Equality of Opportunity for Young People

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, it is a depressing fact that there are now 500,000 more children living in poverty in the UK than there were in 2012. With so many young people starting from this position of early disadvantage, ensuring equality of opportunity is more important than ever, and I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for providing a platform to air these issues today.

Being born into poverty has a profound and enduring effect on the opportunities that will be both available and attainable in later life. Privilege may be an accident of birth but the propulsion that it provides, throughout the life course, is not.

Children from disadvantaged families have the odds stacked against them from the outset. By the age of three, they are likely to be 18 months behind the children of more affluent parents. In areas of high deprivation, up to 60% start school without adequate speech, interaction and communication skills. This early disadvantage accumulates: if you are lagging at age five, you are six times more likely at age 11 to be behind in English and 11 times more likely to be behind in Maths.

The terrible truth is that, by the age of five, 40% of the overall gap between disadvantaged 16 year-olds and their better-off classmates has already been set in train, and it continues throughout the educational journey. Only 26% of free school meal students go on to higher education, compared with 43% of their more affluent peers. Just 5% win places in the most prestigious institutions and, for those who do, drop-out rates are a third higher.

Early disadvantage continues to exert its insidious influence on employment prospects, career progress and earnings potential. A degree will certainly make a difference, but students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to be in work six months after graduation, they will be earning less and, as they are less likely to have gone to a Russell group university, they will not be enjoying the 40% earnings premium of those who have. Even when disadvantaged students go on to gain a prestigious first, they are still likely to earn around £7,000 a year less than more privileged graduates with identical results. The recent State of the Nation report says:

“Being born privileged in Britain means that you are likely to remain privileged”.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, authors of The Class Ceiling, go further, describing privilege as a,

“following wind … an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort”.

It is not that the upwardly mobile cannot progress, as we know that they do, and it is not that they will never reach the top; it is just that they often have the wind against them. Their analysis in The Class Ceiling of Labour Force Survey data confirms that, showing that only 10% of people from working-class backgrounds will climb the steep social ladder to the highest professional, managerial or cultural occupations. It would be easy, and it would certainly be easier on our consciences, to put that down to merit—to justify it on the basis of talent alone—but research shows that this is not the case. Unless we believe that talent is reserved solely for the middle classes and above, we have to admit that something has gone wrong.

Education ought to be the great equaliser, but all the challenges of disadvantage are compounded through our twin-track education system: one track for 94% of UK children and another for the remaining 6%. That part of the system employs one out of every seven teachers in the UK and the spend on students’ education is three times higher—all underpinned by fees that are now, on average, 50% of the median UK household income. Pupils at these schools mix with a peer group of equal privilege—the beginnings of a valuable network that will support them in their future careers—and they benefit from a vast range of extra-curricular activities and facilities, such as theatres, sports fields, drama and art, all of which help cultivate character, confidence and cultural capital.

To those of us who regret falling arts provision in state schools, it is bitter-sweet to see how frequently fee-paying schools sell themselves to parents on the basis of their outstanding arts provision. These schools fully understand the multiple benefits of arts engagement—discipline, resilience, empathy and creative thinking, for example—but they also understand the value of cultural capital in high-level careers: the contribution it makes to that elusive quality of “fit”, not just to getting in but to getting on. All that is borne out by the statistics: 48% of A-level grades in independent schools were A and A*, compared with a national average of 26%. Their pupils win 43% of the offers from Oxford and 37% of the offers from Cambridge. They also continue to dominate the professions: 74% of judges, 51% of journalists and 71% of top military officers are privately educated. Even in those fields that we think would be genuinely meritocratic, we see the same discrepancies. One-third of British Olympic medal winners in 2012 went to fee-paying schools, as did 42% of the 2016 BAFTA winners. Those are a lot of statistics, but it is hard not to conclude that our twin-track education system risks entrenching privilege more than ever before.

This matters for three reasons. First, educational credentials matter more than ever before. Secondly, it risks perpetuating inequality far into the future. If these schools were more diverse, society’s leaders would ultimately be drawn from a broader cross-section of the population, able to bring wider perspectives to the processes of decision-making. Thirdly, if there is an education system that is so successful in developing potential and opening up opportunities, should it not be available to everyone, especially those young people who need it the most?

Despite successive Ministers and Prime Ministers making it a priority, inequality is a wicked problem that is not going away. So what might the Government do? First, invest more in early-years education, which has a direct effect on the adults that children become. We know that children’s centres lead to better outcomes, yet up to 1,000 have closed over recent years. Can the Minister confirm when the promised review will be completed? Will he also consider the Sutton Trust recommendation that early-years teachers be given qualified-teacher status?

Secondly, the Government should lead a national conversation about how to harness the best qualities of independent schools, reimagining how the advantages they confer could be shared more equitably and articulating more clearly the role they should play in advancing social mobility. There are excellent examples of partnership in place, but there is a lack of definitive best practice and thought leadership to shift the status quo. The Social Mobility Commission’s report promises more detailed recommendations. Can the Minister say when those will be available?

Lastly, perhaps one of the reasons progress on social mobility has stalled is the absence of any imperative to monitor and report on socioeconomic diversity in the workforce. In January the Government published guidelines on how employers might do that, but their use is currently entirely voluntary. It is a well-worn truth that we measure what we value and we value what we measure. Given that, does the Minister agree that the time is right to move to the compulsory measurement and publication of social mobility data, particularly in the highest-level professions? Only then will we know whether our efforts to equalise opportunities for young people are having a genuine impact on the opportunities available to them in later life.