DJ Taylor: The thing about a real class act is that it's pretty hard to define

We might all be middle class now, but it's not so simple: television and book awards are on the slide. And spare a thought for the second-rate in schools

The most intriguing aspect of the royal engagement was the debate about Kate Middleton's precise social status.

Was she moderately posh but managing to disguise it? A shameless arriviste whose fond Mama had sent her to the University of St Andrews to fizz in the royal slipstream? There were Thackerayan shadings here, which most commentators chose to ignore, and the general consensus seemed to be that she was "middle class".

In fact, Miss Middleton turns out to be the great-great-grand-daughter of a coalminer, whose parents run a mail-order firm catering for children's parties. Before university, she went to the decidedly up-market Marlborough College. After university, she lived in a top-of-the-range King's Road flat. If all this sounds distinctly upper-bourgeois, then it should be pointed out that "middle-class" is now a horribly elastic term whose original meaning has perished in the tides of history. Mr Pooter, for example, in the Grossmith brothers' The Diary of a Nobody (1892) may be an amiable idiot, but his belief in his social position – several rungs up from the office boy, a step or two down from the "gentleman" – is as fervent as his belief in the God who ordained it.

Even by the mid-20th century, though, standard ideas of what it meant to be middle class were running into trouble. The Oxford historian Ross McKibbin's invaluable Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 admits to taxonomic bafflement ("There was no definition on which all could agree, and in defining it people might choose different criteria.") Using occupational classifications taken from census data, McKibbin estimates that the percentage of the population that could be rated as "middle class" rose from 21.7 in 1921 to 27.8 in 1951. Comparable figures in the 2001 census are well over 70 per cent.

But if "middle class" is now a term of the same indeterminate vagueness as "liberal" or "democratic", its sub-divisions, and the behavioural assumptions they imply, are endlessly fascinating. George Orwell once observed, with characteristic precision, that he belonged to the "lower-upper-middle class", by which he meant that his knowledge of "smart" life was largely theoretical. His family knew how to ride but owned no horses. The distinction between "lower-middle class" and "middle-middle class", all the evidence insists, is to do with your awareness of the value of money. My father, for example, an electrician's son who acquired a white-collar job, knew his salary to the last penny. My mother, the daughter of an insurance company manager, never had, or affected never to have, a clue. But I don't suppose any of this means very much to Miss Middleton.

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According to Gillian Low, president of the Girls' School Association and headmistress of Lady Eleanor Holles School, the nation's children live in an "age of anxiety" and should be allowed to adopt a more "carefree attitude" to life. Speaking at her association's annual conference, Mrs Low suggested: "We must not ignore those things which deeply enrich lives." While not urging a retreat from the traditional curriculum, she pointed out that "there are no A-stars for determination, integrity, leadership potential, responsibility, values, kindness, common sense or a positive attitude towards life."

The stand-off between the carefree individualist and the chain-them-to-the-desk schools of educational philosophy has been going on for a couple of centuries now. It was that great ogress and child-queller Mrs Pipchin in Dombey and Son who remarked: "There is a good deal of nonsense – and worse – talked about young people not being pressed too hard at first, and being tempted on, and all the rest of it .... My opinion is 'keep 'em at it'." Normally one inclines firmly to the anti-Pipchin view, and yet while reading about Mrs Low's advocacy of the carefree attitude I couldn't help being reminded of a conversation I overheard on a bus in the summer between a friend of my eldest son's in the Norwich School sixth-form and a second boy who had clearly transferred himself to another establishment for years 12 to 13. The latter's contribution, doubtless exaggerated for effect, went something like this: "Oh ya, I mean, I only have to turn up three days a week. You still have to sign in at 8.40 and go to assembly? Oh no, I couldn't stand that. Really couldn't stand that at all .... Weekends? Well, it's pretty much one long party," etc. No offence to the excellent school which our man attends, but you don't have to be Mrs Pipchin to work out who was going to get the better university place.

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As a fan of William Boyd's novels, I shall be sitting down this evening to see what kind of a fist Channel 4 will make of their dramatisation of Any Human Heart. Mr Boyd, who has adapted the book for the small screen himself, has been doing the rounds of the broadsheet arts pages this past week. He could be found in The Daily Telegraph conceding that this approach to a novel long thought to be "unfilmable" had been to concentrate on the romantic entanglements of its womanising hero. No disrespect to Mr Boyd, but this struck me as an acknowledgment that TV viewers are so dim (or rather, are assumed to be so) that any kind of procedural complexity is beyond them, and that the average TV drama, if it is to retain its audience, can only operate on the rather rudimentary level of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds another girl and so on.

Set against this kind of prescription, a film like Mike Leigh's Another Year can seem a work of the most daring radicalism. Mr Leigh doesn't do sex, or flaring prompt cards. He barely does climacterics. Rather, he simply allows his characters to talk – sometimes realistically, at other times with a kind of stylised super-realism. Instead of wrapping things up in some end-tying climax, he lets the film drift to a close in a supper-table chat where the camera lingers on the face – drained, exhausted, practically tragic – of a woman who is excluded from it. Not the least of Another Year's merits is its ability to remind you of the many reasons why so much modern television is so awful.

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Going back to education, Michael Gove, has been talking up the merits of the Teach First scheme, whereby high-achieving graduates, fast-tracked into disadvantaged inner-city schools, do their training on the job. Teach First's results have been encouraging, with GCSE results on the up. The message would seem to be one common to practically all professional life: if you want the best outcomes, employ the best people and let them get on with it. Naturally, all this – the thought of first-class minds busily improving standards – is a terrific idea but it makes you wonder, and profoundly sympathise with, the second- and third-class minds who struggle on at their sides.

Hardly a week goes by without a survey outlining the stress-fest that is the modern workplace, an atmosphere in which technology, that dreadful sense of being permanently on call, only exacerbates the insecurities of the workforce. If, amid the mess of grade inflation, we sometimes expect too little of the people being taught, then we sometimes expect too much of the people doing the teaching. To venture a little further down the scale, what about all the teenagers who would never pass five GCSEs if they were given the answers in advance? What, in our new high-skills economy, does Mr Gove propose to do with them?

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Two reports last week maintained that the noble art of biography is "in crisis". First, the distinguished biographer Victoria Glendinning complained that no one would offer an advance for her projected life of Sir Stamford Raffles. Then it was noted that the judges of this year's Costa Prize could find only three titles (out of 97 books submitted) for their shortlist. But neither of these revelations is evidence of a "crisis". Certainly, there is a shortage of subjects, with most of the major 19th- and 20th-century seams thoroughly exhausted. Certainly, as Ms Glendinning has found to her cost, some books are more attractive to publishers than others.

On the other hand, a three-volume Costa shortlist, in a year that saw the publication of, say, Adam Sisman's biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper or Candia McWilliam's What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness, is faintly bewildering. Or rather not bewildering at all, as it betrays the punter-patronising urge that could be seen in the failure of Howard Jacobson's Booker-winning The Finkler Question to make the best novel shortlist for being "too cerebral". Something may very well be in crisis, when a literary prize starts falling over itself to limit the range of items it offers to the book-buying public, but it probably isn't biography.