Seven Children and the future of inequality in the UK: Danny Dorling

What connects your street to your life chances? Geographer Danny Dorling addresses students of Wychwood School, a private school in Oxford, about his new book Seven Children.
Professor Dorling observes: "There are 14 million children in the UK, and the thing which most determines your life chances - this is your chances of good health, your chances of doing well or poorly in education, your chances of being well housed or poorly housed, your chances of getting a job that pays well or not, or being unemployed, your chances of having a comfortable retirement or a retirement which is hard; the thing which determines that more than anything else is the income of your parents."
He tells his audience about growing up in Oxford near the Green Road roundabout, which was then, very unusually in terms of the UK then or now, at the junction of neighbourhoods of five different socioeconomic levels, from the poorest to the richest.
"I went to school every day going under the subway. The subway really mattered; if you were a boy in the 1970s, subways were quite frightening. That's when I became interested in social inequality. I began to realise what happened to children didn't depend on the children very much, it depended on what entrance they came into that subway; it depended on what part of Oxford they were living in much more than them."
"Our futures are largely predictable from birth, or actually from slightly before birth in this country. What happens to us in terms of school, exam results, GCSEs, A-levels, university - you can know quite a lot of it without knowing about individual effort.
"Yes, individual effort does make a difference, and it begins to matter more and more later on in life, but there are streets in London where a majority of children go to Oxford and Cambridge, and not going to Oxford or Cambridge is actually an achievement. There is a school just up the road named Cherwell, where more young people go to Cambridge from the sixth form than do not go to university. So it's harder if you're in Cherwell sixth form to become an apprentice than it is to go to Cambridge University. And that is the degree to which things are determined by geographical location and by schools."
Audio-only recording of a talk given by Professor Danny Dorling on 19 November 2024 at Wychwood School.
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