Social Mobility Committee Report

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, for her excellent chairing of the Select Committee. It was a great pleasure to serve on it under her leadership. I also thank the superb committee staff—particularly Luke and Emily—who served us so well.

When it comes to the big debates on education, almost invariably the focus is on schools and universities. On the rare occasion that that is not the case, the focus is on apprenticeships. Of course those are very important things, but the attention that Governments of all hues have paid to these flagship policies has obscured one very important fact: that the majority of young people—53%, as we have already heard—do not follow the “traditional” academic route into work. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, I feel that the title of the Select Committee report—Overlooked and Left Behind: Improving the Transition from School to Work for the Majority of Young People—says it all. Those young people not pursuing either higher education or apprenticeships—around half of them—face a system beset by a lack of funding, esteem, guidance and co-ordination, and those are the issues on which I wish to focus.

The bald conclusion of the report is that young people not pursuing the traditional path are getting a raw deal. Let us consider the fact that as of 2014 there are some 3 million people in further education colleges on a government budget of £4 billion, while the 2 million people in higher education enjoy a budget of some £30 billion—nearly eight times as much.

The Select Committee had the privilege—and it was a real privilege—of hearing first hand from policymakers, educators, employers, civic organisations and, most importantly, from young people themselves about the challenges they face. The committee recognised the value of apprenticeships for young people and the economy but pointed out that less than 7% of 16 to 18 year-olds do one. The vast majority of apprenticeships are started by people aged 19 or over.

Many young people leave school or college and face a bewildering and incoherent set of options with little help or support to guide them through this morass, leading to high levels of drop-out. There is no centralised, UCAS-like system to guide these young people into jobs with the possibility of upward mobility. Instead, they, and indeed the employers who hire them, must face a constantly shifting, incoherent and poorly funded system of vocational qualifications that are constantly given short shrift in favour of A-levels and university degrees.

This issue was, I thought, reinforced very powerfully by the Social Mobility Commission’s State of the Nation report, published last month. It amply endorsed many of the committee’s findings, and its central conclusion is that:

“Britain has a deep social mobility problem”.

This is, it says, exacerbated by poor alternatives to academic education and leaves those from lower-income homes much more likely to end up in low-wage, dead-end jobs.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, I too found the Government’s response to the Select Committee’s report disappointing and lacking in urgency. Sadly, it provided no response to a number of the key recommendations. However, on the positive side, I welcome the bringing forward of the Government’s post-16 skills plan, prompted by the Sainsbury review, which was published in July this year. The Sainsbury review reaffirmed many of the committee’s conclusions, particularly on the importance of technical training and the incoherence of the smorgasbord of qualifications that young people currently face post-16. The aim of the post-16 skills plan, to establish a framework of qualifications which will cover both apprenticeships and college-based learning to provide a common core of knowledge, skills and behaviours as well as specialist training for specific areas, is admirable. However, there is for me one fundamental area where the plan falls down. Although it pays lip service to the idea of parity of esteem between technical and academic education and training, the plan offers no provision to reduce the gap in funding between the two routes.

It is notable that the Government found £200 million for grammar schools in the Autumn Statement but could not spare a penny, it seems, for technical training. It is hard to see how this underfunded, long-neglected part of the skills system will realise the Government’s own vision of becoming world class under current funding plans. Will the Minister tell us what progress has been made on implementing the recommendations of the Sainsbury review?

The Select Committee report made a raft of recommendations to government to help young people who do not go on to university or undertake an apprenticeship to make a successful transition to work. For me, key among them is the urgent need to reduce the unfairness in funding between academic and vocational routes into work. Most people in the sector agree that further education colleges have the potential to be real engines of social mobility and to help with much-needed local 16 to 19 co-ordination. But while government policy has ring-fenced schools and university funding from budget cuts, the same cannot be said for post-16 institutions which provide for young people moving into vocational education. In fact, the budget for provisions for 16 to 19 year-olds was cut by 13.6% in real terms from 2010 to 2015. The individuals most affected by these spending cuts are much more likely to come from low-income households, which further harms their possibility of upward mobility.

An underfunded and overworked system invariably leads to lower-quality education, and this has a cost as well. Drop-out in post-16 learning courses cost the public purse a whacking £814 million in 2012—the latest figures I could find—which is some 12% of the funding allocated to provisions for 16 to 18 year-olds that year.

Funding is not the only problem. The key insight from the Select Committee is that rather than the national curriculum stopping at the age of 16, it should instead end at 14 to enable a 14 to 19 transition stage to be developed. This would ensure that young people sliding down the wrong path are caught earlier. It would also allow young people to experience a mix of vocational and academic options more tailored to their interests and aptitude, which I think could help them make better informed choices later on. Far too many young people are demotivated by the over-academic GCSE curriculum, yet see scant opportunity in other directions. Importantly, this transition stage must include a gold standard in careers guidance—that is the term that we used on the Select Committee—which moves responsibility away from schools and colleges. This careers guidance must be independent, comprehensive and face to face to help young people through our current vocational system. It has to be said that our current system is some distance from this gold standard. The Careers and Enterprise Company has thus far made little impact, and although recent modest funding increases are welcome, they certainly do not outweigh the sums removed from the careers service in previous years.

Careers guidance is currently the responsibility of schools, which have a vested interest—not to mention an inbuilt financial incentive—for pupils to carry on in the academic route. Instead, careers guidance must adequately inform young people of all the options available to them.

We were not alone in our concerns. The recent House of Commons Sub-Committee on Education, Skills and the Economy concluded in July this year that careers guidance was inadequate and exacerbating skills shortages. Only last month, Ofsted published a report saying that the chaotic careers education in schools could jeopardise the UK’s future economic prosperity. We continue to await the Government’s careers guidance strategy, which has been promised for a year now. Can the Minister offer any news on this front today?

Taken together, the Select Committee’s recommendations support the development of a stable, coherent and navigable transition system for those aged 14 to 24. Ultimately, this needs to be underpinned by reliable publicly available data and owned by a single Minister who could monitor it and be accountable for its success.

The current system is not only unfair on individual young people, often leading to a lifetime of missed opportunities, it also damages the UK’s economy and limits our collective human capital. We are living in a period of profound change. Consider the fact that the richest 10% of the UK’s population now owns half of the country’s wealth, with the top 1% owning nearly a quarter. Consider that today only one in eight children from low-income backgrounds is likely to become a high earner as an adult. High inequality combined with low social mobility is a toxic mixture for our society.

The ladder to a better future is becoming longer and the rungs further apart. No wonder public dissatisfaction with our current system is growing. We have seen much evidence of declining social cohesion, of a country split between those who have been given a leg up and those left behind, in 2016. It does not augur well. Investing in our young people today has a significant long-term economic and social value tomorrow, but only if we get the system right for all. It is long overdue.