In the run-up to the 2019 election, an extremely irate man appeared on Question Time attacking Labour’s plans to increase taxes on those who, like him, earned over £80,000 – in other words, the top 5 per cent of earners. He accused them of lying, claiming he was ‘nowhere near in the top 5 per cent … I’m not even in the top 50 per cent.’

He was, of course, wrong and much mocked on social media. But his mistake is extremely common – and understandable. Our frame of reference isn’t a national set of statistics but the people we know and spend time with. If that’s successful businesspeople, bankers and lawyers, then £80,000 will not seem like a high salary.

These relative frames of reference are extremely unhelpful for the development of good policy. See, for instance, the endless articles bemoaning the charging of VAT on private school fees written by parents earning six-figure sums who seem to think they’re hard up (which they are compared to the parents they meet at the school gates). This issue has had reams more coverage than, say, housing benefit freezes or the introduction of a welfare cap – policies that have caused many more people much greater misery.

In Seven Children, Danny Dorling aims to provide the true frame of reference. The title refers to a selection of children from seven income bands across society. He uses these children as a way of illustrating how most people live. It’s quite explicitly written for elites who may not be aware of where they really sit in the pecking order.

It’s a clever and admirable idea, but it’s hamstrung by two things. First is that the children of the title are not real but inventions built out of statistical aggregates and Dorling’s own imagination and experience. His justification for this is that even with careful selection it would be ‘impossible to give you a truly representative picture of what life is like in each of the seven income brackets’. Yet since no single child – real or fictional – can ever fully represent an average (they can’t, for instance, have the average number of parents at home), one suspects the approach was more a matter of time and resources.

This is a shame. Dorling is a geographer and not a novelist, yet even a Booker Prize winner would struggle to match the power that real-life stories have or capture the complex workings of real children’s minds. His approach can’t help but feel somewhat reductive.

All this means that Dorling falls back on statistics to make his case. This should have been achievable, for the numbers Dorling cites are very bleak: 35 per cent of parents are unable to afford to invite their children’s friends to tea; 14 per cent of children go cold because their parents can’t afford to heat the house.

But the second problem with the book is that Dorling, despite his academic credentials, is at heart a polemicist who makes no attempt to hide his political biases. These have led him, in his righteous indignation, to make some very basic errors. For example, he claims that thanks to the tax breaks that private schools receive, the government spends more per child on privately educated than state school-educated pupils. A quick check would have told him that this is wrong (and the source he cites for this makes no such claim). Elsewhere, he says that the two-child welfare limit includes child benefit, when this has always been excluded. In a book in which welfare plays such a large part, these kinds of mistake make the reader who catches them less trusting of the numerous stats he cites in support of his argument.

More broadly, his partisan positioning will surely put off any reader who doesn’t already share his views. New Labour is mentioned only with contempt – in references to the Iraq War and tuition fees. The very significant investments that New Labour made in health and education are ignored, despite these things helping the poorest the most. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn’s pledges of additional spending on education are uncritically acclaimed, even though much of the extra money would have gone to the richest cohort through the provision of universal free university tuition and free school meals. Labour’s 2019 manifesto was less generous to the lowest income band than the Liberal Democrats’ one. It’s all very frustrating because Dorling’s argument is one that needs to be made, just by someone attempting to persuade private-school parents of the fairness of charging VAT on school fees rather than beating them round the head with a copy of the Morning Star.

For persuasive writing, and real children, readers will be better off turning to Exam Nation by Sammy Wright, a headteacher at a secondary school in the northeast. As a study of the state of our education system, it is far more nuanced than the subtitle (‘Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School’) might imply. It is not an attack on exams, which, Wright acknowledges, are critical in helping young people from lower income backgrounds succeed. The Covid-19 years, during which exams briefly disappeared, led to an increase in inequality as teachers gave higher assessed grades than were justified to pupils with more educated parents.

Wright does argue that exams are given too much prominence in schools in comparison to other things, such as community-building and a broad curriculum. However, he slightly undermines this by describing how certain schools do exactly these things, even if the government isn’t asking them to (funding pressures make this ever harder).

But really this is a book about inequality and fairness. Even though it’s less overtly political than Dorling’s, the bleak experiences of the children Wright interviews pack a far harder punch. Take Benny, an eleven-year-old with behavioural problems, whose mother walked out on him and his three siblings while his father was in a hostel living on universal credit (which he gets for only two of the four children). There are additional traumas here that Wright leaves undocumented. He concludes his account of the boy’s experiences by ruefully noting, ‘Benny’s path to adulthood seems desperately narrow. School is both the least of his worries and his only hope.’

Throughout, Wright’s book is refreshingly unsentimental. He is clearly a superb teacher himself and there are positive stories of lives he and others have turned around. But there were also kids who left school with poor qualifications and without having experienced a Dangerous Minds-style epiphany. Some of them landed on their feet, some didn’t. 

Ultimately, though, Wright gives a series of good, quick and easy-to-follow guides to government education policy, and makes some suggestions for reform at the end. His main point is this: schools are only part of a student’s life. They can make a big difference, but there’s a limit to how much they can mitigate the problems caused by entrenched poverty.

This is not a call to return to the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, just a polite request to engage with reality. A child who isn’t properly fed, who doesn’t have a laptop, and who has to share a room with two siblings is, on average, not going to do as well as a well-fed, well-rested and well-resourced peer. Politicians like to talk about education as a route out of poverty but the best route out is money. Schools could be a lot more effective, and focus more on academic and extra-curricular activities, if we had a welfare system that provided for that.