Social Mobility

Debate between Dan Poulter and Laura Trott

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock); I particularly agreed with her remarks about university and encouraging participation. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) for allowing us to debate this today.

Given the time, I will talk about one specific thing: the importance of going to a good university in driving social mobility, and what more we can do to encourage that. I should declare an interest at the outset; I am a Sutton Trust girl and am now an ambassador for the trust. It has been mentioned a number of times, which has been a pleasure to hear.

We know that university places correlate with success; that has been shown again and again, in study after study. The Browne review showed that people are more likely to be employed, with higher wages and greater job satisfaction, if they go to university, but it is the top universities that confer particular benefit. We know that many of our top employers only recruit from a certain select number of universities. On average, they target the top 19 of our 115 universities, so it is not only university attendance that we need to focus on, but which universities our deprived kids are going to.

That has been slightly overlooked in the debate we have been having over time about university attendance, which has been more about the quantity of people going through university, rather than the quality of the education that they get and what impact that has on their educational outcomes. We have found that not enough children from disadvantaged backgrounds are going to those good universities. There have been huge upticks in the numbers over time, which is of course to be welcomed; the Government have done a huge amount to encourage that, and the Office for Students now has a plan in place for each university to encourage it further. However, the most advantaged 20% are still seven times more likely to attend the most selective universities than the most disadvantaged 40%—a statistic that we urgently need to address.

Over time, we have put a lot of emphasis on universities. That is obviously right, and there is a place for that, but, as someone who came from a comprehensive school and was lucky enough to get into Oxford with the help of the Sutton Trust, I know how difficult it is to make that transition from a comprehensive education that was good, but not amazing, to university, and the extra help that was needed once I got there. We can do more at school level to help with that transition and to raise aspiration for our kids as they are going through school.

[Dr Poulter]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the importance of raising aspiration, but it is not just about raising aspiration a year or 18 months before the transition to university. It is about raising aspiration towards the end of primary school and at the very beginning of secondary school. There is good evidence that if that takes place, and is done effectively, we hugely increase social mobility and the aspiration of young people and their ability to attend good universities.

[Laura Trott]

My hon. Friend is right. We cannot just do this at sixth form: we need to focus on it throughout a child’s school career.

Successive Governments have tried to fix careers advice, and none has been effective in doing so. Careers advice varies hugely throughout the country and, despite the best efforts of successive Governments, evidence shows that it is not really getting much better. In our levelling-up agenda as a Government, we really need to focus specifically on that.

We also need to look at subject choice. The subject choices that children from more deprived backgrounds make tend to be less academic and I do not think they always realise how much that will drive future choices. There were people at my school who did A-levels, but did not study all the sciences, and then realised that that restricted their ability to study medicine at university. They did not know that beforehand. It is crucial that we look at how schools guide subject choices and consider what different career paths require at an earlier stage.

We come to the fundamental question of the quality of education. The education reforms that the coalition put through and that have been pushed by this Government have been critical in driving up standards in schools. We need to focus on the fact that children need to be able to read and write when they leave school; everything else that we talk about—music education, for example—is all well and good, but we must have those fundamental basics. The reforms that have been made to GCSEs and A-levels are critical and I believe will, over time, make a difference in social mobility terms.

We cannot lose sight of that. We cannot allow our Ofsted regulators to inspect everything under the sun, rather than examine quality of education. It has become a Christmas tree over time, which has diluted the focus on the quality of education in schools. We cannot allow that to happen. If we are to really succeed in changing social mobility, we need laser-like focus on quality in schools, which I know we will have. The increased funding will help with that.

In summary, we must get more disadvantaged kids into good universities. We need to highlight opportunities and instil aspiration in them throughout their time in schools.