The second Thursday of June is Social Mobility awareness day and I was delighted to be part of the Department for Education’s (DfE) Social Mobility Recognition month, a series of events organised by the DfE’s staff Social Mobility network.
I was asked to talk about my experiences of teaching and researching working-class writing in Higher Education and also shared my work on republishing the novels of Lancashire mill-woman Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962), one of the first published women novelists from a working-class background in the UK. As well as reflecting on my teaching and research, this was a good opportunity to share the centenary project ‘Celebrating Class: Working-Class Identities at the University of Reading, past, present and future’ I’m working on with colleagues Professor David Stack (History), Anne-Marie Henderson (Director of Quality, Support and Development, CQSD), Mathew Haine (Student Outcomes Manager, CQSD), plus PhDs Sharla Attala (English Literature), Amy Longmuir and Abbie Tibbott (History).
As part of this, Sharla has been conducting interviews with past and present students and staff about their experiences of social class at the University. There is lots of policy work on what we can do better in HE to make universities more welcoming to staff and students from socio-economically diverse backgrounds. We are also looking at the persistent challenges students from working-class backgrounds face in achieving their potential while on course. As Mathew’s team point out, approximately 25% of our student body are from the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK (defined using the Indices of Multiple Deprivation) and these students are approximately 10% less likely to achieve a first or a 2:1 if they complete their degree. It’s important to amplify the message that working-class students are not ‘lacking ability’. Rather, we should reflect on the ways in which we put pressure on students to fit in by masking aspects of their identity.
We’ll be having a Centenary exhibition in the library next year focusing on class at the University, plus other events. After speaking with colleagues at the DfE, I am keen to learn from their staff social mobility network. Some colleagues at the University have expressed interest in being involved in something like this through this survey: there is still time to sign up, please do get involved.
Working-class writing and me
I shared the moment with DfE colleagues of when I first became aware of the existence of a vast history of published working-class writing. I am from a working-class background (my family live in a former mining village near Wakefield) and managed to go through an entire state school education and then undergraduate degree in English Literature before being introduced to the idea that there might be working-class writers, never mind such a rich literary heritage. For me, it was stumbling across Ian Haywood’s Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting (1991) during a Masters in Women’s Studies (where class was barely spoken about) that opened my eyes to working-class literature: this led on to my PhD, then my first book (Home in British Working-Class Fiction), as well as ‘Class Matters’ – the module I have been teaching in the English Literature department at the University for the last 10 years.
Jackie Thompson, who co-wrote the introduction to one of the most recent reissues of the works of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, writes:
‘I read her first novel, Miss Nobody, in 2019, which is ridiculous really, because you would’ve thought Ethel’s books would be studied in every school in Blackburn. Reading it made me wonder, if I’d had Ethel as inspiration from a young age would I have come to writing sooner than I did. I think the answer is, yes. I identified with everything in Miss Nobody. … We have the same anger towards injustice, the same weakness for the underdog, the same contempt for authority, the same struggle for independence…’ (Cotton Factory Shorts, 2024)
The DfE asked today what we need to do to address social mobility in literature and education: I think it starts like this, with ensuring we have texts publicly available that can help foster a sense of belonging and inclusion; in challenging the idea that there aren’t or weren’t writers from socio-economically diverse backgrounds hiding in plain sight all along…
And most of all we need to speak up. We’ve been struck through our interviews with students and colleagues at the University by this sense that class isn’t really spoken about here…
So we need to talk about class more.
We hope the Centenary project can be part of that conversation.
Dr Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Studies and co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing.
Interested in learning more about Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, her works and her legacy? Sign up for the CBCP’s workshop on 1 July.