Poltergiest

 

Privation of Opportunity Under a Conservative Government

This was written before the clusterfuck of results days for GCSE’s and A-Levels, and seems even more relevant now. 

I suppose the downfall started before 2008 really. I think the most striking thing for me is how fast the descent happened after the financial crash of 2008. I suppose I was quite a lucky child, government wise, as I have grown up in a largely Labour led society. The things that allowed me to even get into university were immediately stripped away as soon as the Coalition came to power. At sixth form, I qualified for full EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) giving me £30 per week, £10 of which immediately went on bus fare, as although we took the same bus as the rest of years 7 to 11, it wasn’t free after compulsory education ended. The rest went on books and stationary, some socialising and a meager amount left for me to buy cheap or second hand clothes that I hated.  I remember that I and a few others in my form were split up and shunted into another tutor group for ‘pastoral’ which was mostly just a morning register at this point, with some half arsed attempts at vague skills like financial budgeting. As we’d had the same sex ed and drugs prevention ed every year since year 7 (don’t have sex or you’ll get pregnant/STIs and you’ll die and don’t do drugs because then you’ll have sex and get pregnant/STIs and die) they skipped that, since we were all over the legal age of consent, and those girls who were going to get pregnant as teens tended to go to college rather than sixth form. In one almost comically badly handled session, a few of the rich kids (not actually rich because where we were, rich meant not getting ESA, so a family income of £30,000 or more a year - the richest I knew of was a family earning £100,000 which seemed like a ridiculous amount of wealth) kids who didn’t get ESA, complained about the ones who did, that it was unfair, and the form tutor decided to ‘open up the discussion to the class’. Me and a few others who did get it kept our heads down at the back of the class and just watched him botch a potentially good moment to explain to these entitled pricks that the nice houses, meals out, foriegn holidays and fashionable clothes they had made up to much more than £30 per week. But he didn’t, and we weren’t about to stand up and identify ourselves as the ones who got the money, because we were poor, with the irony of then being accused of being better off than the people who didn’t get it because their families had too much money. Grow up watching these kinds of exchanges and you can very easily see exactly how Brexit happened. Of course the Coalition stopped EMA immediately. I wonder what I would have done without it. 

As it was, getting into a redbrick university was something of a miracle. We were absolutely sold on the idea of university purely for the purpose of social mobility; everyone was getting a degree, every decent job required a degree, if you didn’t get one you may as well just resign yourself to shitty jobs forever. Because at least then, there were jobs, even if they were shitty. As I was in sixth form, our school was rapidly getting worse, with good members of staff leaving in droves and being replaced by ones who were incompetent at best. In total, throughout sixth form, we had six different psychology teachers, two of which were NQTs one of which left just before our first A-level exams in January, meaning that for the last week before the exam, we had no teacher. I shit you not, I ended up effectively teaching a class of my actual peers because it was the last one before the exam and people were panicking, asking me questions as the class nerd, and one lad stole a pen from another classroom so I could write on the whiteboard. When the teacher using it came to ask if we had a spare, he paused at the door, puzzled, because he wasn’t sure enough that I was actually a student to call me out for having his pen. He decided to leave it, and I kept writing. Lucky for me, our textbooks had all the information we needed, and I understood how exams worked well enough to just pick out the information required to answer the questions. The teacher after that was off sick most weeks, and insisted on teaching us things that would not be on the exam, then told us she didn’t have time to explain things we didn’t understand. Apparently she had interviewed with the first teacher and didn’t get the job the first time round. By the time she left we were just expected to cross our fingers and hope for the best. The ‘good’ teacher was an NQT who became head of department immediately since all the previous staff left, and only taught us two of the three required modules of the course because she ran out of time at the end. We were told to go in during half term for two days to learn a module that should have taken a third of our time. In Philosophy and Ethics, we had another NQT who left before Christmas because he had only ever taught at an all boys school before and our class was all girls, and he couldn’t handle the outspoken ones who were frustrated at the complexity of the course. One particularly funny lesson he brought in the film Priest without actually watching it first, not realising it had quite a graphic gay sex scene. He was the only one who was embaressed however, as we had previously watched the Oscar Wilde biopic with Stephan Fry and Jude Law for English Liturature, and it was no more salacious than that. (Apparently he eventually left to join the clergy which is….. interesting.) The next teacher was much better but had a lot of time off sick, then we finally got a long term substitute who was excellent. It helped that by this point, the class had shrunk to just six of us who grasped the concepts quite well already. A similar story ran for English Literature, staff leaving, crappy replacements and a lot of stress for everyone involved. After we left, the school went into special measures. This was the summer of 2007. 

By the time I started my BA Applied Social Sciences (after a year working and a year getting frustrated trying to do a BA in Philosophy) it was 2009. After the 2010 election, our head of department outright told us there would be no jobs for us after we graduated. He had seen everything he had worked to build ripped apart in a matter of days, he was angry and maybe a touch bitter, but he was not wrong. I worked as a sales assistant through my first and second years, every weekend and through the holidays, I had a full student loan grant and bursary, and it is the most money I have ever had. Friends were complaining about being poor and I had never been better off, and unbeknownst to me I still wouldn’t be earning as much as I had in those two years even now, eight years after I graduated. I did manage to get a job immediately after university, but it wasn’t a graduate job, it was a minimum wage nursery assistant role. My first class degree and years of experience working and volunteering made no difference to the fact that people were being sacked in the sector I thought I would work in. I ended up with a job I could have easily gotten straight out of sixth form - I’d been the second choice for similar jobs as a teaching assistant that I had actually interviewed for in my year working between sixth form and university, and they were better paid. I ended up completely burnt out, very ill, and had to move back in with my parents. I only recovered enough to take on part time sales jobs, which I still struggled with on long shifts, and was looking for a way to do the kind of work in the social sector I had wanted to do. Every job going, even minimum wage, wanted at least one year experience having already done the job, and even basic caring roles needed a car. Most were unreliable hours and times, and needed you to be ‘fully flexible’, able to work whenever they needed you, with no guaranteed hours. Sales jobs that I had always had as my back-up option were the same, but more soul destroying. I eventually decided that if I was going to do something at a graduate level, I would have to get post-graduate qualifications, and got an ‘opportunity scholarship’ to do an MA in Women, Violence and Conflict, thinking that I could potentially then do a PhD or qualify as a teacher and take on pastoral roles in secondary schools. In order to qualify, I had to be the first in my family to go to university, have a family income of less than £20,000 per year, be from a postcode with low university application rates and have a disability (along with my mental illness I am also dyslexic). The only box I didn’t tick was having been in care. I guess four out of five isn’t bad. Although I got a huge amount out of both my BA and MA studies, I was still far too ill to cope, and ended up failing my MA dissertation and taking a PGDip Merit instead, unable to face editing the bastard thing that had completely frazzled my brain. I’m still immensely proud that I got Merits and Distinctions for my other essays, but in career terms, I was left underqualified, overqualified or without the experience I needed to actually do any of the jobs I was interested in. Of everyone in my year, the only person who got a front line charity sector position got it through the traditional ‘oh my Mum knew the head of the sector’ pathway. Throughout my childhood, Labour had pushed the possibility of social mobility through higher education, claiming it evened the playing field. After four years of a Coalition with a Conservative majority, it was right back to the old ways. Most of the people I worked with in sales had either worked there for years after school, were current students, or had degrees and shifted to full time in sales because they couldn’t get graduate jobs. There is a stark difference between my friends who did science and technology, who are all in graduate positions, and my friends who did arts and humanities, who are not in graduate positions. The only exceptions are those who went on to do PhDs, but once they get them, their careers are ever more uncertain as positions become harder to come by and the list of experience you need gets ever longer. 

The only difference between me and my friends in minimum wage or lower tier jobs is that my ongoing mental illness meant that I fell through the gaps into the benefits system, which requires at least another article to explain, if not a book. I have experienced the genuinely debilitating effects of Universal Credit, which only made me more ill. I ended up self-employed because I wasn’t even able to do my back-up job as a sales assistant, and needed something to fill my time with, eventually finding The Prince’s Trust Enterprise Course. I’m nowhere near earning minimum wage, but at least it’s not making me more ill. There is a theme throughout my experience at school and university of being on the last crest of the Labour wave of social investments or the remnants of it, that has enabled me to do so much despite my health problems. The investments that made it possible for me to continue onto higher education, like EMA and bursaries were cut the year after I graduated. I was in the last year of the £3,000 tuition fees before they shot up to £9,000. The scholarship that enabled me to do the MA no longer exists. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t had those opportunities. I still think I would have been much worse off, as my mental health would have deteriorated regardless, but the achievements I had and the things I learned along with the people I met have given me a resilience and assurance in my own abilities I wouldn’t have had without them. I’m certainly not living the life promised to me by a Labour government of escape from poverty and a steady, reliable job and income, directly as a result of the financial crisis and the austerity imposed by the Tories. I am entirely reliant on my partner to live away from my parents, and my business is fragile at best. But a couple of years younger, and I wouldn’t even have that - even The Prince’s Trust is cutting services and the wonderful person who relentlessly supported me has now left. It took so little time for the Conservative government to take away the opportunities that have benefitted me so much, and to make the benefits system so utterly cruel and destructive. I was always particularly vulnerable to the effects of austerity because of where I came from, and my intelligence and perseverance was never any match for a system so weighted against me. But what I managed to achieve, just before it was all swept away, is what kept me going, enabled me to adapt to unforeseeable circumstances, and will stop me from going under completely. I still have all that knowledge and those skills, and they only get refined as I use them to make the best of things for now. Being self employed isn’t easy, it’s stressful, unreliable, relentless and requires you to be entirely self motivated. But it is flexible for people with mental health issues or any other special needs in a way that employment just isn’t, especially now working conditions are getting steadily worse and worse. I can only hope it won’t be long before these precious social investments and supports are back to benefit not just people who need them immediately, but society as a whole. Maybe I might even be financially secure and independent. The best I can hope for is that I don’t end up poorer than my parents.