Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Baroness Massey of Darwen Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Morris for initiating this debate and for covering important issues with her usual expertise and dedication. It is a pleasure to see the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, responding. Her concern for children goes back a long way.

The economist Esther Duflo said in a recent interview:

“What people are mobilised by is dignity. They want status and a place in life.”


I immediately related this to this debate. How much dignity and status do many schools give to working-class children? What place in life do they envisage for working-class children? We know the statistics on the educational achievement of working-class children. It has always been the same. It should have improved. Why has it not?

I was a working-class child. Many parents in the area where I grew up worked in the cotton mills, as did mine. I passed the 11-plus and went on to grammar school. Most of my cohort did not. There were three streams: A, B and C. We had no education on social skills nor any discussion of growing up and relationships, and no discussion of our hopes and fears. Few pupils went on to higher education. I had inspiration from two teachers; I was good at sport, and those teachers encouraged me to go on to university. I became a teacher myself. I was lucky, but luck is accident rather than design, and our education system should surely be more robust than that if working-class children are to succeed. Of course early intervention is important, but some children need consistent intervention, especially in adolescence.

I shall refer to two examples of ambition for working-class children. In my home county of Lancashire, the new executive director for children’s services, Edwina Grant, and Matt Lees, a consultant from East Learning, are working together to change poor outcomes. The area is the most deprived of the English county council areas, with a resultant impact on children’s readiness to learn and their life chances; at the end of primary school, the combined score for reading, writing and maths was below the national average in 2019, and the number of young people excluded from school has been double the national figure since 2015. With a new approach, Lancashire has recognised and researched missing data to show what is needed at community level, moving away from a single solution for schools. It is helping to identify what each community needs, linking action to partnerships with the NHS and other services. Data is collated and shared with young people to stimulate discussion on needs and to identify opportunities for change.

A different example of identifying need and improving the chances of working-class children is the Amos Bursary, set up 10 years ago to help the outcomes for black boys. Each boy in the scheme has a personal, academic and social mentor, with the intention of creating high achievers, role models and leaders. It works: 80% of the students attend Russell group universities and some Oxbridge, studying subjects from medicine to law and aerospace. Some 96% gain 2.1 degrees. One young man, brought up in a single-parent family in east London, recently graduated in anthropology at University College London and was a visiting undergraduate at Harvard. He has been selected, under intense competition, to be an intern on a Silicon Valley scheme aimed at creating the technical entrepreneurs of the future. I take great pride in being a patron of the Amos Bursary.

We need to look at new methods of delivery for children, especially working-class children. Will the Government seek out examples of good practice in education for mobility, of which we have heard many today? This might inform us when it comes to how our policies should be formed and local practice. Will the Minister respond in this fashion? What can we do?