Social Mobility Committee Report

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, it was a privilege to serve on the Select Committee. I join others in thanking my noble friend Lady Corston for her excellent leadership and presentation of our report. I join with her in thanking the officials who supported us, and the witnesses. In that sense, it was a joy to be a part of the committee because it worked so smoothly. I pay tribute, as she did, to the young people who gave evidence. That had an impact on all of us. Their words are threaded throughout the report’s recommendations, as they should be.

Before I get on to what I was going to say, I want to take up something the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said. I am about to agree with almost everything he said. In fact, I am about to concentrate on the thing he concentrated on. With his permission, I have to correct him on Birmingham because I would not want people to be misled. Michael Wilshaw did not say what the noble Lord said he said about the Birmingham education system—he has not asked for it to be taken over by the department. After the so-called Trojan horse scandal two years ago, a school-led organisation called the Birmingham Education Partnership was handed the legal responsibilities of the Department for Education related to school improvement. I happened to chair it, which is why I know that to be the case. It is now in its second year of operation. I think Ofsted will now say that things are improving in Birmingham as far as schools are concerned. I pay tribute to the school-led Birmingham Education Partnership, which has brought that about. Michael Wilshaw did say what the noble Lord said about Birmingham social care. That is perhaps where the misunderstanding has arisen. I would not want a story in the Birmingham Evening Mail tomorrow to say that Sir Michael said its schools were not of good quality.

Returning to the Select Committee report, it is worth thinking about the young adults the report is about. They are exactly the “just about managing”. When we talk about untapped talent we worry a lot about the young people with A-levels who do not get to Russell group universities and go to one of our other 100-odd universities. I reckon there is more unfulfilled potential and lack of skills capacity for our nation in the 53% who are in the middle than there is with students who go to university, but not Russell group universities. When we talk about productivity and not having the skills we need, it is this group that needs to be given the opportunity. When we talk about not delivering for this group, it is not just a question of their life chances, aspirations and all that that means; there is a fault in the system of the way we run the country. They ought not to be ignored, not just because it matters for them, but because it matters for all of us.

I say at the start that we should not assume that all this 53% should take vocational studies and that that would be suitable for them. Many of them should pursue academic careers. The point of our report is that they should have the choice. Many of them do not have it.

At the core of the report is the statement:

“Our recommendations support the development of a coherent and navigable transition system for those aged 14–24”.

Why vocational education is so important in this context is that everything we have ever done in vocational education has not worked as a system of transition. Every element of our education support system either does not work for vocational education or works less well than it does for academic education. If we look at the curriculum, qualifications and assessment, we see that we constantly change them, they are not understood and they are not a commonly known currency. In terms of place of learning, such children are moved from pillar to post—from further education to school and, very often, back and forth in years 10 and 11. On continuity of teachers, children have to have both lecturers and teachers to gain the skills they need. Careers guidance does not work for them. The education areas that they access are not as well financed as others.

The best way of understanding that is to make a comparison with children who follow an academic curriculum. If you follow an academic curriculum, you have all the continuity and coherence that you need. Indeed, if you are educated in a public school, you are very often in the same school from five to 18, with the same teachers, the same cohort of peers and the same pedagogy working towards the same end. If you talk to your teachers for careers guidance there, you are talking to somebody whom you are about to follow on the same track throughout life. It is amazing how for the most confident and highest-achieving group of people we give tremendous coherence and continuity; for those who often struggle, we give the least continuity and the least coherence. That for me is the most important thing. Unless we can solve it, nothing else matters. All the recommendations in the report and all the small changes that we try to make will not work if they are plonked into a system that is not coherent. That is where I agree so much with the noble Lord, Lord Baker. Unless we get rid of this big barrier at 16, nothing else will change.

That is why I join other speakers in saying how very disappointing is the Government’s response to the report. In response to the call for greater coherence, it states:

“The Government’s education policy … ensures transition from early years right through a young person’s education and onto work”.

No, it does not; it does not do that at all. At every single join, whether it is from infant to primary, primary to secondary or whatever, it is not good or cohesive. But the biggest join that does not work is at 14, 16 and 19. If we have a Government who believe that what we have at the moment works, we may as well not have written the report, because none of it will work unless we are prepared strategically, robustly and bravely to look at that 14-to-19 structure.

When we saw good evidence of what works—when we talked to university technical colleges, to some further education providers who were really trying to help with 14 to 19, and, to some extent, to studio schools —we found that what was making it most difficult for those good initiatives to work was that the system was working against them. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, talked about what works with UTCs. There are things about UTCs that do not work. It is really difficult to fill some of them. It is difficult to persuade some schools to let children go, for understandable reasons, at the end of year 10, because a UTC is trying to be a 14-to-19 school in an 11-to-16, 16-to-18 education system. All that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said could be even better if he was working with an education system that was 14 to 19 and not 14 to 18 with a big join at the age of 16.

The point that I want to make has been made so often and I have never heard a government response as to why we cannot do it: 16 transition is out of date. The only mention the Government make of that in their response is to tell us that they are going to make GCSEs more robust and rigorous. That will make the problem worse, because if they insist on making the exam at age 16 very robust, very high-stakes, very rigorous and very important to schools’ accountability, the whole school system will concentrate on what happens at 16. What 14 to 19 becomes is 14 to 16 with a pause and a concentration on GCSE, and an effort to pick up the pieces for two more years from 16 to 18. The proposal is quite clear: speed up the national curriculum—because it could do with being speeded up—and finish it at 14. There would then be an end-of-national-curriculum examination—call it a GCSE; call it robust; call it rigorous; call it what you want, but have it at 14. At that point, let us then have some proper pathways from 14 to 19 that are academic, vocational and naturally bring coherence, through which many of our good initiatives such as the university technical colleges and the work of further education could flourish. I invite the Minister to explain why that is not possible and why those issues were not addressed in the department’s response, which the predecessor Secretary of State signed off.

The Government deserve to be criticised for their response to the report, but, quite honestly, my Government did not get this right anyway. There comes a time when all politicians know that they have struggled with this area and all we want now is to get it right. There is no feeling of having to criticise the others. I will criticise my record on this—it was not as good the record in lots of other areas on which we delivered. There is an opportunity and there is good will. The report we are discussing today gives a framework to move forward, as long as the Government are brave enough to take the risk.