Social Mobility

Debate between David Johnston and Dan Poulter

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Westminster Hall

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) on securing the debate. I have heard him talk many times about how important social mobility is to him, and we have had conversations about it. He is right that we have slightly lost focus on the issue in recent years.

Social mobility has been very important to my own personal and professional life. I ran three charities for disadvantaged young people, the last of which was called the Social Mobility Foundation. I was on the original Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, when Alan Milburn was the chair. I chair the social mobility all-party parliamentary group. The two words “social mobility” have been very important in both my personal and professional life.

If there is one key point in what I will say, it is that it is everybody’s responsibility to make social mobility happen. On the commission, we used to say that we can get into a situation where employers blame universities, which blame schools, which blame families—and everybody blames the Government—and that, actually, if at each stage of people’s life cycles things were done slightly differently, obstacles that are in the way of social mobility would be removed.

Starting with the early years is very important, but it should not be an obsession. It does not necessarily provide what Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone calls the escape velocity that will take someone through the rest of their life—even though we might hope it does. Some academics would say that about 80% of our outcomes are about what happens in the home rather than in school. We focus on school in this place. That is why things like family hubs are so important; every parent wants to be able to do the right thing, but they do not necessarily get the right advice and guidance about what to do. Being school-ready at age five is so important to how children then access school as they move through their lives. That is one big area that is not within the Government’s control, but it is important that we encourage the right things.

Then there is school. The Prime Minister said that education is the closest thing to a silver bullet that we have for social mobility.

[Dr Poulter]

Before my hon. Friend moves on to school-age children, there are things the Government can do to support disadvantaged and vulnerable children at an early age to improve not only educational attainment, but many aspects of their lives. We can look at longitudinal studies of schemes like the Family Nurse Partnership, which targets vulnerable and poorer families, provides targeted support for new mums and dads, and helps children be school-ready. Will he briefly comment on that, because that is something the Government could put money towards?

[David Johnston]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have to talk more about this because too often in politics people on the left fear they will demonise parents and on the right they fear they will appear to be the nanny state if they talk about it, but politicians and commentators who say those things are doing exactly the right things for their children. He is absolutely right about the Family Nurse Partnership and a whole range of other things, including family hubs.

The schools system is the easiest lever for politicians to pull, and we have seen huge increases in attainment through academies, free schools and various other initiatives. We have seen London state schools go from being the worst to the best, but we still have parts of the country where the standard of education is not good enough. We have a gender gap in education where girls do better than boys, and an ethnicity gap where certain ethnic groups do better than others, but the biggest gap in education is between children who have free school meals and those who do not. Although we have been making progress—albeit slow—covid has made that situation a lot worse, and has destroyed a lot of the progress we have made. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford says, the national tutoring programme is important, but we have to do more to focus on that.

Let me quickly canter through some other areas. This is about further education colleges and ensuring that the courses they provide will help people in the employment market, which is what we were trying to get to with the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022. When it comes to universities, the success they often trumpet about the percentage of state school students they have masks the fact that a huge proportion of them went to selective state schools—grammar schools—and that the proportion of comprehensive school entry pupils is still low. There is more for them to do, particularly at the most elite universities.

Finally, on professions, Members will have heard me say previously that someone is 24 times more likely to become a doctor if their parent is a doctor; only 6% of doctors are from a working-class background. Again, that is not in the Government’s control. Employers have to do something about that. Some people will say that social mobility is not about people leaving their home area, going to a Russell Group university and getting a middle-class job, but show me someone who says that, and nine times out of 10 they will have done exactly that in their own life. That does not invalidate the point—we need to have both, and to move jobs and investment to those areas—but do not tell me that we should not be trying to get more people into those universities and professions, because they are controlling the country. If we are to get to a position where talent and opportunity is everywhere, everybody has to play their part.