The mirage of meritocracy has sold our children short

Despite the promise of equality of opportunity, social mobility has come to a halt and a generation has been left stranded
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In the 11 years since Labour took office, I've watched my children and their contemporaries grow almost to adulthood. They were five and eight in the spring of 1997; they are taking GCSEs and A-levels now. If there was one thing I was sure of, it was that this generation would be lucky to grow up under a Labour government. New Labour promised a new emphasis on equality of opportunity. Families would see their children given the chances that had been so lacking under the Conservatives. While the Thatcherites had only valued winners, Labour wanted to develop the potential in every child.

I didn't think that, two elections later, I'd not only be reading that social mobility has come to a halt, but that I'd have witnessed a whole group of teenagers being washed up more or less in the positions their parents had occupied. Statistics are one thing: watching the optimism die in a bunch of real children is another. Of all the children I have known as mine were growing up, I am profoundly depressed to find I can't think of one that has escaped its class destiny.

It was always going to be hard to change the lives of the least able and the most disadvantaged, and they fell by the wayside early on. Labour intended to drive up achievement by a new focus on standards in schools. But teachers preoccupied with delivering the national curriculum had no time for the problems of Kylie, a foul-mouthed four-year-old whose mother smacked her and called her a stupid little bitch on the day school began. Nor did they want to know much about Leroy - the last, lonely child of an absentee single parent - who at seven was always hanging around the playground at hometime asking wistfully if he could come back to someone else's house. "My mum won't be back till late."

Leroy and Kylie were still stumbling over simple words at nine because the school relied on parents to do the bulk of the teaching of reading, and neither had a mother who cared. At 16, Kylie's been truanting for much of the past two years, and Leroy has at last found a family of sorts in the gang on his estate. After a dozen years and thousands of hours in education, they'll be lucky to pass any GCSEs. They'll be emerging from the system much as they went in - undersocialised, unwanted, and underskilled.

Offering more opportunities to the academically able children looked like a much simpler task. My daughter went to a grammar school with a socially mixed intake and a record of good results. Simply being at the school, however, has not been enough to transform children's lives. Perhaps it was an engine of social mobility once, but it didn't seem to be so for her peers. At 15, 16 and 17, big class divides, in confidence and expectations, started to open up. The children of doctors and architects and senior civil servants have won places at Oxbridge and Edinburgh. The children of actors and junior managers are going to the newer universities. But the equally talented children of firemen and bookkeepers and curtain-makers have, overwhelmingly, lost faith in their ability to move out of their class, and most have either dropped out or drastically underperformed.

At 16 the clever daughter of an alcoholic pub landlady came to ask me what student debts would mean for her. With no family money behind her, was there any job she could do that would earn enough to pay the loans and buy a flat? Her mother was scornful of her wanting to change her life. If she set out to do this, she would be doing it alone. At 18 she gave up and went to work in a bar.

The government is exasperated by what it calls the "poverty of aspiration" and exhorts people to have more ambition. It talks as if the only obstacle that lies between talent and success is an absence of will. But that isn't true.

These teenagers' fear of the future is rational. The poorest students have the highest drop-out rates at universities, and research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that, when they graduate, they face much greater difficulties than their peers in finding good jobs.

Alan Johnson, the cabinet minister who himself escaped poverty, acknowledged two years ago that "it's currently harder to escape the shackles of a poor background in Britain than anywhere else in Europe". But these obstacles aren't being sufficiently acknowledged in developing policy, or in an honest approach to those who are affected. And that is destructive.

Children have grown up with rhetoric urging them to try harder, aim higher. The mirage of a meritocracy is laid out in front of them. With such false expectations, it's no wonder the dropouts at every level end up feeling confused, angry and depressed.

If Labour really intended to deliver on greater equality of opportunity, it would need to invest far more resources in emotional, practical and financial support for the most disadvantaged. But just as important is a change of approach. Labour's devout pursuit of academic success has left far too many people feeling like losers, and its conversion to the merits of vocational education is both late and limited. Instead of urging everyone to compete and win, there needs to be a new and genuine emphasis on developing the abilities, however limited, of every child. A party of social justice should do no less.

· Names have been changed

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