Social Mobility/Child Poverty Strategy

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing time for this important debate, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) on securing it. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work that his Committee has done on crucial aspects of social mobility, including most recently the report on poor white children, and to the right hon. Lady for not only talking about these things but doing them in a practical way, not only in her constituency but more broadly. She is to be commended and thanked in particular for the Speaker’s Parliamentary Placement Scheme. I benefited from having one of the fantastic young people on the scheme, who has gone on to work for the civil service.

For so many of us, opportunity for the many, making society fairer and relieving poverty are the things that brought us into politics in the first place, and they go to the heart of today’s debate. Bringing up the rear of the debate, as I do, there is the tiniest danger that I might repeat some of the things that have gone before, but I see that as positive as it reflects the commonality across the House on some of the challenges that we face.

There are big challenges today. We have entrenched multigenerational poverty in parts of our country, massive geographical differences, and social mobility that is low by international standards and seems to have been stagnant over a number of decades. For the avoidance of doubt, none of these issues has arisen since 2010, or indeed since 1997, and will not be solved within the term of any one Government. But we have to get our act together and work together because whatever the problems are today there are more difficult headwinds coming tomorrow in the form of globalisation, the further effects of technological change and the differential effect that has on people, whether their job is enhanced and enabled by the computer or is in competition with the computer. Those effects are partly responsible for the hollowing out of the labour market that the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain) referred to, where there are more jobs in the so-called knowledge economy at the top of the scale, lots of jobs in the low wage service sector at the bottom of the scale and relatively fewer in between.

We must think about mobility, fairness and distribution within our society, but we must also think about those things collectively on behalf of our society, relative to the rest of the world. The two go hand in hand, because unless everyone’s talents are optimally deployed, economic efficiency is impossible.

I think that the Government are on the right track. The child poverty strategy is right to focus on the root causes of poverty, because although cash transfers can alleviate and mitigate poverty, they cannot cure it. Curing it, of course, is about many things, including regulatory measures, such as the national minimum wage, and tax, but it is also about bearing down on the extra costs incurred as a result of being poor. It is about building more homes, because the single biggest cost in most people’s lives is rent, and we will not solve that issue structurally until we have more housing. It is about affordable credit and trying to help people to save and build up a cushion of resilience against the nasty shocks that life inevitably brings. Most of all, it is about work: getting into it and getting on in it, and building up the skills required to do that. I am proud to support a Government who are grasping the nettle on welfare reform, especially through universal credit, and addressing the crucial issue of work incentives.

I am also proud that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said, everything that the Government are doing on education—I pay tribute to the Schools Minister, who is sitting in front of me, and his colleagues—is about both raising the average level of attainment and narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. We see that most obviously in the pupil premium, but it is in so many other measures as well, such as the early-years extensions. We also see that in measures, such as the English baccalaureate, that act as signalling devices to give young people a clear message about which subject choices will keep their options most open in case that advice is not forthcoming from other directions.

I will focus the rest of my remarks on social mobility. When people talk about social mobility, they are generally talking about one of three subjects. They often assume that everybody else is talking about the same thing, but they are distinct subjects that are in danger of being conflated. The first subject is what I call breaking out, meaning breaking out of severe poverty. That is the link between social mobility and child poverty. The subject at the other end is what we might call stars to shine, which is about nurturing outstanding talent. My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness talked about how that sometimes develops into an obsession with a relatively small number of people who do amazing, stellar things, going from very humble backgrounds to running the world. The danger is that we forget the third group, the 70% or 80% in the middle, where social mobility is about helping everybody to get on, to be the best they can be, to make the most of their talents and to achieve some security in life.

The three policy areas that I want to focus on cross-cut those three subject areas. I want to focus on teachers, parents and character development. We know that education is fundamental to social mobility. At the heart of the social mobility debate is a close correlation between the circumstances, social class and income of parents and the eventual circumstances, social class and income of their children—but it is not a direct causal link. Rather, disadvantage among parents tends to be associated with low educational attainment, and it is that which drives the child’s eventual circumstances. If we can break that link between poverty among parents and low educational achievement we can achieve a good degree of social mobility.

The pupil premium is the structural measure that enables many of the initiatives for doing that, but it does not actually tell us what to do. The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles alluded to that, as did the hon. Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright).

Thanks to the Educational Endowment Foundation and others, we now know more about the things that can make a difference. We also have to face up to some of the things that apparently do not make a difference but are favoured policy areas of lots of people in this House and elsewhere, such as reducing class sizes a little, which, according to the data, does not seem to make a huge amount of difference, or the deployment of additional teaching assistants, which again, according to the data, does not seem to make a lot of difference. I can see people looking at me as though I must be mad to suggest that. These are still controversial things to say in such debates.

What we do know, and I think everybody can agree on, is that the most important thing in education is the person standing at the front of the room. When the Secretary of State says that we have the best generation ever of teachers in this country, he is absolutely correct. A number of things have raised the status of teaching, one of which is Teach First. The figures are remarkable, even compared with when I was at school. A couple of years ago, 6% of Russell Group graduates and 10% of Oxford graduates applied to be teachers. Teaching has become one of the top graduate employers at our great universities. That, in itself, is a good thing.

It is also true—this is another controversial thing that one sometimes finds it difficult to say—that qualifications alone are not a great predictor of who is going to make a great teacher. When I served on the Education Committee, we produced a report on attracting, training, retaining and developing teachers. When we tried to address the question of what makes a great teacher, we kept finding ourselves unable to answer it, except to say, “You know it when you see it.” In having great teachers, we need to start with the premise that we have to see it in order to be able to know it.

Teaching is a very high-stakes profession. It is one of the few occupations left where the assumption is pretty much that someone who starts in it at 21 will still be doing it in their 60s. It is a massive decision for someone to go and do an undergrad degree in teaching or a postgraduate certificate in education. I think we need more auditioning in teaching. If we know it when we see it, we have to be able to see the person have a go at teaching, not just at the stage of interview for a post in a school but in pre-initial teacher training. People also need more opportunity to see it in themselves. It is very difficult for anybody to know whether they would make a great teacher—I am pretty sure I would not—and they need opportunities to see that in themselves. I would welcome more taster sessions for undergraduates who might think about doing a PGCE or sixth formers who might think about doing an undergrad degree in teaching.

There is another side to this, I am afraid. People say quite readily and easily, “Everyone remembers a great teacher.” The truth is that we can all also remember someone who really was not a great teacher. We cannot just wait a generation or two generations for brilliant teachers to come through. There is a big challenge today in making sure that continuing professional development is good. Slightly more controversially, there is the issue of performance pay for teachers—not as a way of punishing those who are not so good but encouraging those who are good to stay in the profession and rewarding them accordingly.

One of the lessons from the London Challenge, which we do not see so much in the reports but always hear from the people who ran it—who were absolutely at the top of it—was that a key aspect was the attitude of not quite ruthlessness but an intense focus on quality of leadership in London schools in saying, if it was not working out, “There’s another job for you somewhere, but this one is not quite the right one for you.” We need to have a great focus on making sure that we have the right people in place.

There is a group of people who are far more important even than teachers, and they are, of course, parents. Everybody who has ever looked at social mobility knows that the earlier the involvement in a child’s life, the more impact—the more leverage—it is possible to have on where they end up. Between years zero and five, children are not with teachers, nursery workers, the early-years work force, or whomsoever, all that much—they are with parents. Studies of children who succeed against the odds—who are born into backgrounds and circumstances where all the academic literature would predict they are not going to do well but manage to break out from that and do, in fact, do well—suggest that that has a lot to do with parenting style. We can define that to the nth degree and in a very complicated way, but I would use “books and boundaries” as shorthand for the parenting style that emerges.

As the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles has said, Alan Milburn has called parenting the last taboo in public policy, and he is right. It is a scary thing to talk about and I think that everybody is reticent to do so. There is good reason for that: nobody wants to try to tell parents how to bring up their children. Many people probably feel qualified to advise other parents on how to do so, but it is dangerous territory for the state or, indeed, anybody else. It is vital, however, that we somehow start to take steps to break through the taboo, do more work in this area, build up knowledge and find new ways to provide support to parents when they want it.

Speaking of parents and parenting, I am reminded of another vital factor in social mobility—character. We all know of kids from among those we grew up with who got either no or one or two GCSEs—or, from my generation, O-levels—and have gone on to do brilliant things. We also know of people who had A grades to spare who have ended up doing nothing that exciting. The difference between them tends to come down to self-belief, drive, tenacity and, admittedly, a little bit of luck. There is a big overlap between those things and the employability skills that firms are looking for and that we hear about so much these days. It is claimed that they are less prevalent now than they used to be—although it is difficult to say whether there was ever a golden age for such things—but in the new world economy they are more important than ever. However, our education system now and ever since I was born has been all but exclusively focused on young people’s exam results.

The all-party group on social mobility’s character and resilience manifesto was written by a think-tank, along with Baroness Tyler of Enfield. We had a simple definition of character and resilience: people need to believe they can achieve; understand the relationship between effort and sometimes distant reward; stick with the task at hand; and bounce back from life’s inevitable setbacks. That is easier said than done, but if people can master those things they will have a very good shout in doing as well as they can in life. The key question is: are those things inherent, or can they be taught? As has been said, the evidence tends to suggest—although we have to be careful about being dogmatic about this—that they can at least be developed and enhanced through life. That can be done through all sorts of things, including volunteering and Saturday jobs, which have been in massive decline, and the National Citizen Service, competitive team sport and the scouts, the guides and the cadets.

The question for public policy is how to institute those character development strands into the social mobility strategy. The process has to start early, so thinking about character should be part of how we think about school readiness. Schools have a key role to play. When our all-party group asked the headmaster of one of Britain’s leading public schools what it was about his school that meant it apparently did so well on character, the first thing he said was, “We teach boys how to fail—the ability for things to go wrong—and then how to bounce back.” I think there are lessons to be learned from that, not only by individual schools but by the system as a whole.

Perhaps the most obvious thing of all is extra-curricular activities. It seems that the gap in extra-curricular activity between better-off and worse-off kids is more about take-up than availability: a lot of programmes are made available, but they are not used that much. I would like to see more emphasis on extra-curricular activities not necessarily happening in schools, but being led, driven and encouraged by schools. That could be a legitimate use of pupil premium money, given how important we know such activities are for how young people get on in life, and I would like Ofsted to pay even more attention to the issue in future. The Government are looking at this in earnest and I hope it will end up becoming a key part of the social mobility strategy.



I want to talk about some of things that we do not know. In many public policy areas, we think that if we know the facts we need only to have a bit of a barney to find solutions or ways forward. On social mobility, we still do not know many of the facts and the situation is still evolving.

We are blessed with one example of a place in Britain that has gone from zero to hero in educational attainment, and probably in wider social mobility measures as well, which is London, particularly inner London. When we look at the data, it is striking to see how far inner London in particular has moved. Today, disadvantaged children growing up in London do half a grade better per GCSE than those growing up elsewhere; they appear to be twice as likely to go to university as those growing up elsewhere; and they are even more likely than that—the maths becomes quite difficult because the numbers are small—to go to a top university than disadvantaged kids growing up elsewhere.

The stock answer that rolls off everybody’s tongue when we say that is, “Oh, yes, but those children had the London Challenge.” Hon. Members should not get me wrong, because the London Challenge was good and positive, and it is difficult to argue against elements of it, but there are several reasons for believing that it was not the sole or primary cause of the change. The first reason is that the improvement predated the London Challenge: the London Challenge began in 2003, which was also the year in which GCSE results in London caught up with those elsewhere. The second reason is that the improvement was in primary schools as well as secondary schools, but at that time the London Challenge covered only secondary schools, and from the limited data we have, it appears that disadvantaged kids in London do better even in nursery, before their schooling has even begun. The third reason is that the improvement was very concentrated among poor kids. The fourth reason is that when the London Challenge was tried in Manchester and Birmingham—again, hon. Members should not get me wrong, because there was some success—the results were not replicated in nearly the same way.

We now have to cope with or come to terms with the strange situation that coming from an ethnic minority and/or having English as an additional language is a predictor of doing better at school, which challenges policy makers a great deal. Given the massive population change in London during the past 20 years, we must at least entertain the possibility not just that that situation is related to the fact that schools are now different and have got better in London, but that it has something—not entirely, but partly—to do with the population make-up of people living in London. That brings us back to questions about parenting.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Has my hon. Friend seen the articles by Christopher Cook, who is now the BBC’s education correspondent, which suggest that there is a link between the London effect and graduates, particularly graduate teachers, marrying?

[Damian Hinds]

I have not seen the marrying study, although I have seen several of Chris Cook’s articles in the Financial Times. There are another two reports. At one launch, the Minister for Schools rightly said, “Londoners are used to this sort of thing. You wait a long time for a report about schools, and two come at once.”

[Mr Stuart]

Three.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

Three reports have come along at once.

Lots of different effects are taking place, and we need to understand them much better. What we can be sure of is that there is no one simple and obvious answer, because it would have been found by now. More generally, we do not know enough about the patterns of uneven opportunity in this country. We know that some big areas are worse than others, and we can identify pockets of poor schooling, sometimes in affluent wider areas, where school results are not good enough. However, we do not understand enough about our country as a whole in relation to who stands to do better than others, why that should be the case and what we can do to mitigate it.

In the United States, a recent study on equality of opportunity, led by Raj Chetty of Harvard, has helped us as never before to understand inequality of opportunity and the patterns of inequality in the United States. It found that the chances of achieving the American dream are two and a half times higher in Salt Lake City than in Charlotte, North Carolina. To put that in context, average social mobility in the UK is about halfway along the range for cities in the United States. There is every reason to believe that there will also be quite a range, perhaps for different reasons, in this country. The Chetty study has some challenging findings on the potential causes of inequality, including the de facto segregation that still exists in some American cities and the family structures in different places, as well as dealing with the more obvious issues that we might expect: income inequality, school quality and social capital.

That study was carried out by linking tax data to school records to track how people did through life and look at the differences—seeing how someone was affected if they moved to a different area, and so on. I do not know whether I am the only Member in the House today to have had the benefit of some e-mails from 38 Degrees this week on whether it is legitimate to use data from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for other purposes. I totally recognise and share the massive data security concerns about that, but I hope that the Government will look at the potential of using the data to understand this issue better so that we are able to do something about it.

Social mobility alone will not solve poverty or child poverty, but it can solve a part of those problems. It is a huge issue for both social justice and economic growth. It is self-evident that every person in our land should have equal opportunities to fulfil their intrinsic potential. It is also true that maximisation of national income requires optimal deployment of resources, including human resources. It could bring an extra £150 billion a year of national income, or a one-off 4% rise in growth, and that is an opportunity that we as a country cannot afford to miss.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rushanara Ali]

I referred to the failure to close the gap. The hon. Gentleman is right that there have been improvements, but that is not enough. It is not satisfactory. As the Education Committee’s commendable work highlights, the position of white working-class children—boys and girls—is deeply disturbing. As a society, we have failed them. Most of them are in that category of having free school meals, so the position is not good enough. The Government should take seriously the hon. Gentleman’s work, which has cross-party support, on the plight of white working-class children. We need to step up and address the challenge.

It is clear from the speeches that we all want children to do well, regardless of background. We want their talents to be maximised, not wasted, so that their abilities are recognised and they can contribute to our economy and our society.

The Government’s policy of scrapping the education maintenance allowance has had a direct impact on social mobility. I know that from the experience of several groups. More than 80% of ethnic minority children, for example, from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, relied on that grant. Young people from parts of the country where they spend money on transport now struggle to commute to their further education colleges. Many have highlighted the challenges they face because they do not have the support that they need. Some go to their further education colleges not being able to feed themselves. In a climate of high levels of poverty and deprivation, provision such as an education maintenance allowance was a great help and its removal has contributed to taking away the ladders to progress.

I know from direct experience with young people that other changes, such as the proposal to scrap support for young people under 24, are deeply troubling. Without support and access to benefits, one young woman whom my charity supported would not have made it from a broken family and having been made homeless to what turned out to be an incredible opportunity: she got a place at Cambridge.

She would not have had that ladder of opportunity if the support system offered by the state had been removed. We must consider many welfare changes to ensure that the barriers to young people being socially mobile are not added to, and that we all work hard to remove them.

The hon. Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright) highlighted the importance of qualified teachers and the need for a royal college of teaching. I am delighted that he emphasised the importance of qualified teachers, and his party’s support for that. It is a great shame that the Government, the Secretary of State and the Conservative party do not support that provision, but I hope we can get agreement on that.

[Damian Hinds]

rose—

[Rushanara Ali]

I did not give way to the hon. Gentleman, but if he insists—if I am allowed to continue then I am happy to, but I will give way.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Lady was talking about London a moment ago. Can she tell the House which region has the highest proportion of unqualified teachers?

[Rushanara Ali]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will say why his Secretary of State said that there is no need for qualified teachers, when evidence suggests that qualified teachers play a profound in role in young people’s attainment. On his point about London, I suspect he is referring to the last Labour Government. We increased the supply of teachers by introducing teaching assistants who then got qualifications. We have called for teachers and for those who are not trained to be able to work towards training, and that is what we did. Perhaps the Conservative party will address that point given that the Conservative Chair of the Education Committee has said that qualified teachers make a massive difference to young people’s potential to achieve.

[Damian Hinds]

rose—

[Rushanara Ali]

I will not give way any further because I have already given way twice to the hon. Gentleman—[Interruption.] A number of times to his colleagues then. I would like to make progress because I know the Minister will want to address some of these points.