It is not clear that Katherine Birbalsingh’s achievements as a headteacher have equipped her to address entrenched inequality
At least the government knows that it has a social mobility problem. This is to look on the bright side of the announcement that the controversial headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh is its newly appointed commissioner. The body she will lead, set up by David Cameron, has been a thorn in Boris Johnson’s side – as it was in the side of his predecessor. Report after report has pointed to the corrosive effects of extreme inequality – with the gulf separating the rich and advantaged from the poor and disadvantaged getting wider rather than narrower.
In 2017, the first commissioner, Alan Milburn, led a walkout on grounds that Brexit meant Theresa May’s government did not have the “bandwidth” to tackle the issues thrown up by entrenched unfairness. Since then, partly due to Covid, the situation has sharply deteriorated. A strongly worded report last year called on the government to increase the number of “opportunity areas” receiving extra funding, and said that “children’s opportunities in England are still defined by both the family they were born into and the area they grew up in”. A poll last year revealed deep unease, with only a third of 18- to 24-year-olds thinking that everyone had a fair chance in life. More recently, the Durham-born former White House adviser Fiona Hill warned that regional, economic and generational inequalities fuel populism that can, over time, become “a national security crisis” – as with last year’s attempted coup in the US.
