Dorling’s latest book, Seven Children, offers vividly detailed analysis of the extent and meaning of inequality in today’s Britain, finds Graham Kirkwood

Less than seven percent of children in England attend private school. In Scotland it is even less, around 4% and in Northern Ireland only 1%. You wouldn’t think that, given the furore surrounding the new Labour government’s ever so mild proposal to levy VAT on private-school fees. The Independent Schools Council has claimed a 1.7% drop in numbers of children attending private schools in the UK in 2023 is mainly due to Labour’s plans, despite similar falls in the state sector as a consequence of a declining birth rate. The Telegraph has claimed it would be a tax on toddlers, and on a recent episode of the Radio 4 politics panel show, Any Questions, Telegraph columnist and deputy comment editor Annabel Denham claimed Labour’s plans would hit ‘hard working parents’ who send their children to private schools.

How many hard-working families in England have children in this seven percent? As Danny Dorling illustrates in his new book, Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation, very few. The data in the book come from the Family Resources Survey, an annual survey carried out by the UK government via the National Centre for Social Research (p.3). Dorling divides the UK’s fourteen million children into seven groups of two million, each just over 14% of the total, ranking them from the poorest to the richest by parental income.

Within each group, he creates a fictional child sitting in the middle of the group (the median of the group) based on disposable income (after benefit receipts, housing costs and tax). Freddy, the child in the second richest group has parents who work as a teaching assistant and a nurse (p.122). Even the parents of Gemma, the median child in the richest seventh within the UK, whose parents are typically shopkeepers working all hours 365 days a year in Dorling’s illustrative example, would barely be able to send their children to one of these 2,500 elite schools. The top 7% of children sit above them in the distribution and the rise in income at this point is exponential.

Why do parents send their children to private schools? One of the advantages is that they are better resourced. Private schools in the UK take up 15% of the resources devoted to all schools. Another benefit is access to some of the top jobs in the country, or at least a path to well-paid employment.

For those from state schools who manage to go on to university there are many hurdles put in the way, not least tuition fees. The amount saved by those families who are rich enough to pay fees up front amounts to tens of thousands of pounds (p.127). However, an interesting fact is that children who do manage to get over the hurdles and do get to university from state schools actually do better on average than children from private schools, achieving better degree results. What private schools do well is making it look like their pupils have learnt more by passing more exams. According to the research cited by Dorling, students who achieved ABB at A-level, 69% from independent schools went on to gain 2:1 or above compared with 77% of students educated at state schools (p132).

Inequality

Dorling makes available to the reader a vast array of statistics which serve to illustrate how the UK is now home to the largest concentration of children living below or on the poverty line across the entire continent of Europe. (p.4). In households with three or more children, 44% are now living in poverty (p.8).

Dorling’s median richest family has a disposable income of just over £50,000 whereas families in the top two percent have disposal incomes of £144,000 and £510,000 (p.14).

What Dorling does is bring to life the devastating effects of poverty on the poorest families, much of it subtle, especially the effect on children. The ability to replace worn-out furniture has become out of reach for around 40% of Britain’s poorest families whose children have to sleep on worn out mattresses or worse still on the floor (p.29).

As he shows here (pp.35, 36) and has shown elsewhere, increasing inequality in the UK really took off in the late 1970s and, since the late 1990s, has stayed high through successive Labour and Conservative governments. Another indicator of the UK’s levels of increasing poverty is in the average height of five year-old boys which has fallen by a centimetre since 2010, in contrast to France and Germany (p.50).

Increasing Inequality

Dorling asks the question, are we ‘willing to tolerate the high human cost of our increasingly unequal British nations’ (p.13)? The answer obviously needs to be a resounding no. Properly taxing the wealthiest top one or two percent would be a good place to start to reduce some of the record level inequality in the UK today.

Recently we have seen some groups of well organised workers able to achieve higher pay and better working conditions. It would wrong however to see this as necessarily increasing inequality to the detriment of those at the bottom of the income scale. This is the argument used by the Tories when they said that rail workers and junior doctors were taking money away from pensioners who were having their winter fuel allowance removed.

It is absolutely justified for train drivers, members of Aslef, to use their power to improve their pay and conditions. As former RMT leader, the late Bob Crow said in response to a shocked journalist who had learned that London underground train drivers might earn over £40,000 he replied, ‘Yeah! But we’ve got people on far more than that. Technical officers and signal workers are on £54,000. Basic. For a flat week. All pensionable’.

This is only part of the story, however. We also need workers who are best organised to use their power to help those not so able. Taking a class perspective, we are strongest where we are organised at the point of production, and this power can be used to improve society for all working-class people whether unemployed, pensioners or children. Workers who have built the best organisation in the country need to look beyond their own pay packets to wider society where, as Dorling points out graphically, increasing numbers of people are suffering and suffering badly. It has been welcome, for example, to see Unite in particular taking up the fight over the winter fuel allowance. These kinds of political campaigns need to spread and take on Starmer and Reeves’ new austerity.