Social Mobility Commission: State of the Nation Report

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I echo the words of the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) and of many other speakers in the House today in paying tribute to those who lost their lives or were injured yesterday, and to the House staff for keeping us safe. It is very important that the House’s business has resumed today. As the Prime Minister said earlier, yesterday was an attack on democracy. It is therefore important that our democracy should continue unabated today, and where better to start than on so important an issue as social mobility?

I was just looking at Twitter, as you do, and I see that somebody has tweeted, “How can there be a debate this afternoon if everyone agrees?” I suspect many of us spend our time trying to explain why everybody disagrees in this place, and why we are busy arguing and falling out with each other, so on the whole I think it is rather nice to have a debate in which people can broadly agree that there is an issue with social mobility in this country that we all want to tackle.

I thank the hon. Lady and the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) for co-sponsoring this debate, and I thank all those outside the House who have sent briefings to Members sharing their thoughts on today’s debate. The November 2016 Social Mobility Commission report said:

“Britain has a deep social mobility problem which is getting worse for an entire generation of young people”.

The Teach First briefing for this debate says:

“Failing to improve low levels of social mobility will cost the UK economy up to £14billion a year by 2050, or an additional four per cent of GDP.”

Frankly, we cannot afford not to tackle it.

I want to talk about three things: Britain’s social contract; schools, to pick up some of the issues that the hon. Member for Manchester Central has mentioned; and social capital. Every generation expects there to be greater opportunities for their children and grandchildren. In Britain at the moment, that social contract and the expectation of social mobility has broken down in parts of our country and among some groups of people. Education is a key driver of social mobility—I know that the Minister is committed to this, because I have had the privilege of working alongside him—but in the parts of the country that most need social mobility, there is often little educational aspiration, and underperformance is entrenched. I agree that tackling that should be the focus of this Government’s education policy, rather than having yet another discussion about expanding selection.

Last year’s vote and the rise of populism not just in this country but elsewhere, including in the United States, was a cry showing that our social contract has broken down. As I have said, each generation expects better opportunities for the next, but I think we should be honest in saying—I know this from my casework, but also from talking to friends and family—that that is not how many people see life today. There is pressure on housing services, and housing is unaffordable for the next generation in many parts of this country. The labour market feels incredibly insecure, but also very demanding, which has a knock-on effect.

The hon. Lady mentioned the numbers of words that children from different backgrounds know by the age of three. There is some very interesting research in the Social Mobility Commission report about the number of minutes each day that parents from different backgrounds spend interacting with their younger children. People working long hours in an insecure job will inevitably have less time to interact with their children than those not in that position. What can we do to help with that?

[Mr Burrowes]

I thank my right hon. Friend for highlighting the issue of parental contact, but may I focus on contact with fathers? The Government have made great strides in trying to ensure greater opportunities in work, but we must also look at how to create greater opportunities to ensure that fathers are not only in contact but are involved in their children’s upbringing. I saw from clients in the criminal justice system that one of the prevailing factors for them was either an absent father or a father who was not involved in their lives.

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The importance of families and of having two parents or two important role models in life—and of both boys and girls having a strong male role model—should not be underestimated. It is no secret that I disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) on some policy issues, but the work that he did at the Centre for Social Justice and the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) is doing now on the importance of family relationships and public policy should not be underestimated.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

On the issue of working hours, I find in my south-west London constituency that the bigger determinant is ethnicity. If people have travelled a long way to get here, an education is the most important thing for them. In my experience, their children do exceptionally well whatever hours they work, because they imbue them with the importance of education. The young people who go to the grammar schools in south London, other than the privileged ones, are overwhelmingly from particular ethnic minorities. In my experience, that particularly includes children from the Tamil community.

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[Nicky Morgan]

The hon. Lady makes a really interesting point. There is a broader point, which is that we are sometimes reluctant to explore too far the differences in social mobility between different communities and people from different ethnic backgrounds. She is right, in that anyone walking around Chinatown on a Saturday morning will see children sitting there, often in their parents’ restaurants, actually doing their homework. I do not need to tell the Minister about the successes, particularly in maths, of students from the far east.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to talk about drive and aspiration, and I will come on to aspiration in a moment. It always struck me when I was Secretary of State for Education that around the world young people and their families are fighting for education, and sometimes in this country we have parents fighting to take their children to Disneyland. That tells me that education is not given the importance in everybody’s lives that it should be given. I suspect that part of the success of the London challenge—it is difficult to unpick exactly what was behind it, because there were lots of factors in the London challenge that made a difference—was due to the diverse ethnic backgrounds and the importance that people from different ethnic backgrounds attach to education, and everything that goes with that.

As I was saying, there are parts of the country that feel they are very much left behind other parts. That is picked up in the commission’s report, which also says that

“today only one in eight children from low-income backgrounds is likely to become a high income earner as an adult.”

Politicians and the Government have to find a way of renewing that social contract; otherwise, we are playing into the hands of those who would feed on the dissent and take advantage of it at forthcoming elections. That means that we need to focus on communities and areas where social divisions are at their widest and where social mobility has stalled or is going backwards.

Recently, I have been studying the Louise Casey review of opportunity and integration. We are awaiting the Government response to it. It is a fascinating report, in which she says that integration is a key part of a successful immigration policy. I do not think we have used the word “integration” in our immigration discussions enough. I do not expect the Minister to respond to that point, because he is not a Home Office Minister, but Louise Casey goes on to say that social mobility is a key part of integration:

“As well as providing economic advantages, social mobility also provides knock-on benefits such as reducing grievances, heightening a sense of belonging to a country or community and increasing geographic mobility and social mixing too.”

As I said, schools and education are the great driver of social mobility. It is worth drawing attention again to what the Social Mobility Commission report says:

“Despite a welcome focus on improving attainment in schools, the link between social demography and educational destiny has not been broken”.

The hon. Member for Manchester Central was right to say that that is not the fault of one Government, but has happened over successive years. However, it cannot be right that that link between social demography and educational destiny has not been broken. The report states that

“over the last five years 1.2 million 16-year-olds—disproportionately from low-income homes—have left school without five good GCSEs.”

It goes on to say:

“A child living in one of England’s most disadvantaged areas is 27 times more likely to go to an inadequate school than a child living in one of the least disadvantaged. Ten local authorities account for one in five of England’s children in failing schools.”

We know where the problem is; we must work out how to fix it. What does that mean in practice? Those of us who have talked about choice in education must realise that for families who are surrounded by inadequate schools, “choice” is a hollow word. There are no good or outstanding schools in those areas, and the families cannot afford to buy their way out of poor services or even the transport to a different area.

The focus on areas is right. In the White Paper that the Department published last March, “Educational Excellence Everywhere”, areas of entrenched educational underperformance were announced, where access to high quality teachers, leaders and sponsors was insufficient. They are now opportunity areas and I hope that the Minister will say more about them in his concluding remarks. It will be helpful to know the plan for investing in them, the services that will receive attention and how we will tackle getting high quality teachers, leaders and sponsors into them. We can be more directional. That is where Government can give a lead.

The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) said that it is about not just academic attainment but aspiration. One of my most formative experiences—I have probably shared it with hon. Members previously—was visiting a primary school in Lancashire. It was a good primary school. It would be fair to say that the staffroom was not inclined towards my politics, but we had a robust discussion. I was struck by the fact that the headteacher had moved to this rather nicer area and this good school from an inner-city primary school. She said of the latter, “Oh well, those children were never going to be more than ‘requires improvement’”. How can someone write off children before they reach the age of 11 as never amounting to more than “requires improvement”? What a waste of human potential. What a waste for our country. That attitude must be overcome.

Attitudes in families of, “My child can access a profession, go to university, get a great apprenticeship”, even though perhaps the parent did not, should be encouraged. We must also foster the attitude in schools that children will fulfil their potential.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I believe that all parents aspire for their children, but some do not know how to make things happen. We know that doing more homework on more evenings is more likely to get children to where they aspire to be. The inability to connect reality and the required work with the aspiration is a problem.

[Nicky Morgan]

I agree. It is not that parents do not want the best for their child. If you ask most parents on the birth of a child, they want their child to be happy, healthy and successful in life. I will talk about extra-curricular activities shortly because again, there is a social injustice in access to those activities. The hon. Lady is right about support. All the nagging that middle-class parents do about homework, or chivvying children to read more books, often does not happen elsewhere, not for lack of wanting to do it but perhaps because it was not done to those parents. Going into a child’s school and challenging teachers is anathema to someone who has had a very unhappy school experience. Attendance at parents’ evenings is indicative of the support that children get at home.

Aspiration is about aiming high for young people. I did not have a chance to look up the name of the school, so I apologise for not remembering it, but I went to a fantastic primary school in Northamptonshire, where a high proportion of children had free school meals, but it was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company and every child had access to Shakespeare and his language. I heard the tiniest children talk about Shakespeare’s characters and watched the older children perform complicated scenes—I would have had difficulty remembering all those lines, but they were doing brilliantly. The headteacher there had high aspirations. He said, “All my children will be able to do this and benefit and learn.” They were doing incredibly well.

I pay tribute to the National Association of Head Teachers for setting up its “Primary Futures” campaign, which is about getting adults into schools to talk about their careers and broaden horizons. When I was in the DFE, we set up the Careers & Enterprise Company. Broadening horizons, and aspirational and inspirational careers advice, are important. There will be a difference of opinion in the House about work experience, which we have debated. One week’s dry work experience in an office will not necessarily set the flame alight, but I remember talking to some apprentices, who told me that a week at Rolls-Royce, where they could see how the maths they were learning would be applied in the workplace, does set the flame alight. People then go back to school more determined to do better in their maths classes.

There is a changing labour market. In the article at the weekend that the hon. Member for Manchester Central and I wrote, we talked about the number of high-skilled jobs that will be around. The Teach First briefing says that, by 2022, the British economy is expected to experience a shortage of 3 million workers to fill 15 million high-skilled jobs. At the same time, there will be 5 million more low-skilled workers than there are low-skilled jobs. I did not want to mention the “B” word this afternoon—it is very nice not to be talking about the European Union—but, if we are to change our immigration policy in this country and have fewer people coming in from overseas, we must ensure that all our young people are training for the labour market of the 21st century.

That is my problem with the Government’s focus on introducing more selection. We do not live in a world where we need only the top 20% or 30% to be highly skilled. We need everybody to have access to a knowledge-rich, excellent academic curriculum. A renewed battle over selection distracts from what is needed in our education to deal with the demands of a 21st-century labour market, to give everyone a chance to close social divisions, and to build a consistently strong school system.

Research from the Education Policy Institute talks about the negative effects on those who live in the most selective areas but who do not attend grammar schools. The negative effects emerge around the point when selective places are available for around 70% of high-attaining pupils. The research says that there are five times as many high-quality non-selective schools in England as there are grammar schools.

Every child is entitled to an academic curriculum. Like the Minister, I have seen some great schools in some very unexpected places. I remember my visit to King Solomon Academy in London—the Minister will have been there too—and to the Rushey Mead in Leicester. They have a higher proportion of children on free school meals but are doing incredibly well in terms of the exam results they are achieving. I also pay tribute to the Harris academies and Ark in Portsmouth.

The hon. Member for Manchester Central mentioned the secondary heads in Surrey who had written about selection. The Leicestershire secondary heads, too, wrote to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Education. Impressively, every single headteacher in Leicestershire signed the letter. If the Minister has not seen it, I hope he can get hold of a copy. One paragraph states:

“As professionals who have dedicated our lives to educating children across Leicestershire, our concern is for all the children in our region. Removing the most able pupils in our schools will have a negative impact on those who remain. Removing the option of ambitious, all ability comprehensives, with a scarcity of academic role models, will impact most particularly on the least affluent and least able. Therein lies the most significant injustice of this policy.”

Academic attainment is important and we should set high aspirations and ambitions for all pupils, but pupils in the best schools gain something else, and I want all pupils to gain it. This was one of the things I tried to champion when I was in the Department for Education. I am thinking of the character traits—persistence, resilience, self-confidence, self-esteem—and the values and virtues of integrity, honesty and whatever it might be, that help to build a whole pupil. I was at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in north London recently. The school focuses on building social capital among its pupils. It is conscious of the fact that its pupils will have to compete with the independent school down the road. I visited the King’s Leadership Academy in Warrington, which is a new free school, now over-subscribed, where behaviour is excellent, and where aspirations are incredibly high. All the young people are trained for leadership. Kings Langley School in Hertfordshire and Gordano School near Bristol are fantastic schools—I could go on.

Educating young people is about not just what happens in the classroom, but access to other schemes. I pay tribute to the former Prime Minister and the current Government for their focus on the National Citizen Service and other schemes: social action, volunteering, uniformed activities such as the cadets, the guides and the scouts, and the Duke of Edinburgh award. They all help to build up experience and confidence in young people. Those of us who have been employers and have interviewed see the ability of some young people to walk through our door, look us in the eye and shake us by the hand. Some children are taught that and encouraged in school, but some are not. These things matter in helping young people to get on.

I mentioned extracurricular activities. The commission’s report specifically talks about the effect different social backgrounds have on how people participate:

“One study found that 43 per cent of children whose mother had a postgraduate degree had music lessons, compared with just 6 per cent of children whose mother had no qualifications. At the age of 11, 85 per cent of children whose mother had an undergraduate degree participated in organised sport outside of school, compared with 56 per cent of children whose mother had no formal qualifications.”

I was very pleased that in last year’s Budget the then Chancellor announced funding for a longer school day. It would be helpful to know what emphasis the Department will place on that to help schools provide such activities. It is not necessarily about the schools themselves providing the activities; it could be enabling all young people in their schools to take up a place and participate.

[Mr Burrowes]

I very much support what my right hon. Friend says, particularly about social capital and building character through education. The Government have committed to a statutory requirement for relationships education. Many children, sadly, come from a background of conflict, trauma and survival. There is now the opportunity to provide them with the building blocks that others receive outside school to build resilience, self-esteem and respect for others, and help to build that character which is so vital for their long term future.

[Nicky Morgan]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I was very pleased to support his amendment on sex and relationships education, and I am very pleased that the Government have taken that on board and accepted an amendment to the Children and Social Work Bill. He is right to say that. One of the most important characteristics is resilience, or to use the awful phrase, stickability and bouncebackability: the ability to deal with what life throws at them and not be blown off course. Anything that schools, adult role models and other organisations can do, in addition to families, to help young people to develop that characteristic will go at least part of the way to building the more resilient and confident young people we need for the 21st century.

I do not think we will all agree with everything in the commission’s report, but it shows that we have a problem with social mobility. For those of us who are one nation politicians, that should make us very uncomfortable. There is talk of a meritocracy, but the difficulty is this: who decides who has merit? I would prefer to say that everyone has potential, but that in some cases the keys to unlocking that potential are more readily available to some than others. Today’s debate is about working out what those keys are and how they are handed out, and about building a consensus, or perhaps cross-party momentum, on how to do just that. But it has to be about more than words. Much has been done by this Government and by previous Governments, but there is much more to do if we are to show how we are going to renew our broken social contract and build real social mobility in this country.

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[Mr Clegg]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. I have gone on a bit of a journey on this: I have always had a somewhat kneejerk liberal reaction of slight squeamishness and reticence about the idea of politicians, the Government, Whitehall and public policy experts seeking to tweak or improve how parents choose to raise their children, which I intuitively think is no business of politicians, but I agree with the evidence. Much like the right hon. Member for Loughborough, I agree on almost nothing with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) on many issues, but on this I think that he led the pack in saying that this is something that politicians need to grapple with, although we need to do so with care.

The first page of the summary of the report recommends that the Government should introduce

“a new parental support package, including a guarantee of help if a child’s 2 to 2½-year check shows that they are falling behind.”

I entirely agree with that. Public policy is inching towards greater involvement in an area that many folk have previously felt should be kept immune from such interventions.

I want to make one more point about early years that I am sure everyone here is aware of. It is unglamorous, rather fiddly and difficult to fix, but it is acutely important: it is the quality of early years provision. The pay and status of early years teachers are real problems. We do not have enough men going into early years teaching. Pay is very low, and there is no qualified teacher status. As the Government seek to expand the entitlements for three and four-year-olds, it is terrifically important that quantity does not come at the further cost of diminished quality. If the Minister can tell us how the quality, status and—in the long run—pay of early years teachers can be improved, so much the better.

I also want to talk about money. In those glory days back in 2010, I intervened aggressively in internal discussions when we had to announce what was in many ways the fateful comprehensive spending review setting out all sorts of unappetising cuts. I insisted that the per-pupil and indexed core budgets for schools should be protected. Those budgets needed to be protected in terms of prices and of pupil numbers, not least so that we could then add on the pupil premium in a meaningful way and ensure that it added genuine value.

I look now at the trouble the Government are getting into, and yes, a lot of this is complex. A lot is to do with the higgledy-piggledy, unjust, idiosyncratic way in which schools have had their budgets allocated to them over many decades, but some of it is pretty obvious. The Government simply cannot cancel the £600 million education services grant, as they did shortly after the 2015 general election, while protecting the per-pupil allocation only in cash terms and not in real terms and while diverting hundreds of millions of pounds to free schools—many of which are doing a great job, but frankly, far too many of which have been opened in places where there is no desperate need for extra places—and possibly compounding that error by spending hundreds of millions of extra pounds on new selective schools, and then ask schools to shoulder their own newly increased national insurance and pension contributions and, in some cases, apprenticeship levy costs, and, on top of that, introduce a national funding formula with no additional money to make that work. If they do all that, they are bound to get into terrible trouble.

I do not say this in a spirit of recrimination, but the Government should not be surprised that they are encountering huge resistance to these plans across the House and huge disquiet from parents, headteachers and governors up and down the country. There is a limit to how much they can keep expecting improved performance from a schools system that is being put under those multiple and entirely self-inflicted financial stresses and strains.

I know a little bit about this because, in the coalition Government, we looked exhaustively at the case for introducing a national funding formula. In principle, the case for doing so is impeccable; of course it is. The current situation is woefully unfair. There are many non-metropolitan schools, smaller rural schools, suburban schools, schools in the shires and so on that have received far less funding over a long period. However, the problem is that if we introduce a national funding formula in a way that does not raise the overall financial tide for all schools, what happens is exactly what is happening now. The schools that think they are going to gain pots and pots of money are disappointed at how little they gain, and those that are going to lose will lose an unacceptably large amount of money. No one is pleased.

The one issue in this debate on which I disagree with the right hon. Member for Loughborough is that, if I understand it correctly, her solution is to adjust the deprivation calculation buried within all the numbers in the national funding formula, which—all credit to the Minister and his Department—is a bona fide attempt to protect the funding to the poorest. The right hon. Lady will no doubt correct me if I am wrong, but one way to try to square the circle is to take a little money from the deprivation allocation and raise the floor or the minimum amount—

[Nicky Morgan]

rose—

[Mr Clegg]

Have I got it wrong?

[Nicky Morgan]

The intricacies of the national funding formula are probably not quite right for this debate, but the right hon. Gentleman wants to consider the different grades of deprivation and how they are funded. Of course, there is the pupil premium outside the national funding formula, but there is also the income deprivation affecting children index, or IDACI, which looks not only at the overall deprivation weighting, but the weighting within the different deprivation gradients. That needs to be reconsidered and the Department needs to rerun the numbers.

[Mr Clegg]

I am grateful for that explanation. I will not try to improve upon the technical proficiency and expertise that the right hon. Lady has just displayed, because I cannot match her for that. I hope in many ways that she has just made my point, which is that we are condemned to fiddling around in the undergrowth to shift a little bit of money here or there to try to square a circle.

We came to the conclusion in the coalition—the Minister may remember—that it is not possible to introduce a national funding formula in a way that is just and fair if it is not pump-primed with a lot of money. I cannot remember whether it was in 2013 or 2014, but we did the next best thing, which was to use about £400 million as a stopgap measure—the Minister may have announced it at the time—to target the underfunding of the most underfunded schools. I plead with the Minister to learn from the past and, because I doubt whether any new money will be forthcoming from the Treasury, do that again. It is not ideal. It is a stopgap. It is temporary, but it is much better to allocate targeted resources to the schools that rightly complain about having been most hard done by under the current funding formula than to annoy and upset everyone in the way that the Government appear destined to do if they carry on with their current trajectory. That is my helpful suggestion for a way out for the Government from this politically invidious position in which they find themselves.

My final point has been made already, but it is worth repeating and relates to the importance of evidence-based policy. It really should not have to be restated that when we consider something as precious and as important as how we design the education system for our children, we should always be led not by dogma, ideology or personal hobbyhorses, but by the evidence. I do not want go over many of the points made earlier, but this old idea of improved selection perplexes me—that is the politest way of putting it. No international, national or local evidence whatsoever is being wheeled out. If the evidence is not there, let me at least make a political plea: the proposal is not actually popular with parents. Opinion polls show that older voters like it, particularly those who remember grammar schools in the old way, but parents, who actually have to make invidious choices about where to send their children, hate it.

The Government appear to have forgotten why previous Governments, including previous Conservative Governments, stopped the expansion of selection. It was precisely because they were encountering such resistance from their own voters, who do not like it. I ask people in the Westminster and Whitehall village why on earth we are proceeding with something that parents do not like, for which there is no evidence and for which there is no manifesto commitment at all. I do not remember the Conservatives populating our television screens in the run-up to the 2015 general election saying, “And we will introduce grammar schools.” There is no mandate for it. I am told—the Minister will not be able to confirm this—that one unelected political apparatchik in No. 10 went to a grammar school and has apparently persuaded the Prime Minister that they are therefore a good idea.

I am sure that it is not as simple as that, but surely it cannot be the case that the whole of Whitehall is being led by the nose because of the personal prejudices of one unelected political appointee in No. 10. I have to put on record this magnificent quote from Russell Hobby, the leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, writing in The Times Educational Supplement:

“In no other sector would this be acceptable. If the minister for health proposed to increase state funding for homeopathy on the basis that it did wonders for his uncle’s irritable bowel back in the 1970s—and must, therefore, be right for everyone today—there would be an uproar. This is a precise metaphor for the expansion of grammar schools. It is educational homeopathy.”

I hope that the Minister, who of course will not be able to disagree with the new orthodoxy, will none the less privately go to the Secretary of State for Education, and to the other powers that be in Whitehall, to stop the fetish for selection before it gets this Government into terrible trouble.

Where does the evidence suggest that we should do more? I am not exactly declaring an interest, but I chair a cross-party commission for the Social Market Foundation—there are Labour and Conservative Members on the commission—and we are looking at some of the key evidence-based drivers of increases in, and the existence of, inequality in the education system. One of our most striking early conclusions from the data we have seen and our original research—we will be producing a concluding report in the next month or two—is, I should think, intuitively obvious to us all, much like the importance of early years.

There is an intimate relationship between educational underperformance in some of the more deprived parts of the country, and the high teacher turnover and lack of experienced teachers in those schools. It really is very striking. The proportion of unqualified teachers working in primary schools with the highest concentrations of pupils on free school meals is 4%, but it is half that in the most affluent quintile. There is a similar pattern in secondary schools, where 5% of teachers in the richest schools, if I can put it like that, are unqualified, compared with 9% in the poorest schools. Schools that serve the most disadvantaged communities also experience far higher levels of teacher turnover than neighbouring, more advantaged schools.

This policy challenge, which does not detonate with the same attention and fury from the media as selection and so on, is a mundane but, none the less, crucial one. What can we do to attract highly qualified teachers to those parts of the country to which they are not presently attracted and/or to make sure that teachers in those schools stay and are supported to improve their own experience and qualifications? The Department for Education is looking at that, and I very much hope that—as we all continue to grapple with the elusive problem of how to build an open society in which people can go as far as their talents, application and dreams take them, rather than having their life fortunes determined by the circumstances of their birth—it is one of the many areas in which the Government will seek to make a positive intervention in the years ahead.

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[The Minister for School Standards (Mr Nick Gibb)]

If I may, I will take a moment to express my personal gratitude to all the brave men and women who work here every day to protect us, showing immense bravery—they run towards danger to keep us safe. Our thoughts are with those who were injured yesterday, and with the families of those who tragically lost their lives.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) and the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) on securing this debate. I agree with all the speakers in this debate about the importance of improving social mobility in this country, which is why the Secretary of State has demanded that social mobility should sit at the very heart of everything the Department for Education does.

The Government have already done a huge amount in our determination to achieve that. The pupil premium ensures that schools are given additional funds to support disadvantaged pupils. We are delivering 30 hours of free childcare for three and four-year-old children of working parents. We have begun our pioneering work in 12 opportunity areas, where we will partner with local communities to drive social mobility. Teach First is now sending even more high-quality graduates to work in areas of high deprivation. We have introduced a £75 million teaching and leadership innovation fund to improve professional development for teachers in disadvantaged areas. Our school reforms have led to 1.8 million more children having a good or outstanding school place than in 2010, helping to ensure that they get the education they need and deserve. The number of children studying the combination of academic subjects that make up the English baccalaureate has risen from just over one fifth to nearly two fifths, ensuring that more pupils have access to the broad academic education that they need. The Government are transforming technical education, with new T-levels adding prestige and raising quality for students.

I listened carefully to what the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam said about early years. The Department’s ambition is to ensure that the circumstances of a child’s birth do not determine what they can achieve in life. We are delivering 30 hours of free childcare for three and four-year-old children of working parents. We have laid out our strategy to improve the quality of the early years workforce by improving access to high-quality professional development. We have introduced the two-year-old offer to allow disadvantaged two-year-olds to attend early years. I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman with regard to that policy.

Crucially, the introduction of systematic synthetic phonics and the accompanying phonics screening check have seen a dramatic rise in early literacy. This year, 147,000 more six-year-olds are on track to becoming fluent readers than in 2012. Phonics is our most potent weapon in our fight to close the intolerable gap in literacy between the most disadvantaged children and the more affluent.

The Government have been unapologetic in their unrelenting push to raise educational standards. Nearly nine in 10 schools are rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding, but there is still more to do. More than 1 million children still attend a school that is not yet rated good. The Government want every parent in the country to have the choice of a good school place for their child. That is why we will create more good school places, harnessing the resources and expertise of universities, faith schools and independent schools, and lifting the ban on selective school places.

We do not think it is fair that children have the opportunity to go to an academically selective school only if they live in a particular county in England, when 98% of grammar schools are good or outstanding. We know that selective schools are vehicles of social mobility—I accept that that is for those pupils who attend them—and almost eliminate the attainment gap between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers. That is one argument, but there are many others. Pupils in grammar schools make significantly more progress than their similarly able peers, with Progress 8 showing an aggregate score of plus 0.33 for grammar schools, compared with a national average of 0. The House will also be aware that 78% of high-ability children who leave primary school with a level 5 in their SATs go on to achieve the full EBacc suite of GCSEs if they go to a grammar school, but only 53% achieve that if they go to a comprehensive. That is why we want to ensure that children from disadvantaged backgrounds and ordinary working families have the opportunity to benefit from selective schools. We also want to ensure, as we set out in the consultation document, that selective schools work with neighbouring primary and secondary schools to the benefit of all pupils.

As the Social Mobility Commission report sets out, there are “social mobility coldspots” across the country that are falling behind. Twelve of those areas have been designated as opportunity areas by the Secretary of State, building on the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough. We will target interventions in those areas that are designed to improve opportunity and choice for pupils. Those opportunity areas will enable us to identify new approaches to tackling the root causes of educational disadvantage. We will build an evidence base of what works so that we can transfer those approaches to other areas to remove the barriers to social mobility.

As the Social Mobility Commission recognises, the single biggest educational factor that improves social mobility is the quality of teachers, so we intend to invest in the profession. We will invest a substantial proportion of the £70 million for the northern powerhouse schools strategy in piloting new approaches to attracting and retaining teachers in the north of England, and we will target the £75 million teaching and leadership innovation fund at improving professional development for teachers where that can make the most difference.

Thanks to the academy and free schools programme, teachers and headteachers have enjoyed greater freedoms to tackle poor behaviour and raise expectations in the curriculum. Teachers have been instrumental in setting up some of the highest performing and most innovative free schools in areas of disadvantage.

Last month, I visited Reach Academy Feltham, run by Teach First ambassador Ed Vainker. I was struck by his passion as he explained the lengths to which he and his school go to ensure that they attract as many pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds as possible. Reach Feltham’s determination to do everything it can to admit pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds is an example of a school with a mission to drive social mobility. That free school and other innovative schools show what it is possible to achieve.

Whether it is Reach Feltham, Michaela Community School, City Academy Hackney, King Solomon Academy, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough mentioned, or Harris Academy Merton, which the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) mentioned, where 39% of pupils are entered for the EBacc suite of GCSEs, they all understand the importance of knowledge and teach a stretching, knowledge-rich curriculum. Each of those schools has clear routines that are consistent in all classrooms. They understand the importance of a strong approach to behaviour management. They all serve disadvantaged communities, demonstrating that high academic and behaviour standards are not and must not be the preserve of wealthy pupils in independent schools or socially selective comprehensive schools.

[Nicky Morgan]

Is not my right hon. Friend demonstrating in the second half of his speech why the first part about reintroducing selection is a red herring? He has just given examples of several hugely impressive schools, with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds who are achieving excellent results. Does he not agree that we want more such schools rather than accepting that schools cannot always achieve that and therefore taking pupils out to put them into selective education?

[Mr Gibb]

We want to leave no stone unturned. The purpose of the Green Paper that we published in September is to ensure that we harness all the expertise and talent in this country, whether in universities, independent schools, faith schools, outstanding comprehensive schools or selective schools to ensure that we have more good school places. There are still problems that we have to address.

According to the Sutton Trust, just 53% of high-ability children who are eligible for the pupil premium take triple science GCSEs, compared with 69% of non-free-school-meal children. Some 20% of high-ability free school meal children are at schools where triple science is not even offered. We are trying to tackle those issues, and we are leaving no stone unturned.

We are also addressing technical education. We are spending £500 million a year on improving technical education and we will deliver the recommendations of Lord Sainsbury’s review in full. Those new T-levels will replace 13,000 or so different qualifications.

As right hon. and hon. Members argued in their article, our country and economy are changing fast. We must ensure that all pupils, irrespective of background, receive an education that gives them opportunity and choice in their adult life. We should all be able to agree that social mobility should be about not where a person starts, but where they end up.

A few weeks ago, I visited Michaela Community School in Wembley, a new free school committed to improving the education of those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Every day at lunch all the pupils recite in unison one or two of the poems that they have learnt by heart. When I was there, they recited William Henley’s “Invictus”, which reflects the determination and stoicism that is fostered at Michaela Community School:

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.



In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes the contents and recommendations of the annual State of the Nation report from the Social Mobility Commission; notes that despite welcome measures by successive governments to improve social mobility the Commission warns that social mobility is getting worse, the reasons for which are deep-seated and multi-faceted; and calls on the Government to lead a renewed approach in the early years, in education, skills and housing, to improve social mobility.