Keir Starmer has finally used the C-word: acknowledging the barriers of class that still divide us | Polly Toynbee

Class? Labour was once too wary of the mine-strewn territory to use the word. Tony Blair talked of meritocracy – “we are meritocrats”, he declared in his first keynote speech of the 2001 general election campaign. He called for “equality of opportunity”. While his 18 taskforces on the causes of “social exclusion” yielded many successes – a 50% decrease in the number of poor children and a sharp fall in teen pregnancy and youth unemployment – he generally avoided any talk of inequality itself, or class.

Keir Starmer strode into that minefield on Thursday outlining the fifth of his “missions”, and the one that may prove the most politically defining: he calls it “my personal cause”. He would “shatter the class ceiling”. He spoke of the “snobbery” of the academic versus vocational gap and of the mental barriers telling working class children “this isn’t for you”. Politicians avoid the word, yet there it still is, large as life.

When I made a Radio 4 programme a while back, actually called The Class Ceiling, I asked everyone I met about their own class experiences: when did you first feel either not posh enough, or too embarrassingly posh? Everyone has stories of slights suffered or of socially awkward barriers in their family histories. Labour’s willingness to face it matters because of the brutal truth that social mobility has gone into reverse: birth is destiny more certainly now than it was a few decades ago, worsened in the austerity years, and the Sutton Trust warns it’s about to get worse still.

If they can, politicians will boast of their working class credentials, that “good backstory”: Starmer and Bridget Phillipson both used their working class origins in promoting their education policy. Wes Streeting, his autobiography just out, can boast even more deprivation, while Angela Rayner had as hard a start. All of them made their own way through talent and determination with no leg-ups. Proving personal merit has become a social necessity: LSE research has found that 47% of those in higher managerial or professional jobs claim to be working class, while 24% of people in those roles whose parents were middle class identify as working class. Plainly people know how critically important class origin remains.

What can be done? The great decades for social mobility were the 1950s, 60s and 70s, until the 1980s brought an explosion of inequality. Labour did well in bringing many of the poorest nearer the median, but even so, overall inequality rose very slightly.

Class is economic, but it has many ingredients. Starmer and Phillipson’s approach is a school programme of cultural and emotional enrichment, giving all children experiences and skills the middle classes take for granted. “Oracy” – a new word on me – will thread through a curriculum stressing speaking, confidence and communication skills, those great social dividers.

Labour will inherit too many schools turned into cultural deserts – Gradgrind fact factories without even enough maths teachers. Look back on Gavin Williamson as education secretary announcing plans to cut funding to arts education by 50% to focus on “high-value subjects”. Labour has chronicled the savaging of school arts since 2010: the number of students taking arts GCSEs has fallen by 40%; 12,000 fewer take music despite a UK music industry worth billions; the number of drama teachers in state-funded secondary schools in England has fallen by 22% since 2011; and there has been a 12% decline in the number of art and design teachers over the same period. Furthermore, the number of art and design trainee teachers has nearly halved in the past two years. To stop burning the seed-corn for one of Britain’s most successful industries, under Labour every student will do arts or sports until they are 16: Ofsted’s reports will no longer be a one-word damnation, but a dashboard measuring all these subtler qualities, valuing things that many people remember with the most pleasure about their school days.

What strikes me talking to Phillipson about her education in a poor area of Tyne and Wear, and reading Streeting’s account of an East End basic primary school, is how much more impoverished children’s cultural experience has become 30 years later. In Streeting’s school he played an instrument, acted in termly plays and visited museums and galleries, with trips to the seaside and countryside “part of the curriculum”. No longer, at so many schools stripped bare.

Phillipson’s assault on class prioritises early years, when futures are set: if children start behind at primary school, they fall further with each school year. Her insistence on a trained teacher in every nursery follows mountains of evidence showing that’s what matters most. Currently the government’s bungled offer of extra free hours of nursery without money for staff has led to fears that nurseries could close in nine out of 10 councils. Starmer praised his own council, Camden, for its remaining children’s centres getting families on their feet, but more than 1,400 of Labour’s 3,500 Sure Start centres have closed.

Labour’s plans include 6,500 more teachers, with bonuses to recruit and retain them, and free breakfasts in all primaries, all of which they’ll pay for with £1.6bn from charging private schools VAT: the noisy opposition from Tories ignores that private school children get 90% more spent on them than state school students, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Of course this doesn’t herald the shattering of class as we know it. Inequality itself – a gap in danger of getting wider – is the true measure. As with all spending, we wait to see what more Labour offers – in benefits and everything else – closer to the election when final economic facts are known (and precedent suggests Labour will do more in office than it pledges). These missions indicate the direction of travel and the party’s intent, but every endeavour reminds us how depressingly hard it will be just to get back to the standards of 2010, let alone to progress.