Letters | 5 April 2018

Self-limiting beliefs

Sir: As someone who spent much of his working life teaching at Eton and Harrow, it was amusing to learn from Toby Young (31 March) that privately educated pupils achieve better exam results than pupils in other schools because they came into the world equipped with high IQ genes which, together with parental background, guarantee success, with the school adding little. If only we teachers had known!

If genes are as important as Toby, Robert Plomin and others insist, it does ask questions of the drive to improve social mobility. If schools are limited in the difference they can make, do we fuss too much about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools? The genetic research Toby quotes implies that pupils with low-income parents tend to have fewer of the high IQ genes and will therefore do less well in exams. But masses of research shows that this belief is itself an important reason why low-income children do less well in schools in Britain and the USA than in the Far East.