Social Mobility and the Economy

Debate between Sarah Champion and Geraint Davies

Wednesday 28th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. It is the greatest pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening), who is a Rotherham girl. She lives and breathes exactly what she is outlining. Her family background is very common in Rotherham. The fact that she has achieved such incredible heights is genuinely an inspiration to my constituents. It is exactly what we are looking to do. I fully support her social mobility pledge. I urge her to come back to Rotherham so that we can work together to make it happen.

I am particularly proud that a woman is launching the social mobility pledge, and a great deal is owed to the right hon. Lady for her work on this. We have now got cracks in the glass ceiling. Indeed, as she rightly said—I am going to steal her line—a ton of bricks is now falling on the class ceiling. That is something we have to address as a country, not least because this week the Children’s Commissioner highlighted the huge gaps that exist between the poorest children in the north and the poorest in the south. Her report found that a child on free school meals living in Hackney is three times more likely to go to university than a child on free school meals from Hartlepool. London children on free school meals are 40% more likely to achieve good maths and English GSCEs than children in the north. Rotherham, by contrast, ranks 188th out of 324 local authority areas for social mobility and has the seventh highest secondary school exclusion rates in the country. The Children’s Commissioner found that too many children are dropping out of education and training before 18, with several northern cities having more than 10% of children missing out on crucial parts of their education.

The all-party parliamentary group on social mobility recognised that social mobility is improved through education and high-quality teaching, yet its former chair now leads a Department that is cutting school funding by 4.6% between 2015 and 2019. Across England, more than half a million primary school children are in super-sized classes. Between 2014-15 and 2016-17, class sizes in Rotherham rose in more than half of our schools and the pupil to teacher ratio rose in two thirds. Some 57% of schools have cut their staff. While the Government talk of a fairer funding formula, schools in Rotherham will have suffered cuts of nearly £3 million between 2015-16 and 2019-20. I fail to understand how that can help our children reach their potential.

Another issue that we cannot ignore is the economic environment that children live in. I am pleased that the Children’s Commissioner recognised that northern children are proud and optimistic, but her report found that many lacked confidence that economic regeneration will mean more job opportunities for them.

Rotherham ranks 119th out of 650 constituencies on the highest number of young people claiming jobseeker’s allowance and universal credit. According to the Office for National Statistics, productivity growth nationally over the past 10 years was the weakest since modern records began. We have some fantastic businesses in Britain. As the right hon. Lady knows, we have fantastic businesses in Rotherham, but there is a serious skills shortage, as she outlined. A recent survey from the British Chambers of Commerce found that skills shortages were reaching critical levels in the last quarter of 2017. How will we address the gap and the lack of productivity if we are not training our young people in the skills needed for a modern economy?

In Rotherham, many businesses are in manufacturing. They recognise—

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

Order. I invite Gillian Keegan to try to get below four minutes.