The single most important factor determining Britain’s long-term growth is the education that the next generation receives. Whether the Bank of England raises interest rates by a smidgen now or next year is all but irrelevant; education policy is economic policy for the long term.

And here is where Britain fails. If your parents are poor, your chances of doing well in school are shockingly low. Around one in five pupils in England are eligible for free school meals—a standard measure of deprivation. But provisional results for 2009 show that 18.5 per cent of pupils in this category did not obtain five or more GCSEs (including English and maths). In a speech to Barnardo’s two years ago, Michael Gove described the educational gulf between children from average and poor backgrounds as “tragic.” It is—both for the children concerned, and for the rest of us. People who do badly at school are less likely to prosper. They generally pay less in tax, and receive more in benefits. And their children do less well at school, so the cycle of intergenerational poverty and economic underperformance continues. That is costly to well-educated, affluent people who make up Prospect’s readership. Even if you care only about yourself, failing children from poor backgrounds is a very bad idea.

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