Social Mobility

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to promote social mobility, and what assessment they have made of the impact of factors such as character and resilience on individuals’ prospects.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

My Lords, social mobility is part of a fair and just society. The belief that children from poorer families should have the same opportunity to succeed in life as children from wealthy families is something that rightly unites politicians across the political spectrum. Yet social mobility in this country is at least flat-lining and, although statistics in this area are always open to interpretation, many commentators believe that it has gone into reverse.

To illustrate this point, the first politician I am going to quote—and this may surprise your Lordships—is Michael Gove, who said recently:

“More than any other developed nation, ours is a country in which your parentage dictates your progress … those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege. For those of us who believe in social justice this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible”.

For me, nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the fact that although just 7% of pupils are privately educated, they account for 59% of our Cabinet Ministers, 45% of our senior civil servants, 15 out of 17 of our Supreme Court judges and heads of Division, and 54% of our country’s leading journalists. While one in five children is on free school meals, this can be said of just one in 100 Oxbridge entrants.

Since what has been called the golden age of social mobility, starting in the post-war years until the 1970s, things have fallen into decline. As the recent report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission shows, our leading universities may be some of the best in the world but over the past 10 years they have become less, not more, socially inclusive and increasingly the preserve of the elite. I am sure that other noble Lords will want to comment on this point.

The gap between the rich and the poor does matter. The influence of parental income on the income of children in Britain is among the strongest in the OECD. Parental income has more than one and a half times the impact on male incomes in Britain compared with Canada, Sweden and Norway. We also know that income inequality in Australia and Canada is similar to the UK, but they have significantly higher levels of social mobility, on a par with Sweden and Norway.

So what is going wrong? It is to the credit of this coalition Government that they have made social mobility a central plank of their social policy, and I welcome the efforts already made to tackle the barriers of disadvantage. I strongly welcome the Deputy Prime Minister’s announcement of the social mobility business compact to help ensure that all young people have fair access to job opportunities; the recent increase to the pupil premium budget to provide extra support to the most disadvantaged children; the extended access to early years education for disadvantaged two year-olds; and the additional help to get young unemployed people back into work or learning through the youth contract.

What more could and should be done? The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility, of which I am vice-chair, has sought to shine a spotlight on some critical areas of debate that are all too often overlooked. The APPG report, 7 Key Truths about Social Mobility, set out the key issues on which policy should focus, looking at the unequal opportunities that start in the earliest years of life and too often persist and widen in later life. These truths cover the importance of the early years in the home; the critical importance of education, including both the quality of teaching and extracurricular activities; the pivotal role of access to universities, including part-time study; and the need for other pathways to mobility, such as apprenticeships.

The final truth, which I want to focus on, is that of character and resilience, something the All-Party Parliamentary Group saw as the missing link in the chain. Character and resilience are somewhat amorphous terms, which some might choose to dismiss as fluffy or cosmetic soft skills. In fact, the very term “soft skills” strikes me as something of a misnomer. Far from being fluffy, developing character and resilience is about developing the fundamental drive, tenacity and perseverance needed to make the most of opportunities and to succeed in life, whatever the obstacles. It is about self-esteem, self-discipline, aspiration and expectation. In everyday language, it is about believing you can achieve, understanding the relationship between effort and reward, sticking with the task at hand and bouncing back from the knocks that life inevitably involves.

Recent survey evidence from the Prince’s Trust tells us that young people from affluent backgrounds are more likely to be told by their family that they can achieve anything, and that one in four young people from poorer backgrounds felt that people like them do not succeed in life; if they have, for example, failed an exam or been turned down for a job, they are more likely to feel that they have already failed. There is also a growing body of evidence showing the link between developing the social and emotional skills and doing well academically and in the workplace. Research by the IPPR indicates that personal and social skills have become 33 times more important in determining life chances, while soft skills have become 10 times more important in determining future incomes in a single generation. Paul Tough’s recent book, How Children Succeed, also illustrates the ways in which character skills contribute to cognitive ability along with the American Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, who found that character traits are just as predictive of academic or job success as more traditional cognitive skills and, indeed, that the two are very much linked.

The really good news from all this research is the evidence that these character or personality traits are not innate. They can be taught and developed through life. Heckman has shown that investing early in these skills, particularly with disadvantaged children, generates strong economic returns. Looking exclusively at earning gains, returns to cash invested can be seen to be as high as 15% to 17%. These so-called “soft skills” can lead to hard results.

In the light of this evidence, the All-Party Parliamentary Group, with generous support from the Open University, hosted a character and resilience summit earlier this year. Whether hearing from Tony Little, the headmaster of Eton, on how he teaches his pupils about dealing with failure, or Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, about working with some of the most deeply traumatised children in the country to rebuild their basic self-worth and faith in life, the summit confirmed to me that, for those who care about social justice, developing character and resilience is essential. As Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility Commission, who was present on the day, emphasised, it is not ability that is unevenly distributed, it is opportunity. In order to overcome this disparity, what he describes as the “Berlin Wall” between state and private sector schools needs to be broken down.

We heard about some great work going on in state schools, too, with examples of volunteering in the local community, outdoor activities which put pupils outside their comfort zone to develop their resilience and a really wide range of imaginative extracurricular activities. Indeed, we heard schools saying that developing such traits is now their core business and that, for employers, these less tangible skills of sticking at it, not giving up, empathy and teamwork are precisely what they are looking for in potential recruits. Overall, the message that we heard from academics, head teachers, employers and charity leaders alike is that, whatever qualifications you might have, where you are on the character scale will have a big impact on what you achieve in life.

Successive Governments’ efforts to narrow the gaps between the rich and the poor have largely focused on exam results. However, as the stark trends I outlined earlier show, just more of the same will not be enough. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient. That is why I call on the Government today to take more account of this growing evidence surrounding the role of character and resilience in improving social mobility and to start putting it into practice.

I have a few ideas to offer. More could be done in early years, working with health visitors and children’s centres, linked to the expansion of free early years education. To break down that so-called “Berlin Wall” between the state and independent sector schools, practical incentives are needed to encourage sharing of approaches and good practice. I would like to see schools being able to allocate greater space in the state curriculum for volunteering, sports, drama and music to help to bridge the gap, as well as using PSHE and citizenship to the full. I would particularly like to see the pupil premium being used directly to develop character and resilience and the identification and spread of good practice. Teacher training should include models for effective teaching of character and resilience. Because we all know what really drives behaviour in schools, I would like to see the Ofsted framework developed to include the importance of character and resilience to learning outcomes, and that reports and inspections say how effectively this is being addressed. These are just ideas, but I would welcome an assurance from the Minister that these and other ideas will be taken seriously as policy is developed.

I conclude by asking why this matters so much when in economic terms the case is clear. Studies suggest that reaching international benchmarks on social mobility could be worth around £150 billion a year in the UK, or the equivalent of a one-off increase in GDP of 4%. However, socially and morally the case is overwhelming. Someone who has overcome disadvantage, persevered in the face of adversity, and shown real strength of character is surely the one who deserves the opportunity to succeed and share in the rewards that society has to offer. Surely that is what a just society is all about.