Social Mobility

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate and I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for her noble championing of social mobility. I also pay tribute to the Sutton Trust, which has worked very closely with her. In the short amount of time available, I want to raise two general points and then three policy points that I ask the Minister to consider bringing back for further discussion. I do not think that there is unanimity on them and we need to debate them before coming to conclusions.

Turning to my general points, first, I worry that, when we talk about social mobility, we overfocus on the bright disadvantaged child. Social mobility is about every child, no matter their level of attainment. I worry most about the underperforming child from a socially deprived background. Secondly, the Government could act now on some of these recommendations. All they need is the political will.

I now turn to the three points that I ask the Government to come back on in a further debate. First, I am not sure that we understand the causes of a lack of social mobility. They are not the same as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of our failure to solve the problem is that our analysis is probably not accurate. We talk a lot about the solutions, but might it be a good idea to talk about the causes as well?

Secondly, I worry about the idea that these children should go to good schools. Some of those schools would not be good by the measurements that we use if they had to teach the underperforming children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Therefore, I should like to invite a debate on what we mean by “good schools” and why we think that somehow the schools teaching these children are not good, because I do not agree with that.

Thirdly, I am really interested in the debate on contextualised admissions to higher education. It is a very brave debate and one that we ought to have, although it is quite tricky for politicians. I would like to look at the advantages, of which there are many, but I know that it is a policy that is not without consequences for other groups.

If we could debate those three issues, we might then more successfully take forward our debate on the solutions.