Social Mobility

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and I congratulate my noble friend on her excellent speech. Most particularly, I welcome her emphasis on character and resilience as factors in any individual’s prospects. Although Governments have a role in ensuring that any barriers to mobility are removed and that opportunity is open to all, no Government can determine how any individual will live his or her life. Upward mobility comes from individuals grasping opportunities, working hard against the odds, leaping over barriers, setting themselves high goals, and often swimming against the stream of their own community and background. These things are done through character and resilience.

Although I rarely speak in personal terms, today I want to illustrate why I believe so strongly in the response of individuals to opportunity by telling a personal story. I am immensely proud of the women of my family across three generations before me. My great-grandmother, the first of the three, was a working-class girl from Sunderland. She was widowed while still a young woman and was left, as I understand it, almost destitute. Too proud to seek charity, she turned her hand to taking in washing to support her family.

Despite this, she was determined that her daughter, my grandmother, would have an education. Each week she would put a penny of her hard-earned income into a tin on the mantelpiece to pay the fees for the Dame School her daughter attended. My grandmother proudly told my sister and me that although she was only a little girl, she realised both that her mother could ill afford the weekly fee and that she was needed at home to help with the huge barrels of washing, which were the family’s business. Therefore, she told us, she worked really hard to complete the work for her school leaving examination and graduated, as they say, at the age of 10 instead of 11. Incidentally, despite the short spell of her education with an unqualified teacher, my grandmother wrote beautifully in an elegant script with perfect grammar and spelling, and read newspapers and books voraciously until her death at the age of 87.

The second of these women, my grandmother, had clearly inherited the character and resilience of her mother and was determined that her daughter, my mother, would have an even better education. Facing up to the prejudices of her husband, who said, “What’s the point of education for a girl? She’s going to get married, isn’t she?”, my grandmother’s fight was with him to ensure that my musically gifted mother won a scholarship to grammar school, stayed on for the sixth form, and gained both her teacher’s certificate and musical qualification from the Royal College of Music.

So we come to my gifted, passionate about education, aspirational mother, the rightful heir to her two female forebears. My earliest memories are of her 12-hour days spent teaching, marking, preparing lessons, cooking, cleaning and caring for her husband and two daughters. She coached us in our schoolwork and cheered us on to succeed at whatever we chose to do. I am for ever grateful to her.

These splendid women had strong characters and enormous resilience. They had little help from the state, but grasped every opportunity that came their way. They are, I believe, a paradigm for the determinants of social mobility. Governments of course have a duty to ensure that opportunities are there to be grasped and that the barriers of prejudice, injustice and low aspiration are removed. This Government are working to do just that, but ultimately it is people, women and men of determination who take their destiny into their hands and move from deprivation to aspiration. Such individuals shape not only their own destiny, but in so doing they move the whole of society forward.