Education: Social Mobility

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, I will be the 18th to thank the Minister for ensuring that we have this debate, although my thanks are none the less heartfelt for that and are very sincere. This is such an important topic and it is much appreciated that he succeeded in finding a slot that gave us more time than the usual two or three minutes.

The debate has focused on a wide variety of things. I have agreed with some of the points of view expressed, but I would vary from some of them. One of the opening points made by a number of noble Lords, and indeed in some of the briefings I have had, related to what we mean by social mobility. I find this a bit tricky. When I hear the two options of “absolute” or “relative”, I am reminded of Garrison Keillor introducing the mythical Lake Wobegon, that town in the far, far Midwest in which all the eggs laid by chickens were larger than normal and all the children were above average. That is one of the risks when we start to talk about social mobility. We need to try to understand not what the statistics are, but what Johnny would achieve if he were liberated and opened up to the future and what Mary would succeed in that she might not have otherwise. That is social mobility.

I had two versions of notes for this speech. One, in case I was called early, is packed full of statistics. Happily—as I suspected—most of those have already been produced, and I will not bore your Lordships with them again. The version that noble Lords will get now is, I fear, slightly autobiographical. I do not think I can match my noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton but I will do my little best. I am from the north-east of Scotland, not the north-east of England, and we are a little less forthcoming with our emotions up there. None the less, I wanted to point your Lordships to a school and a date.

The date is 5 January 1946, and the school is called Woodside Primary School. That was my first day at that state primary. It was just after the war, with my father not yet out of the military, when we all fronted up to this state school. It was right at the edge of the north end of Aberdeen—which now extends for another four miles—and surrounded by council estates and old-fashioned tenement-type rented accommodation. That was its catchment area and the population it served. We went along as part of a three-class intake on that first day. My class had 48 pupils in it and our teaching location was a nissen hut that looked as if it had been used to store tanks during the war. It had a coke stove in the middle, which I am sure was a health hazard—there is no doubt that you would not get away with it today. The lavatories were outside and required more of a triumph of mind over matter than anything else even to contemplate going near them.

That was the physical context. Among the 48 of us and the other two classes that arrived at the same time at the school, there were no better-off families, just those who ended up with one shilling and eight pence in their purse at the end of the week and those who did not manage that. That was the difference financially between the children in the class and their parents. It was wartime but, happily, we mostly ate a reasonable diet because food was rationed. We did not have a lot of choice and could not go and buy expensive food, but you got your ration. Most of us, in one way or another, found that that was more than adequate. We wore our brothers, hand-me-downs and read the comics that they discarded towards the end of the week.

That is a picture of a state primary school that apparently had all of the disadvantages that we fear. Did it have anything by way of social mobility to offer? Where did the pupils end up? I will give some examples. Two of us became professors, one of electronics and one of philosophy—the electronics man was the smart guy. One became a Guardian features writer and one became a solicitor. Two became heads of school departments in excellent state secondary schools in Scotland, one in mathematics and one in English literature. One became a Fleet Street printer in the days of hot metal and, from what I remember of him, I dare say that he was one of those who caused Rupert Murdoch most trouble in getting out of Fleet Street. That was a big step, from the north end of Aberdeen to Fleet Street, but he wanted to become a printer and he did it. He was very successful. One became a radio and TV engineer in the early days. He was happy in his work and very good at it; if you had something flickering on your television screen, it was Colin you went for.

The whole range of careers, futures, jobs and professions came out of that class. The range was huge, which allowed some form of social mobility. Was this then some sort of urban idyll, which we could create again? Of course it had one huge flaw, referred to several times in this debate, which is the great divide between what came next: senior secondary and junior secondary. We did not have the 11-plus up in Aberdeen—they are tough guys there—we had an exam named “the control”. You were allocated. Occasionally, one parent would not allow their son or daughter to go on to senior secondary, which was a real tragedy, but there were those who moved through the system. That was a large—perhaps the biggest—flaw in the system but there were forms of upward mobility for all of us. A number went into the construction trade. You still had shipbuilding in Aberdeen then; later there was the oil industry and so on. They had the opportunity to move forward.

What allowed this? Was there anything different about that school? Just the obvious things: we had excellent teachers, who were absolutely superb. They were not soft; they were tough, and if Miss Paul called you out in front of the school, you walked shaking towards her. However, tough as they were, they taught us the core skills that an education should teach. We became competent in mathematics, reading and writing; perhaps less so in articulation, but that is a local, social thing. Perhaps if we had had to learn another language, that might have improved things, but we learnt skills that were basic to what we eventually all became. We had supportive parents, who were not involved that much but did care. My parents read books and had books around the house. They read books to me and took me to the local library—originally set up, interestingly, through philanthropy of one kind or another.

There were some other, some might say softer, skills. Football was quite good. I was not especially good at it, but the shining example was held up, as an aspiration for all of us, of an older pupil, Graham Leggat, who had signed professional forms for Fulham Football Club. He might as well have been going to Real Madrid as far as we were concerned. For us, that really was hitting the high spot, at least until a few years later, when we discovered that the guy down the road who kept engineering the defeat of our football team—a spotted youth with national health specs—was actually called Denis Law. That was good, in that we had competitive sport of a good order.

That was education and social mobility at work, and I do not see why we cannot do that now. There are different problems today, and we did not have schools with 39 and 40 native languages to deal with, but we did have a degree of poverty in the place. We did not have the possibility of overseas trips, holidays elsewhere or even visits to the farm. Occasionally, on the odd day when the sun shone, we went for a walk through Persley Den, doubtless slashing at the weeds as we walked down the road without caring about the future of the ecosystem, but that was it.

Are there any lessons to be learnt or is this just sheer self-indulgence? I think there are lessons, such as the excellence of the teachers and the grittiness of the head teacher, who was too old to go to the war but extended his working life to provide opportunity. He was great. He was tough but he was very good. We inherited the problem of the junior and senior secondary. Comprehensivisation was eventually brought in to solve that. I have to say it failed and it is because it failed that we are where we are in the OECD league tables. There are good comprehensive schools but we cannot all be Holland Parks—nor were we.

The education system has had to change and I salute those who have been bringing about that change, not least the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who is with us today, and the Minister and his colleagues in the current Government. The one lesson we take from comprehensivisation is that there is not a single solution. There is not a quick switch in the structure that will mean that all will be well and there will be social mobility. That is why I think we have yet to exploit the full richness of the possibility of giving more power to the schools and the head teachers; for example, through the excellent UTC system. We have to give these opportunities and allow schools to develop new ways. There will be failures and there will have to be a decent regulatory system, which, happily, I think we have in Ofsted, but we have to keep working with it.

All the drivers that we have had outlined to us, such as the excellent pupil premium, are necessary but are not sufficient. Eternal vigilance in the education system is all that will be sufficient. We place our hopes and expectations on the teachers, good leadership in schools and commitment to high standards.