The universities in England faced what they called a "fog" of school-leaver applicants this summer. In the easier non-science subjects there were so many students with a clutch of A-grades that the universities couldn't decide between them. The reason for this is the continuation of the dumbing-down process which has infected state schools in particular during the past 30 or 40 years. And grade inflation has been accelerating shamelessly in the past six years of the Labour Government in the name of democracy and opportunities for all.

Tony Blair came to office with the motto, "Education, Education, Education". Quite what he really meant, no-one knows, but it's turned out to mean: "Diploma, Diploma, Diploma". More than any other government for a long time, the present Labour administration believes that the more young people they can squeeze into the motley collection of what are called "universities" and give them cap and gown at the end, the quicker we will proceed into the sunlit pastures of the post-industrial society.

Unfortunately, the Department of Education in London, which rigidly controls 93% of the education of all English children and has also managed to make all the universities in England dependent on it for funds (with the exception of the private Buckingham University), is under the misapprehension that tomorrow's job structure will be diamond-shaped -- similar, in fact, to the normal distribution of intelligence in the population -- with a few of the very able at the top, broadening to the mass of the population of about 100 IQ in middle, and tailing off at the bottom.

But the diamond-shaped job structure has probably happened only very briefly as we passed from the triangular shape of the agricultural society with its broad base of of peasants 200 years ago and through the industrial society with its legions of factory workers to where we are today. For some years, I have been trying to persuade Futurework List that the real job structure has been proceeding relentlessly in the last 50 years towards something shaped like an hourglass. By this, I mean that a modern high-technology society needs larger numbers of the very able and very intelligent than ever before but decreasingly fewer of anybody else. The broad class of middle-ability jobs is disappearing because they're either being automated away or are being exported, along with their firms, to the developing world. Of, course, even in the developing world, these middle-band jobs will in turn disappear in due course.

We are, in short, dividing into two societies, like the mitosis of a cell nucleus or the brachiation of one species into two. The problem is, however, as the brilliant seer, Michael Young, both feared and foretold when he wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy just over 40 years ago, the more egalitarian the educational system, and the more selective it is, then the more stratified society becomes. In terms of earnings and intrinsic job skills and satisfactions, the whole job structure becomes more like an hourglass as the years go by.

To friends who live in other countries I've tried to persuade them that, because England was the first to go into the Industrial Revolution and, indeed, into the Computer Revolution, then we will be the first to show the disturbing symptoms of the social stresses of the new age -- whatever it may be called. Among other symptoms, I've mentioned that newspapers in England no longer represent the whole gradation of intelligence as they did 50 years ago with several excellent "middle-band" papers such as the News Chronicle, but are now sharply demarcated into the trash tabloids and the quality broadsheets, as different from each other as chalk and cheese, the former being unbelievable if one picks up a copy in the Chinese take-away. I've also pointed to the fact that the quality of state schools varies between extremes far more widely than schools have ever before, no matter how many educational theories have been tried by the Department of Education since WWII. More anecdotally, I've been looking at a number of houses recently for my last retirement home, and I've been quite shaken by the fact that the houses I've seen either have a well-stocked bookcase in their lounge or absolutely no bookcase at all, the latter being much in the majority.

The evidence for the increasing social and intelligence divide in England is shown a little more clearly from year to year when the Government publication, Social Trends, is published. But it's rarely discussed even in quality TV news programmes like Newsnight. Anyway, here is some more evidence of what is actually happening and which can only intensify as we step further into the post-industrial age:

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GOOD JOBS GET BETTER BUT BAD JOBS GET WORSE

Anna Fifield

Good jobs are getting better but bad jobs are getting worse. What is more, the pay for the bad jobs is also getting worse.

Two researchers from the London School of Economics will tomorrow tell a conference of labour economists that the workforce is becoming increasingly polarised as "middling" jobs disappear.

"As skilled jobs are higher paid and generally better than unskilled jobs . . . the jobs on offer in the economy are getting better and better," Maarten Goos and Alan Manning will tell the European Association of Labour Economists in Seville tomorrow.

But it would be "overly simplistic" to assume that technological advances mean there is a uniform shift in favour of skilled workers, they say in their paper.

"We have seen a growth in lousy jobs, mainly in low-paying service industries, together with a somewhat larger growth in lovely jobs, mainly in professional and managerial occupations in finance and business services."

There had been a simultaneous decline in the numbers of "middling" jobs such as clerical and skilled manual work. This increased job polarisation is likely to produce rising inequality in wages, they say. But Mr Goos and Mr Manning remain puzzled as to why wages in the worst jobs are falling relative to the median.

"If there is falling demand for the 'middling' jobs and rising demand for the bad jobs then one might have expected the opposite pattern," they say.

In its 2003 employment outlook published yesterday, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said that job creation in the UK over the past decade had been characterised by relatively strong growth in low-paying jobs. This ran contrary to the global trend of a more rapid increase in industries and occupations that paid relatively well.

The Paris-based organisation said that it was possible that policies designed to increase labour market flexibility, including flexibility in setting wages, might have caused earnings inequality to grow.

"For example, wage dispersion has increased steadily since the 1980s in the United Kingdom, where wage setting became considerably more decentralised and market driven over the past two decades."

The OECD forecast that the UK's labour force would grow by 0.4 percentage points this year and by 0.3 percentage points in 2004.

Financial Times 18 September 2003

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