Queen’s Speech

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I speak as a member of the Select Committee on Social Mobility, so expertly and energetically chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Corston. It was indeed heartening to hear so much about social mobility yesterday in the gracious Speech. Then I got home and I heard a lot more from Liz Truss on “Newsnight”, and we have heard more encouraging words from the Minister. I summarise the theme as being that it is not only to improve life chances, but, importantly, to include measurements of that. I add that our report has not yet been responded to by the Government, which is perfectly fair as it was settled only on 8 April, and therefore not debated. I will make two points to the House today concerning social mobility in the gracious Speech.

The first is in respect of data. I will briefly read out our recommendation on data in our report:

“Transitions from school to work should be supported by publicly available data, compiled by the relevant Government departments. This data should be made available to researchers so that they have access to earnings data, study patterns, and different demographic patterns, brought about by legislative change if necessary”.

That is an important “if necessary”. Over the year we sat, we heard a lot of evidence about data and a lot of evidence about the fact that they are being kept in many different places—the Department for Education, local authorities, BIS, HMRC. Often when academics want to investigate those data, they are told that the Data Protection Act applies and there is a problem, or that the Education and Skills Act applies and there is a problem there. We were often dubious about the existence of those problems.

The thing about analysing data is that it is free; it does not cost the Government any extra money. Putting any obstacle in the way of academics and others analysing those data to drive improvement for social mobility seems to me very much an own goal. The good thing about the gracious Speech is that the education for all Bill could be a Bill where suitable changes, such as the ones we referred to in our recommendation, could be made. I therefore invite the Minister to indicate whether she agrees that that was an important thought and whether the Government would be happy at least to hear argument on this point as these Bills go forward.

My second and final point is about careers advice. This was another area that the Social Mobility Select Committee spent a lot of time on, and we heard many very disappointing stories from a lot of people about the wide differences in the quality of careers advice up and down the land at the moment. Our recommendation there was:

“We therefore recommend that the Government should commission a cost benefit analysis of increasing funding for careers education in school and independent careers guidance external to the school in the context of social mobility”.

In this country, academic and vocational paths still have very different social standing among our fellow citizens. Very often, people who are probably well-suited for the vocational path are sent off on the academic path. Of course, if there are more universities, that tendency could easily be exacerbated.

We heard in many evidence sessions that there was no discrete budget for careers advice in schools, that there was no specific gold standard around the country to which schools could aspire and that, when Ofsted went to look at a school, although it would comment on careers advice in its report, it was not a core part of the report but just a comment which did not matter in that school’s score. We felt that it is very likely that the cost to the country of allowing people who should go down the vocational route to go down the academic route could be very great, not only for that person, who will be paying £9,000 for a year or two of wasted time at university, but also for us in loss of opportunity and in people not feeling good about themselves. I feel that that, too, is an element to be captured from our report, and I would very much like the Minister to comment on it.

I repeat that it was very encouraging to hear that social mobility is at the core of what the Government want to do in the next year. I hope that the encouraging words that we heard in the gracious Speech can be turned into carefully crafted legislation by this House in our next Session.