My blog

Tag: Black Lives Matter

  • Lee Elliot Major: Why academic success isn’t ‘the be-all and end-all’

    Lee Elliot Major: Why academic success isn’t ‘the be-all and end-all’

    Lee Elliot Major’s mid-pandemic plea for a focus on social mobility. Originally published January of 2021.

    I was optimistic at the start of Covid-19 that this crisis would somehow affect social mobility in a positive way. But we are still in denial about the long-term economic challenges we face and how these will affect young people’s opportunities: the pandemic has hit the under 25s more than any other group, and this will have far-reaching consequences for social inequality.

    Young people are facing an unprecedented decline in social mobility, and are likely to be much worse off than their parents’ generation. That hasn’t happened since the war: relatively speaking, every generation has done slightly better than the last (in terms of wages and housing).

    This does, of course, affect those from poorer backgrounds the most. Our research found that during the first lockdown, students from private schools were twice as likely to benefit from a full school day (5 hours of learning) than state school pupils.

    My fear is that this will result in a massive gap in school assessment, which means that particularly select universities are going to have to think about how they take context into account. I suspect what it really means is that those from privileged backgrounds will just be better positioned for universities this year.

    So what are the other options? In my view, if we are serious about social mobility, we have to think about half of the young who can’t (or don’t want to) go to university.

    In fact, if you gave me a choice, I’d say we should work much harder on improving the numbers and qualities of apprenticeships. In terms of the links between education and the workplace, we pale in comparison to most other education systems: Australia has, for instance, developed much stronger vocational options and headteachers celebrate the students who get really good apprenticeships as much as those who go to top universities.

    Part of our problem is structural (i.e we don’t have enough apprenticeships in place), but it’s also cultural. Although the government are doing better, we still suffer from a cultural assumption that academic success is somehow the be-all and end-all.

    People need to look hard at what that a degree offers them in terms of future life choices, and whether this is ultimately a better option that an apprenticeship. The problem is that students from underprivileged backgrounds have less guidance in this area.

    Some universities, like Exeter, are offering degree apprenticeships. I’m really pushing for that; it would be great to be able to build bridges between the workplace and the world of academia, and I don’t think that highly selective universities have worked closely enough with businesses. The other great option is a national tutoring service; something I’ve been campaigning for for a long time. The government has already made good headway in this area, but I think it should be ten times the scale it currently is.

    We’ve reached a tipping point in society. Wherever you lean on the political spectrum, my view is that you need to balance the freedom of people to do best for their children (a primal instinct we all have as parents) against the need to ensure that those from disadvantaged backgrounds have a fair chance if they work hard and do well.

    However you look at that equation, I think that we’ve now gone past the tipping point. It’s now near-impossible for young people from poorer backgrounds. The Covid crisis has added yet another weight on that imbalance, and it’s become so one-sided now that we’re all recognizing that we need to do something big – like FDR’s “New Deal” which was enforced after the great Depression.

    What worries me is that we’ve become so polarised in our political debate- and this is much more extreme in America which has become, in my view, a completely dysfunctional system- that anything the government says, the unions will oppose it- irrespective in a way, of the content. Some things the government does should be welcomed and some things should be challenged, but at the moment I feels like debate is so divisive that whatever the prime minister says, he’ll be castigated.

    The trouble is you need some kind of consensus for social mobility to happen. There are some academics who argue that this kind of polarisation of public debate is the inevitable consequence, or end-game, of inequality and capitalism.

    On the brighter side, there’s definitely an appetite for bold ideas. I’m always throwing these to the government, but what we really need is for young people to be empowered and informed, so that they can be motivated to get involved in these kinds of debate and influence policies.

    At the moment, it doesn’t feel like there’s a call to arms. We’ve seen huge progress with the young’s involvement with BLM and the environment; I’d love to see the same momentum around social injustice and social mobility.

    Lee Elliot Major was talking to Georgia Heneage

  • Lorna May Wadsworth: the art world has become ‘glib and ironic’

    Lorna May Wadsworth: the art world has become ‘glib and ironic’

    Georgia Heneage

    One of the more positive aspects of the last pandemic year has been a marked reshuffling and redefining of different work sectors. For the art world this has taken the shape of a shift towards digitalisation and experimentation with different art forms: one thinks of livestreaming plays and virtual exhibitions. For the most part, the arts have undergone serious damage since the forced closure of venues and live events. Artists across the world have had to readjust in what was already a financially volatile sector.

    But for Lorna May Wadsworth, a renowned British artist who has done portraits of Margaret Thatcher, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and writer Neil Gaiman, the pandemic brought with it considerable success. But it was a success built on firm foundations. All of those pictures had already been exhibited in her 2019-20 Gaze Retrospective exhibition at Sheffield’s Graves Gallery alongside 100 other of her major portraits.

    Wadsworth’s painting ‘A Last Supper’, an important reworking of Leonardo Da Vinci’s great fresco, brilliantly captures the diversity of modern culture. It was first painted in 2008-2009 but rose to fame in 2020, as the Black Lives Matter protests took the world by storm.

    In a recent live Instagram conversation with Isabelle Kent (@izzy_kent) from the Colnaghi Foundation, a not-for-profit platform which promotes Old Masters and Antiquities to a 21st Century audience, Wadsworth spoke of how the painting’s revival was one of the many “strange surprises” of lockdown.

    Over a decade ago, Wadsworth was approached by a church in the Cotswolds which wanted to commission a reworking of the great masterpiece. “I said I’d do it on the condition that Jesus be a black model and the disciples beautiful young men,” Wadsworth said. She had just painted her portrait of Thatcher, and wanted a “challenge” after her 2007 debut solo show in London, Beautiful Boys, which consisted of individual portraits of handsome young men painted from life in her studio, who she scouted out and about in London.

    Despite the painting’s technical virtuosity and bold subject matter, Wadsworth said that when she first unveiled it at St Martin-in-the-Fields she couldn’t get the double exhibition A Last Supper/Sacred Or Profane included in the Time Out listings. It was only when a 9 foot print of the painting was installed in St Albans Cathedral in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement that it was noticed. And noticed is an understatement: Wadsworth’s piece was soon plastered across newspapers around the world even prompting questions surrounding a mysterious bullet hole in the aluminum panels behind the painting in Christ’s right side.

    The strange, even spiritual, journey of Wadsworth’s masterpiece reminds us that there is no one linear path to success, and that recognition can come at unexpected times and in unexpected ways; an artist’s work can be revalued years after its composition.

    Perhaps this is a silver lining artists can take from the pandemic: despite the difficulty of the artistic life, when artists can sometimes feel they are toiling to little appreciation, the moment for recognition can arrive suddenly. Success is neither finite nor time-bound.

    State of the arts

    The arts sector has, in recent times, been self-consciously defined by its deviation from the norm: venerated 21st century artistic giants, such as Tracy Emin or Damien Hirst, have made their mark through a distinctively unconventional approach to the practice and concept of ‘art’.

    For Wadsworth, the commercial art world has become “glib and ironic”, and she says that satisfaction in her work comes through its impact on the community: “I love the fact that I was painting an actual altarpiece that people would live their lives around and pray to,” she says of A Last Supper.

    Wadsworth’s work treads a delicate middle-ground between the modern and the traditional. She is in thrall to Old Masters such as Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Singer-Sargent, and says that after sketching them from life, visiting their work in a gallery is like “bumping into an old friend”.

    But she’s also interested in challenging a tradition and canon which is predominantly male-centred: many of her works – A Last Supper included – aim to subvert the male gaze. Wadsworth is keen to stress that her conception of the ‘female’ gaze is not correspondingly voyeuristic. An observer, she says, should not be an imposition. They should feel compassion, and they should honour the subject.

    “We are all a bit sick of the myth of the male genius, aren’t we?” she says. Personally, I find it hard to disagree.

    To view the talk between Lorna May Wadsworth and Isabelle Kent please visit @colnaghifoundation on Instagram and click on the image on their grid of Wadsworth’s A Last Supper.

    The Colnaghi Foundation are organising a series of live interviews over Instagram with artists and creatives whose work reframes art history in a modern and relevant context. Recent guests have included artists Kent Monkman, Babajide Olatunji and Nancy Cadogan, and historian Simon Schama. You can find them here: https://www.instagram.com/colnaghifoundation/?hl=en