In a LinkedIn post a while ago, I talked about how a primary school teacher took a particular dislike to me. Even as a kid, you know when you’re being ‘othered’. Beyond her words, mocking us for not having a telephone at home, school outings included a field trip to the council estate we lived on to show the class what deprivation looks like. I didn’t want anyone else to know it was our flat she was pointing at, like it was a museum exhibit from another time or an example of life in another (inferior) country.
An acute sense of what’s unfair as a child transformed into an agenda for social justice as an adult. A ‘difficult’ child has become a defiant adult with an axe to grind. Tell me something cannot be done or changed and, if I don’t think it’s okay, I’ll go out of my way to prove otherwise.
I remember the epiphany I experienced at sixth form – further education being something no-one else in my family had accessed at that time. Halfway through a conversation about how A-levels lead onto university, I realised the tutors were talking to everyone else but me. There were a couple of us who wanted to get on and then get out to work but it had never occurred to me that almost all my friends were on a different trajectory. It felt like I’d uncovered a conspiracy, but it was just that people not from my world made a different set of assumptions. They didn’t think about it, and the teachers never thought about it. It just was. And it made me feel like I didn’t belong in further education.
When I told my mother I was applying to uni, a couple of years into my life in a dead end bank job, she was disappointed. She reminded me I’d already exceeded expectations. ‘Why did I want more?’, she demanded to know. ‘If they can, why shouldn’t I?’ didn’t seem to cut it. My brother called me a snob but, in a way, he was really calling me a class traitor. Since that time, I’ve felt in limbo, like a class refugee who is ‘othered’ by two social groups. Maybe that’s why I can see how the UK (and much of the world) is splitting down the lines of haves and have nots. At least I speak both their languages.
Across the UK, something has fractured. Trust in institutions has eroded, faith in public services has thinned, and many people living with financial hardship feel unseen, unheard and processed rather than supported. In that vacuum, simple explanations and loud voices thrive. Some promise easy answers. Others tell people they are at the back of a queue, pushed aside by “others” who are supposedly receiving preferential treatment.
As Quids in! found by talking to communities in hardship as part of its #TakeWhatsYours campaign, (more here), people are particularly resentful of authorities right now. And it is happening alongside rising living costs, overstretched services, and a growing sense that the people designing policy do not recognise the realities of everyday life for those struggling to get by.
At Quids in!, we see this disconnect daily. Frontline advisors hear it when people tell us about missed appointments, unread emails and training programmes that feel irrelevant. Our hearts sink when we see middle-class, corporate emails to jobseekers about “skills pipelines” and “career pathways” when many people’s primary concern is far more immediate: Can I pay the rent? Can I feed my children? Can I sleep without anxiety tonight?
This is why we are staging an event and calling on professionals who deliver services. At our upcoming online webinar, Changing the Conversation, I want us to explore difficult, but necessary, questions. How did we lose trust? Why do so many people feel left behind and left in the dark? And how do we re-engage people who are being drawn towards regressive politics that promise recognition but deliver division?
As I read this month’s special report on ‘equity’, it stirs up mixed emotions. Understanding what it takes to build access bridges is at the heart of all I believe in around social justice. But it’s from the language of another country – one where flags up lamp posts don’t make any sense. And yet, in my head, all I can hear is the rebuke: ‘I guess that’s one of those fancy words you learnt at university?’