Social Mobility

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I thank the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) for securing this important debate and for giving me my first opportunity to speak about social mobility since becoming one of the vice-chairs of the all-party social mobility group.

It is entirely appropriate that the debate takes place in Westminster Hall, as it was here, nearly 500 years ago, that King Henry VIII’s closest aide came to put a Bill for the relief of the poor before Parliament. The causes of poverty listed in that Bill included unemployment and bad upbringing. It provided for a works programme that compelled the able-bodied to work on projects such as road building, maintenance of fortresses and harbours and cleansing of watercourses, in return for a fair wage. Even child beggars were to be hired as apprentices to skilled craftsmen, offering them a chance of a future that they would otherwise never have had. The proposals were radical, but that quality was perhaps more pronounced because they were the brainchild of Thomas Cromwell, who was the King’s chief Minister, Earl of Essex and Master of the Rolls—but also the son of a blacksmith from Putney.

We should be clear about what we mean by social mobility. We are not talking about creating equality of income, or equality of experience. Our aim is to achieve equality of opportunity and a society in which individuals who grow up in poorer families can use their talent and effort to move up the socio-economic ladder. The problem is that people from low-income backgrounds find it extremely difficult to get on in life through education and employment. Now, as in 1535, poverty is the greatest barrier to social mobility and equality.

The all-party group’s report on social mobility showed that the prospects of half of all children born in the UK can be almost entirely linked to their parents’ socio-economic circumstances. Perhaps contrary to outward perception and certainly counter to the American dream, America and Britain have the highest intergenerational correlations between the social status of fathers and sons—47% in America and 50% in the UK, whereas, by comparison, in Denmark it is just 15% and in Australia 17%. I have no doubt that that is in large part down to educational attainment.

The BBC 1 programme “Who Do You Think You Are?” has sparked many people’s interest in examining their backgrounds and finding out about their predecessors—often with surprising results. I, too, have looked into my predecessors. I found it quite easy, helped by the fact that my father, Robert Crockart, had a father named Robert George Crockart, whose father was Robert Crockart—you can guess the rest, Mr Rosindell. My father was born in Methven, a small village outside Perth, and I have traced his direct predecessors back almost 400 years to the 1600s, when they all worked manually on the land around Methven, so there was no degree of geographic mobility, never mind social mobility—yet here I stand. The only difference is education and my being the first in my family to achieve a degree—and not even that good a degree, it has to be said. That is only one example, but one that I am sure is repeated many hundreds of times across the country. That is why I regard access to education and especially higher education as key in this debate.

Two days ago, as part of my party’s attempts to increase representative diversity, I was shadowed by a potential Liberal Democrat candidate from a poor background, who blogged about the experience afterwards and reminded me of a certain quote:

“I believe that access to higher education is a key enabler of social mobility and the best way to narrow the gap between the richest and poorest in society.”

It is a wonderful quote. It is from me. I do not want to open old wounds, but those words were written in my letter of resignation from Government over the increase in tuition fees. I did so not because of any pledge, but because of a personal understanding that knowing that a figure indicated a contingent liability rather than an actual debt was a differentiation that would be lost on many young people from backgrounds like mine.

Nevertheless, I think the Government are right to view the problem more widely and to take a life-cycle approach by examining issues and interventions from the early years all the way through to adulthood.

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

The hon. Gentleman rightly expresses the anxieties that people had at the time of our tuition fee and loan proposals. Does he take some encouragement from the UCAS evidence that applications from school leavers and 18-year-olds at college have barely fallen? Indeed, we are running at the second highest rate of applications ever, and, in particular, we cannot find any differential fall in applications. If anything, applications from young people from low-income backgrounds have held up slightly better than those from other groups.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

Thank you, Mr Rosindell, for chairing the debate; I also thank Mr Hollobone, who was in the Chair before you. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on doing an excellent job in bringing together the all-party group on social mobility.

My hon. Friend’s opening speech was excellent and included some great truths. It is true, for example, that everyone in the education system blames people in the stage behind for the problems that they face. I completely recognise that observation. He was also right to challenge some issues relating to social mobility, as was the right hon. Lady.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this debate has been not so much the front-of-house stuff, but the back story—the personal accounts that we have heard from several Members of their own experiences. I will not share my complete personal back story, but I will say that a lot of my family also came from Small Heath in Birmingham, and one of these days I will compare notes with the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) on Birmingham and the trades in which my family worked.

I want to pick up on some of the important points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire, which are captured in the excellent report, “Seven Key Truths about Social Mobility”, which combines the best features of a think-tank pamphlet and a McKinsey PowerPoint presentation. He lists seven truths and I recognise a lot of them, but I would challenge him on two points in his report. The first is the statement:

“The point of greatest leverage for social mobility is what happens between the ages of 0 and 3”.

I realise that that is very much the view nowadays, as a result of which we have a different pattern of spending in Britain from the OECD average, with more spent on early years and less on other stages of the education process. We must beware of becoming Calvinists who think that everything is determined by early-year experiences. The Government’s approach in our report on social mobility, “Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers”, is to look at each stage of the life cycle. My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) made an important point about going to university and graduating at the age of 54. It is a reminder that nobody’s fate is determined by their earlier experience.

People have the opportunity to break free and take the initiative. I meet exceptional examples of that. To take a classic case, a lone parent, perhaps aged about 30, who left school at 16 and has been busy raising kids, begins to think about what they will do with the rest of their lives just when their kids are at secondary school or even older. They suddenly think, “With my experience, I could be a social worker, join the police or become a nurse.” They want to go to college and university to get the qualification to enable them to do that. That is the kind of opportunity we need to continue to provide.

There is an interaction between the different stages of social mobility, in that often one of the best things that we can do for a child aged nought to three is provide further or higher education for their parent. The experience of the parent having an opportunity as a mature student is often an incredible investment in the child as well. To provide higher-quality early-year experiences, it is important that we have better qualified staff in child care, which in turn requires further investment in apprenticeships and college and university courses. The more I look at it, the more I am persuaded of the interaction between experiences at different stages, rather than a special priority for one stage.

I agree with the vast majority of the report, but I am trying to identify some areas of challenge. I agree that university is the top determinant of later opportunities, so pre-18 attainment is key. It gives people an important opportunity. The debate in Britain about what follows is sometimes rather fraught. There are two extremes. In the Chinese model, everybody sits an exam at 18, and those with the top 100 marks go to the university of Beijing, the next 100 go to Shanghai, the next 100 go somewhere else and everything is ranked by the marks.

The other extreme is the American model, where Harvard or Princeton mould the class. Ivy league universities have a view about the mix of people they want. They look for people who play sport and those who do not. They think about ethnic mix, alumnae and donors. There is a host of criteria. Someone must have reached a certain academic level, of course, but the institutions are explicit: they are moulding the class because they think that doing so moulds the future of America. It helps to shape the people who will govern and have leadership roles in America.

In Britain, we are somewhere in between. I am a complete meritocrat on this issue, but I do not think that a university in Britain has ever simply used the marks at A-level as the only criterion; they also try to assess who has the greatest ability to benefit from going to university. One encouraging thing about university is that, if anything, it is the first stage of the education process where people from more disadvantaged backgrounds outperform, rather than underperform. That is something that universities take into account when they look at how to maximise people’s chances of getting a good degree—a first or a 2:1.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire made an excellent speech. He made a series of shrewd observations, which we will draw on as we develop our social mobility strategy. The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles also made an excellent speech, with a shocking example of social attitudes: the solicitor who nearly offered her a job, but did not. I hope I am not complacent, but I think—and hope—that that view of the world has long since gone. In my experience, including chairing the group on access to the professions, the legal, medical and accountancy professions are desperate to reach out to the range of talent across the country, regardless of background.

The right hon. Lady asked three specific questions, which I will briefly respond to. She talked about what was happening to widen the networks of people from the poorest backgrounds. There are limits to what Governments can do, but we will launch the new Inspiring the Future programme next month, following the success of Speakers for Schools. It aims to get into schools, especially in the more deprived areas; people from a range of careers and jobs will open kids’ eyes to what the possibilities are. We already have 800 volunteers—people who have achieved something, who know about a job and who can explain it persuasively.

On internships and unpaid internships, and going back to the right hon. Lady’s pressure for networks, internships have become an important part of routes into work. Therefore, we have kept the Graduate Talent Pool, which began under the previous Labour Government; I have confirmed this week that we are keeping it for three years. It is a web-based service with information on internships for people who might not otherwise be part of a network that provides them with such information.

Since its launch, the site has carried 47,000 vacancies from 6,000 employers, and 73,000 graduates have registered. Due to concerns about the exploitation of interns, we have made it clear in a recent update of the site that we have added a quality assurance process for any new vacancy, to ensure that it offers a graduate-level internship opportunity and complies with minimum wage regulations.

More widely, I assure the right hon. Lady that we are clear about minimum wage obligations. If something is employment, with the obligations that come with employment, such as set hours when people are expected to attend the workplace, the minimum wage applies. The Government are conducting a targeted enforcement operation in sectors where internships are commonplace and where we are aware of advertisements for unpaid work experience.

The right hon. Lady’s third and final question was about great employers.

[Hazel Blears]

Before the Minister leaves the subject of internships, I should say that I asked about the current anomalous situation whereby it is still lawful to advertise unpaid internships that are clearly jobs with set hours. That seems to be a contradiction in terms: if it is unlawful to have the job unless it is paid the minimum wage, I cannot for the life of me understand why advertising such placements, which on the face of it contravene national minimum wage legislation, is permitted. Will he look at the issue of advertising for such posts?

[Mr Willetts]

I will look at the issue but, because of our commitment to freedom of speech in this country, the regulation of what we can say or advertise is rather different from the regulation of the minimum wage, for instance. We have a higher and more demanding criterion before we say, “This form of communication is banned.” When we are aware of advertisements for unpaid work experience, and when it looks as if a sector has become particularly active with those, we engage in targeted enforcement through Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

On businesses, I refer briefly to the social mobility business compact that we have introduced. Some 140 businesses have signed up already, involving 2.5 million employees. That is absolutely to do with businesses committing themselves to drawing on the widest range of talents.

Let me refer to some of the other lively contributions to the debate, including from my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) on apprenticeships, which were also brought up by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart). We are absolutely clear that higher education should not be seen as the only route into a well paid job. It is important that the classic, vocational route is available.

Indeed, one of the things that I am doing in the working group on access to the professions is to see whether we can reopen some of those non-graduate routes into accountancy or law that used to exist and were perfectly legitimate in the past. Nowadays, they might involve employers at some point down the track sponsoring one of their employees through university as a mature student, to get some extra qualifications in finance or law—mature students who have already done some practical work as an employee might get even more out of the university course.

We are doing our best, working with the professions that will ultimately decide, to ensure that those routes are opened up again. My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock rightly referred to the work of my excellent colleague, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. The Government’s record in expanding apprenticeships is evidence that we really are committed to them. We are way ahead of our target, having added more than 200,000 apprenticeships since the coalition took office.

I am not sure whether I should stray into the remarks on grammar schools made by my hon. Friends the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) and for Thurrock, but I will just very briefly observe that what worked in the past as a device for social mobility does not necessarily work today. In Birmingham, I did sit the 11-plus, in the days when all of us, at every local primary school, sat in our rows of desks and did the exam. Nowadays, there is more tuition for the 11-plus, and more people who go to private schools up to the age of 11 to get themselves taught to pass the exam.

Although we respect the decision in parts of the country to keep grammar schools, the evidence is that the number of children from low-income backgrounds who pass the 11-plus in those areas and go to grammar schools has, sadly, declined. It might be that the schools do not work in the way they used to—as an opportunity—and that is one reason why the Government do not propose a return to selective education. Within schools, streaming and setting are, of course, very effective devices.

This has been a wide-ranging debate, and I have tried not to focus solely on higher education, but I absolutely agree with the points about mature students, and it was great to have at least one such student identify himself. We should not think of higher education as something that people do just at the age of 18.

When we consider the evidence from UCAS applications, we look particularly carefully at what has been happening with mature students. There was a bit of a surge in their numbers two or three years ago, and it is a bit early to say whether there is an underlying pattern, but, as I said in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West, despite the fears that people had about our fee proposals, the evidence so far from applications is encouraging.

My party—the Conservative Opposition, as it then was—was afraid that people would be put off applying when the then Labour Government introduced the £3,000 fees in 2005, and that is one reason why we voted against the measures. The evidence, however, was that the £3,000 fees did not have the feared effect, and that gave us some confidence that with a fees and loan system, in which no student had to pay up front, we could avoid such fears. The number of 18-year-olds is falling, due to a decline in the birth rate in the early ’90s. Allowing for the slight fall in the size of that cohort, the number of university applications from school leavers is down by about 2%, but the fall among school leavers from the poorest backgrounds is, if anything, rather less. We take some encouragement from that.

Finally, I say to my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire that the debate has been valuable. I am sorry that it has not been possible to cover all the excellent comments, but we will certainly draw on them as we develop the Government’s social mobility strategy.