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Earlier this year, a called for discrimination against working-class people to be made illegal in the cultural sector. Over half of the respondents to a survey it ran said they had experienced harassment or bias of some kind due to their socioeconomic background.

The context for this report was squarely focused on the cultural sector, but if social class were to become a protected characteristic under the - joining race, sex, disability and sexual orientation - what would it mean for education?

On one level, the argument for this has some immediate appeal: Britain has embarrassingly low levels of social mobility compared with its peer nations, and parental background remains an outsized determinant of the realisation of one’s individual talents.

That is despite the high priority already set for addressing this in schools in England through the pupil premium conditions of grant and Ofsted’s focus on disadvantaged students.

Closing the disadvantage gap

The Equality Act already takes us a step in this direction through Section 1, which places a duty on some public bodies to have due regard to “the desirability of exercising (their functions) in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage”.

This rather tortuous construction is as far as the outgoing Labour government of 2010 could push it. Section 1 does not apply directly to schools in England, though.

What if the government went one step further and made social class a protected characteristic?

The first problem is definition.

Education and class

Most people broadly know what is meant when they hear the terms working class, middle class and upper class. These things can then be defined to an extent. One can just about get away with using pupil premium eligibility as a proxy for working-class status in staffroom conversation, but could it ever bear the weight of a court case?

Measures such as the National Readership Survey social grades of ABC1 and C2DE do exist as a substitute. They assign a category according to the occupation of the highest earner in a household, with A including higher managerial workers and C2 being skilled manual workers (a nightmare for prognosticators of 21st-century jobs, one would imagine).

Could schools collect these data on admission and track attendance, attainment and enrichment according to them? Does the headteacher become the arbiter of whether mum or dad is skilled enough to be a C2 or semi-skilled and therefore a D?

Ofsted and pupil premium

Presumably, Ofsted’s inspection data summary report would provide leaders with a neat breakdown, encouraging schools to target with greater specificity the daughters of the supervisory, clerical and junior managerial (C1) and the sons of unskilled manual workers (D).

So yes, it is possible to apply a technocratic measure. However, all such measures are imperfect and deviate from the purpose of the classification. So it would not be a route most would be comfortable travelling down.

Where does that leave us if we did want to push this area further?

Ruling on a famous case before the US Supreme Court, Justice Potter Stewart wrote that, while he was unable to define hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it”.

Teacher knowledge

This somewhat provocative line has echoed as an expression of judicial humility: some things are known and understood while eluding definition. So too, social class.

We should be confident in saying that things that we cannot always define, measure and validate are at least as important as those that we can.

God, love and fervent opinion are all powerful forces, fundamental to the identities of many and yet gloriously immeasurable.

However, that route, too, has multiple challenges. Meanwhile, proponents of harder lines being drawn must also address the law of unintended consequences of any movement in this direction.

Unintended consequences

For example, one unintended consequence would be the capacity of such laws to incentivise “acting the part”. We already know that contextual admissions to university have seen candidates privately educated to 16 go back into the state system for sixth form in order to improve their chances. As Pulp lyrics remind us, you can play the part, but “you’ll never fail like common people”.

In schools, more specifically, you would see big shifts.

Uniform and equipment costs will be the first to be challenged, their impact on the socioeconomically disadvantaged argued to be too great a burden. This is not speculative; the debate is long-established and would find fresh fuel from any extension of equality law.

We would likely see the sports and arts drawn into the fray. On the one hand, with equality as entitlement, the argument is that schools must reverse the cultural disadvantages of the working class through exposure to apparently middle-class recitals and museum visits.

On the other hand, an insistence that class background be honoured and reflected, the great-grandchildren of coal miners not having their heritage denied to them through a preference for the more superterranean opportunities funded by the Arts Council.

Skewed focus

Ultimately, these lines will be drawn by judges. According to the Sutton Trust, 62 per cent of senior judges were privately educated, nearly nine times the national rate.

A privately-educated judge might be as good as a state-school alumna in deciding a question of law, but is a disproportionately privately-educated whole sector the right determinant of what constitutes something as contested as class?

Finally, bear in mind the costs as well. The Isle of Wight Council alone spent £106,000 to get the Supreme Court to define “regular attendance” at school in 2017, and that is likely a much simpler term than “lower middle class”.

So while it is tempting to push for a legal answer to the ongoing (and widening) disadvantage gap, it’s unlikely to get the desired result.

All it would achieve is pushing school leaders away from what they are there to do: apply their expertise to school - rather than social - classes.

Tomas Thurogood-Hyde is director of corporate services at Astrea