Social Mobility

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord McFall, for securing this vital debate. From listening to today’s debate and to wider debates in the area, it is sometimes tempting to think that there is a singular causal connection between these two worrying economic trends—growing income inequality and slowing social mobility. I suspect that the truth is not so simple. There is a significant body of research suggesting that rising inequality and lower social mobility are both symptoms of the same condition. This condition, as we heard so eloquently from the noble Lord, Lord Giddens—I do not pretend to have his academic background—is what is sometimes called the hollowing out of the labour market. Increasingly the UK labour market is characterised by very high-skill, high-wage jobs on the one hand and low-skill, low-wage jobs on the other. This is having a major impact on feelings of fairness and social cohesion. For the record, yes I think that the widening gap between the rich and the poor really matters.

In the light of this fact about our labour market, I would like to focus today on the role that education plays in creating greater equality of opportunity. This is not because I do not think that certain economic measures can improve income equality. In fact, I believe that things such as raising the minimum wage and encouraging employers to pay a living wage, which is something I support very strongly, could make a significant difference. I want to focus on education because, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said, it is only through education that we can truly tackle the pernicious problem of intergenerational social mobility. As the Save the Children’s briefing for this debate highlighted, the top performing countries on international educational comparisons—Hong Kong, Canada, and Japan—all have a comparatively low correlation between the socioeconomic status of a child’s parents and his or her performance in school. Therefore, if we are going to improve our education system to meet the highest international standards, which we must, we have to meet the challenge of improving inter-generational mobility head on.

Through my work as the vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Social Mobility, I have come to the conclusion that any social mobility strategy needs to have the following primary goal: continuously evaluating and improving our education system to ensure that all children develop the skills necessary to succeed in a demanding and changing labour market. This means investing to improve the quality of education that underprivileged children receive throughout their lives. Given that privileged children continue to enjoy disproportionately high access to a good education it should be no surprise that a person’s ability to get on in today’s jobs market is strongly correlated with the resources enjoyed by his or her parents. This lack of intergenerational mobility will continue unless we make a commitment to ensure that all children have access to a high-quality education. I think that state sector education should be as good as, if not better than education in the independent sector. Importantly, this equality of access refers not only to education during the school years, but early years education, further education and higher education. I would say that further education is often neglected in these debates.

I shall refer briefly, as did the noble Lord, Lord McFall, to the 2010 OECD report on income inequality. That report made clear that one of the best ways for developed nations to improve their overall rate of social mobility is by lengthening at both ends the portion of a child’s life that he or she spends learning, regardless of his or her parents’ income level. Today, access to high-quality early years education as well as higher education is still disproportionately enjoyed by those on the higher end of the income spectrum. This must change if we are to see any improvement in the overall level of social mobility.

Lengthening the time that every person spends in education will ultimately help more people be more qualified for better jobs. Employers are increasingly looking for employees with technological literacy, advanced foreign language skills and other key qualifications for a career in the 21st century. At the same time, employers are looking for certain character and resilience traits. They want people who do not get discouraged when the going gets tough, who can bounce back, who can work in teams and build meaningful relationships. These soft skills—or non-cognitive skills—are crucial to social mobility and should feature far more prominently among our educational priorities, particularly in the early years. The evidence shows how important this is.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Eaton for mentioning that, next week, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility will publish a major manifesto on character and resilience, and I hope that there will be an opportunity to debate it.