Social class officially no longer exists since former Prime Minister John Major announced the UK was ‘a classless society’. His successor, Tony Blair, likewise declared, ‘The class war is over’, but he did not say who had won! Education has been central to contributing to the confusion that allows such assertions to be taken seriously. Since its inception in the 19th century, mass education held out twin promises of democracy and meritocracy. Both have been subverted ever since the ruling class (‘the smallest … best organised … [and] most class conscious class’, Roberts, 2001, Chapter 7) responded to the Great Reform Act by implementing mass elementary schooling to ‘educate our masters’ (Johnson, 1976), while maintaining its own elite schooling for the ‘sons of the Empire’. Meritocracy, promising that applicants for any position would be judged solely on their abilities and qualifications, irrespective of social origins, could not be delivered save exceptionally in a capitalist, imperial and patriarchal society split between a minority employing class and a mass of employees, divided, in turn, by ‘race’ and gender, as well as by culture and (dis)ability etc. These are not social statuses but power relations.

Education is vital to maintaining that power. It impresses on the majority that it marks down for failure an apparently absolute judgement of their inferiority. As a student put it to me once, “If you let it, education really messes with your head.” Psychological considerations also enter into the way in which, in an officially ‘classless society’, talking about education substitutes for discussion of class and the ways it has both changed and remained essentially the same over recent years. To draw a classically Freudian analogy, the return of this repressed content is manifested in hysterical symptoms that blow education up out of all proportion to its real significance. This chapter condenses the ongoing debates around different models of social class to get to the bottom of these confusions.

Pyramid or diamond?

The postwar occupational structure remained pyramid-shaped – at least as most people thought of and largely accepted it. The subsequent steady growth of white-collar, managerial and professional employment led to claims, however, that society was becoming diamond-shaped as more moved into the middle from the top and bottom.