trend towards criticising the Blair Socialism, she says that his ability to envision what is important to the country and to come out and say it, baldly and then to find a way to make it happen is something that can never be taken away from his legacy. She points out that when the government, against a backdrop of a previous conservative government which doubled child poverty, sets a target of lowering it by 1,000,000 in a given year and achieves 700,000, it is nonsense to report this as a failure.

One point that Polly Toynbee makes however really resonated with me from my experience as a teacher who has always taught in inner city and education action zone schools.
She says that poverty is entrenched and cross generational, "Intergenerational poverty is solidifying, so poor children are more firmly anchored to the floor than for decades, their social mobility frozen."

My generation, brought up and living through the years of Harold Wilson's Labour Party, when education was opened up to all, saw for the first time working class children being enabled, empowered to stay at school to fulfill their potential, and able to go to university. I'm not naive enough to think that all working class children who had the ability actually did go to university, but a cycle was started, so that as those people came through we were no longer hearing just Oxford accents on TV, from playwrights to politicians, our public landscape was changing.

But what is it we see in schools, still today? Yes, frequently we were seeing parents who were interested in and supportive to their children's academic achievement, but equally and all too frequently we were coming across parents who felt threatened by it. The rebel child was too often supported by a parent who paid lip service to wanting their child to 'do well' but in reality undermined them at every turn, who challenged the view that the child was disruptive or would do no work either in the classroom or at home. So much teacher time was spent dealing with parents who feared their child overtaking them in life.

What is to be done about this? It is a very difficult phenomenon to tackle. What socialism has given people is access to opportunities that they didn't have before. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I have heard similar points made by friends who work in the Health Service. Not everyone uses it responsibly, the 'social contract' dictates that rights and responsibilites go hand in hand, but socialism itself dictates that everyone should be put in a position of having equal access to resources. Polly Toynbee in her article mentions the social ideals of Scandinavia, but to achieve such levels of utopia, taxes would also have to be raised to Scandinavian levels.

I feel that as Polly says, it has to be seen as a National target, not simply one for a political party. The Labour Party has raised public awareness on this hot potato over its lifetime in power, but this has to be seen merely as a starting block, the first few rungs on the ladder. Companies and organisations need to sing from the same hymnsheet as the grassroots. Those working in Health and Education see the problem every day, but too much of society is able to, no, is allowed to, ignore it.