Education: Social Mobility

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for initiating this debate with such a powerful speech. His own record in offering truly life-changing opportunities to hundreds of children in the Pimlico Academy stands as an example to all providers, whether local authorities or sponsors of free schools and academies.

Although I am a once-upon-a-time philosopher, I will resist the temptation to deconstruct the phrase “social mobility”, complex as it is. We all know what we mean by it and recognise it when we see it. If an individual rises in social and economic status over their lifetime, and if they rise beyond the social status of their parents, we say that they have achieved social mobility. Much of our proper concern as a civilised and prosperous society has been towards breaking what Keith Joseph—the late Lord Joseph—called the cycle of deprivation, in which children from the poorest parents never rise above the level of their parents’ deprivation, and nor do their children or grandchildren. All Governments have tried to find ways to break that cycle, beginning with the Education Act 1870. Rightly, in my view, they have looked to education as the means of breaking it. A brief look at the history of those efforts, all of them top-down, may help us to understand why the Government are tackling the issue in a new way now.

I will not weary the House with a complete history of education, but I must pause on the effects of the Education Act 1944, which was so earnestly well meant and which was, in my view, so sadly misguided. That Act provided that something between 15% and 25% of young people, depending on the local authority, would be selected at age 11 for grammar schools. These academically excellent schools provided the young people with the skills needed for white-collar jobs at the least, or with access to the professions via university at best. Although the excellent ambition for technical schools was a part of the Bill, we now know, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, so eloquently said, how little was achieved in providing that demand in technical education. That left up to four-fifths of the population sent—as failures—to secondary modern schools which provided at their best a generalised and undemanding curriculum, which in my less kind moments I describe as soup-kitchen education.

That model was based on an economy which had already begun to die. It assumed a structure in which 80% of workers could be unskilled—an economy which our competitors in Germany, Japan and elsewhere had abandoned. They saw the need for all workers to be skilled in industries where technology was taking the place of the unskilled workers, and they rejected our 1944 model in favour of a model which ensured that 100% of their young people were given a demanding education, both academically and technically. Our error did more over those crucial post-war decades to deny social mobility and economic growth, as we saw in our competitors. So many of our young people simply lacked the skills for the changing economy.

Like many of my generation, I hoped that the move to comprehensive schools would reverse our educational and economic decline. By offering all children access to the same good-quality education, we hoped that all would leave with employable skills and opportunities that had been denied to their parents. I will not enter the argument about why the original comprehensive failed to deliver. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis—the much admired pioneer of the academies movement, as several noble Lords have said today—makes clear the reason that they failed in his excellent book Education, Education, Education. He commented that,

“too many comprehensives were simply a continuation of the secondary moderns”,

and that even the celebrated Holland Park and Pimlico schools,

“soon became educational battlegrounds in the face of low standards, poor teaching and hard-left politicisation”.

So, comprehensives were not the answer, though for my part I remain wholly convinced that selection is not the answer. I do, however, believe that elective differences in the route through education for older pupils—a formula which works for most other successful economies and which has been offered by the UTCs of the noble Lord, Lord Baker—should be the way ahead for this country.

Experience over the years had demonstrated all too clearly that top-down reform and diktat has had little impact on the quality of education. As many began to understand, it was the quality of the leadership and the initiative of the individual school which determined the success of its pupils. Some years ago I was entranced by the words of a Scandinavian educator who declared at an international conference:

“The school is the living cell of the body educational; it is the health of the individual school we must address if the body is to become well”.

I equally rejoiced in the words of the chief inspector of Ofsted at the launch of his annual report this year, when he said that we should end the categorisation of children as either “deprived or well-off”. Their social background, he said, is not the arbiter of their success; there were simply “lucky or unlucky” children: those who went to a good school were lucky; those who went to a poor or inadequate school were unlucky. This puts the emphasis on the quality of education each child receives and not on their social background.

We have spent far too long being emotionally concerned about poverty and too little concerned in shining a light on the crucial contribution of schools. Good schools have been shown time and again to be able to grant success to all their pupils regardless of background. It was this understanding which led to the founding of independent state schools, first started as CTCs in the 1990s, as has been said, and then becoming the academies movement, first under the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and now hugely accelerated under my right honourable friend Michael Gove.

Academies have autonomy over many aspects of their provision. Their quality depends on the leadership and expertise of the head with her or his staff. Control from the centre has been replaced by responsibility at the school level, with freedom for the professional judgment of heads and teachers to meet the needs of their individual children and the community from which they come.

One story of an academy trust illustrates the huge success of this approach. My noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham started one of the first CTCs back in the 1980s. Now there are 27 academies in the Harris Trust, 17 secondary and 10 primary. Those schools were previously classed as failing or near failing: 45% of the pupils qualify for free school meals, and 44% come from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. Under their previous management thousands of children would have been consigned to educational failure and to a lack of any prospect of social mobility. Now, 20,000 “lucky” children are finding success; 72% of the pupils in these schools achieved the magic five good GCSEs—well above the national average—and that improvement has been sustained year on year since the schools became independent.

The Harris Trust story has been matched up and down the country by over 3,500 schools, now with over 2 million pupils. These schools have taken the opportunity to determine their own professional destiny, backed by powerful and supportive governing bodies. These independent state schools are innovative, using all the professional skill and judgment of the teachers and their leaders. Uniformity imposed from the state or local authority too often stifled innovation and the flowering of professionally creative schemes in the academies has been a delightful feature. Examination success has not been their only contribution. Music, art, dance, drama and creative writing have flourished as teachers have felt free to share with their pupils their own enthusiasm and skill. To the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, I would say that good teachers very much recognise the need for emotional development, emotional skills and emotional intelligence.

Not all academies and free schools will succeed; in any system there will be problems and failures. However, there are mechanisms for those to be dealt with quickly and firmly in the way that local authorities manifestly found it difficult to do with the huge number of failing schools under their control.

We are watching a revolution in education. It is a benign revolution. It is contributing hugely to social mobility and has brought life-changing opportunity and the experience of success to thousands and thousands of children. The academies movement is one which all who care about the future of our young people should welcome and celebrate. I am pleased to do so in this debate today.