Education: Social Mobility

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for tabling this debate today and to all noble Lords who have contributed to what has been a wide-reaching and thoughtful debate. I have to confess to being a little surprised that the Government chose to have a major debate on social mobility because, putting it kindly, I would not have thought that this issue was their strongest suit. After all, the latest evidence shows that, if anything, the education attainment gap is widening.

However, many noble Lords have quite rightly made the point that a proper assessment of the influences on social mobility requires a rather longer-term perspective and is rather more challenging than a simple statistical snapshot would imply. This point is echoed by John Goldthorpe, an eminent professor at Nuffield College, Oxford, who has argued that the rate of relative social mobility, which measures the chances of a given person escaping their class origins, has not changed for a century. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Graham for reminding us of some of the problems that he experienced over that century and which continue to exist today.

Of course, what has happened is that the structure of the labour market has changed, with a rapid growth in white-collar, middle-class employment, which, when combined with a change in women’s employment opportunities, created an upward curve in relative mobility, which unfortunately has now tapered off. It is a challenging issue. In this context, we need to be realistic about what government can achieve through education policy alone, but this does not mean that we should not be ambitious.

The previous Labour Government were certainly ambitious and, like my noble friend Lady Taylor, I am very proud of the changes we made to tackle the attainment gap, improve standards and raise aspirations. For example, we spearheaded a relentless focus on raising the status and quality of the teaching profession, delivering the best generation of teachers ever. In 2007, there were 42,400 more teachers than there were in 1997. We invested in Teach First, attracting a new generation of education leaders and teachers with a social mission, bringing the brightest and the best into the most challenging classrooms. The pioneering sponsored-academy programme of my noble friend Lord Adonis transformed schools that for decades had let down the most vulnerable. In the period 1999 to 2008, literacy and numeracy improved, and schools with the highest proportion of free school meals saw a 36% improvement in the number of pupils achieving five good GCSEs. We created the London Challenge, which has been widely credited with turning around many of the London schools and creating the narrowest attainment gap in the country. Reflecting on the point made by my noble friend Lady Massey, we created a network of children’s centres and Sure Start centres to address inequality at the very earliest point, from birth through early years.

All these measures, and many others, were aimed at reducing educational inequality, and we are proud of what was achieved. Our success has been confirmed in a recent LSE evaluation of our time in office, although we are, of course, still committed to reflecting on and learning what more we could and should have done and would do in future.

You would have thought that an incoming Secretary of State committed to addressing social mobility would have taken time to look at the research and learn from the evidence, but, as we know, that is not his style. Instead, there was a ceremonial ripping up of most what had gone before, to be replaced with a glossy new set of untested policies in pursuit of greater social mobility. So, how are they doing so far? Well, we know from Alan Milburn’s social mobility commission report of October 2013 that the Government are missing their targets by a long way. For example, he said that the,

“ambition to end child poverty that the previous government set is going to be missed by a considerable margin, possibly by as much as 2 million children in relative poverty”.

On education, his report finds that:

“The most deprived areas still have 30 per cent fewer good schools and get fewer good teachers than the least deprived. Schools in London are improving most but other places are falling behind for disadvantaged students, including parts of Middle England”.

Meanwhile, other statistics show that under this Government nearly a million young people are not in education, employment or training; and the number of people starting an apprenticeship fell in 2012-13 for the first time since 2005-06. This has been compounded by the Government’s decision to scrap the education maintenance allowance, to sideline constantly vocational education and to create a schools-based careers service which is widely acknowledged not to be fit for purpose. That very much echoes the concerns raised by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. In terms of access to higher education, a 2012 report shows that young people from the richest fifth of families are still three times more likely to go to university than the poorest fifth.

What are we to make of the Government's flagship policies? Of course, we welcome the additional funding that the pupil premium has delivered, but Ministers should not spend too much time patting themselves on the back. The recent report from Demos shows that the attainment gap widened in 72 out of 152 local authorities last year. In 66 areas, the gap was larger than it was two years earlier, before the pupil premium was introduced. This problem is highlighted by the recent Ofsted report which showed schools using the money inconsistently, often to plug holes in other budgets.

Meanwhile, the Government’s obsession with their flagship free schools programme has distracted attention and resources away from the most important thing, a theme which we have heard consistently today: the importance of the quality of teaching. That has led, for example, to West Sussex County Council being forced to put aside £285,000 to ensure that pupils from the failed Discovery free school in Crawley can continue their education back in the state system.

The new education landscape is also leading to greater social segregation, with middle-class parents better equipped to play the game. This includes the financial resource to move house to high-performing catchment areas, to buy additional tutoring or to pay for additional travel. In the words of David Laws, the Education Minister, there is nothing wrong with the sharp-elbowed middle classes dominating the system and pushy parents and those who pay for private education are worth emulating. Well, in contrast to that view, we remain absolutely committed to improving access to good high-quality education for everyone. We will build our policies on evidence, not dogma.

I thank the Minister for his statement on school funding. We will, of course, take time to scrutinise the detail and will want to address the concerns of the Institute for Fiscal Studies that, among the winners and losers, it may be that those in the most deprived areas will lose out disproportionately. We will also want to ensure that it properly addresses the 250,000 extra school places needed as a result of demographic changes, an issue on which the Government have so far shown considerable complacency. We hope to return to that debate at a later point.

Looking forward to a future Labour Government, we recognise that the importance of early-years education would be underlined by expanding free childcare for three and four year-olds to 25 hours a week as part of a wrap-around early years and childcare package. In contrast to the Government’s obsession with school structures, we will concentrate on raising the quality of teaching by ensuring that all teachers have, or are working towards, qualified teacher status. Teachers will have to be revalidated on an ongoing basis and will have new career routes to keep the best teachers in the classroom. We will take steps to repair the morale of teachers, which has fallen so far through the constant criticism by this Government. Echoing the significant points made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, we will create the tech bacc, a rigorous and accredited vocational qualification, on a par with academic qualifications, that will command the respect of employers. We will give young people hope again by eliminating long-term youth unemployment by introducing a compulsory job guarantee for young people, combined with a proper expansion of apprenticeships, including to young people leaving school.

As I said at the outset, there is only so much that an education policy can contribute to improving social mobility. Unlike the opening contribution from the Minister, I think that this debate has got to the heart of what needs to be done. Key themes have been repeated time and time again, such as the vital importance of early years provision; the many pathways to success, not just the academic route; the need for better careers advice; the importance of soft skills, of character, resilience, self-confidence and self-belief, and of communication skills; the need for schools to educate rounded and grounded pupils, not just those drilled to excel in exam factories.

I hope that when the Minister responds, he will be able to demonstrate a little more reflection and a little less certainty, taking on board the many wise points that have been made in the debate today and recognising that we all still have a lot to learn about what truly impacts on social mobility, a cause that I know we all want to address. I look forward to hearing his response.