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Almost all of us will have missed out on something important in the last few weeks. My lockdown low was missing my niece’s first birthday, a virtual singalong no substitute for a real cuddle. But celebrations and holidays can be postponed; children and young people are missing out on rites of passage they will never get back: their last day at primary school with the class they’ve grown up with; the end of GCSE and A-level parties; their final term at university.
Autumn is unlikely to herald a return to normality. Last week, Cambridge University announced that it was moving all of its large-group teaching online for the whole of the next academic year; others are likely to follow. So many of the events that make up university life will also have to likely go: freshers’ fairs; sports, music and drama; student parties. Little wonder that one in five prospective students say they are considering deferring.
There has so far been no sign of a fee reduction; most full-time students in England will still be paying the maximum £9,250 a year in tuition. It’s hard not to sympathise with this take from a second-year student: “We’re paying a lot of money to jump on a Zoom call.” Because repayment of student debt is income contingent and written off after 30 years, the government will end up contributing around 45% of the cost of each cohort’s tuition over their lifetime, possibly more depending on the length and depth of the recession. That’s scant consolation, though, for a young person about to graduate in a fearsomely hostile labour market, facing decades of monthly repayments once they start earning above the threshold.
But if it is rough to be contemplating a first year peppered with virtual lectures and minus a freshers’ week, it is worse still to be a school leaver not going to university, who has lost their last term and had to make do with predicted A-level or BTec grades. These young people get a raw deal at the best of times: while university students’ education and living costs are subsidised to the tune of £25,000 on average, most of them don’t get a fraction of that.
They also get none of the state and institutional support with the social transition to adulthood that those going away to university do: the relatively frictionless glide into student accommodation followed by a house share; the mental health services and pastoral care; the self-discovery opportunities of student social life. No extended adolescence awaits them: too often a move straight into work that lacks training opportunities and prospects for progression, while feeling their own way towards independent living, with profound impacts for social inequality. Their situation has become immeasurably tougher now they are contending with a labour market where far more people are losing jobs than getting them.
So we should not lose sight of the fact that, while all young people are being failed by this pandemic, they are not being failed equally. It never ceases to astound me that we spend 18 years of a child’s life trying to unpick the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage through the education system, only to throw huge sums at a system that entrenches class privilege from 18 onwards.
It’s not just the huge gap in what the state invests in those who do and do not go to university (a gap that Labour’s plans to scrap tuition fees would make even bigger), but the fact that the university system itself – for no overriding educational reason – intensely stratifies young people into institutions that are used by employers as shorthand for their potential, supposedly based on their academic ability, but in reality far too much as a product of their social background. This then allows elite universities to claim too much credit for the success of their graduates, at least some of which is the inevitable result of only letting the most upwardly mobile students through the door. It is a topsy-turvy disgrace of a system that a widening participation initiative here and there can never hope to do enough to fix.
There is a good case for government mandating a fee rebate for this generation of students, and bailing out those universities that need it as a result. (Although Cambridge, which emailed staff last week to warn of potential pay reductions if it does not get the government support it is seeking, should not be first in line: the university and its colleges have a combined wealth of almost £12bn and its vice-chancellor’s remuneration package is almost half a million a year.) But at a minimum, the government should set aside a pound for training for young people not going to university for every pound it spends doing that.
Even better, this crisis could prompt us to rethink the way we do post-18 educational and social transitions. We could, for example, invest in a universal and residential rite of passage that gives all young people the chance to move out of home with pastoral support, mix with people from different backgrounds and build up skills: a six-month paid civic service scheme that sends an army of young people to mentor children in schools, put on social activities for older people in hospitals, care homes and community centres, and undertake environmental projects, while also providing them with coaching and professional development. That might even reduce the importance of going away to university and help create a less elitist system where more people live at home and commute to their local university, at least for the first year or two of their degree.
Too radical to countenance? My warning would be that in a world where education level is fast becoming the new political divide we urgently need to address the fact that the very design of the post-18 system magnifies social inequalities rather than reduces them. The paradox of coronavirus is that it is children whose health it puts least at immediate risk, but whose long-term prospects it most profoundly jeopardises. It would be a monumental injustice if we sought to alleviate those effects for some young people while ignoring others.
• Sonia Sodha is the Observer’s chief leader writer
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