I won’t say I found it weird to learn that a ‘Poshness Test’ exists for recruiting jobs of power and influence in Britain. Only because I’d always assumed it did, under a polite and euphemistic name: ‘the interview’.
When I was starting out as a journalist I watched a succession of colleagues take significant leaps ahead of me, quickly. In those desolate first few employment years, when you think a break will never happen, I quizzed a friend I worked with at a Manchester magazine on this subject. She’d risen professionally dizzyingly fast. One minute she was writing 150 word reviews of Roni Size’s Reprazent, the next she’s editing a chic style title and explaining Hoxton haircuts on Woman’s Hour, a diaphanous reflection of the late 90s.
I asked her straight out: "Why is it you find getting on in work so easy and I find it so hard?" I was 25. I genuinely didn’t know. "Because I went to private school," she explained kindly, "and they teach you to expect success." This was a whole new tangent to the educational spectrum for me. My mind was blown by it. How did they even do that? "Just by telling you repeatedly that you’ll be successful," she qualified. In 13 years of state education and four at a quality university, I’d never heard those words.
At 15, I went to see a career’s officer at my school, a plain woman sitting behind a wilting pot plant with a haircut too sharp for her face. She said, "What do you want to do when you leave school?" I said, "I’d like to be the editor of Smash Hits, please." The likelihood of my learning the necessary skillsets in the three remaining months before being flung into the wider world sat heavy in the room. After some polite expectation management she gave me an address for The Wythenshawe World, suggesting I write to the local newspaper about apprenticeships. It wasn’t anything I was interested in so I screwed it up and threw it in a rubbish bin on the way out. And that, reader, was where any practical nurturing of a career began and ended in the South Manchester comprehensive school system of the 80s, for me at least.