This is true but education is free in the U.K. and has been free for nearly a century .
You don’t need to be master mind to learn how to read and write.
So a ‘paid for’ education in a private, or public school, doesn’t give you better opportunities and determines who you mix with?
That’s it in a nutshell and I write from experience. My paternal great grandparents were known to the work house and my grandfather straight after the ‘great war’ took on a pub and never looked back also opening a pawn shop, the income from which sent me to boarding school. Without that boarding school I would not have been equipped for the employment that now gives me a very reasonable index linked pension.
LOL! It certainly does!
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I think this is a different subject Art .
A private school education may give people a better network of connections and if they are at private school their family may well have money to help them anyway .
What I want to know is how someone in the sixties did not learn to read or write .
Poverty does not exclude people from being literate .
I believe that it does though indirectly.
The old school tie was the best reference I could have wished for.
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The Slum Clearance Movement in the Nineteen Thirties..
This was Nesbet Street in all its squalor. The houses were poorly built. The rooms were small, with low ceilings. Houses were subdivided, with two or more families in each, and all severely overcrowded. There were no bathrooms and probably an outside lavatory shared by several families. No refrigerators of course and no proper place to store food. At most there might have been a meat safe with perforated zinc sides to protect food from the flies. With luck it might have been nailed to an outside wall and reached through a window. If not it was inside the room. A family living in one or two rooms would have had to buy food every day, as nothing could be kept. To add to this, there were mice, bugs and fleas. Conditions like this were to be found up and down the country.
I don’t .
Most people poor or rich know how to read and write.
It’s a basic skill .
1934
Not the year that Angela Rayners mother was born in .
I never claimed it was … to what are you replying?
Can I just interject here and say that perhaps figures on this aren’t widely known. Many people find it shameful to admit they have poor reading and writing skills, so this kind of thing wouldn’t have accurate numbers. I just found this though, as I was replying to you…
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Most, maybe … but, even in the 21st Century, not all:
https://www.teacherboards.co.uk/community/adult-illiteracy-in-the-uk/
According to the National Literacy Trust a major 16% of adults are considered to be ‘functionally illiterate’ in the United Kingdom. Literacy levels are falling among the younger generations and it is stated that 1 in 5 adults struggle to read and write. With this in mind, it is important to consider the crucial elements that go into combating this modern issue.
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You are showing pictures of slums in 1934
What has that got to do with Angela Rayners mother being illiterate ?
She was probably born around 1962 an era when schooling was free open to all and the vast majority of people left school at 16 able to read and write .
Blimey … great minds must think alike … 
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I know! 
Couldn’t have timed it that way if we tried! 
If you look carefully, you’ll see that I was replying to Artangel and not you.
Omah, l have a book that is called… ‘A Life Apart- The English Working Class 1890-1914’ by Standish Meacham …when life was brutal…
We don’t know, we’re born…
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This was a problem today’s youth will never understand. When I tell my grandchildren I played amongst bombsite rubble, they look at me as though I’ve lost the plot 
Edited to add photo 
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My dad couldn’t read until he was 18, my mum taught him and she read to him all his life, even after he could read himself
His mum used to read his comics to him when he was a child
It was because he had polio and a withered leg and spent a lot of time in hospital and a school for the disabled. They didn’t bother with education for them much, just trained him for a trade, a tailor
I couldn’t find out much about Angela Rayner’s mother, only that she was from a family of 12 children who just dropped out of school.
I think she then went on to be diagnosed as bipolar and Angela was her carerfor a while?
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