Social Mobility

Debate between Gloria De Piero and Lucy Powell

Tuesday 11th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Post-16 and youth service funding is critical to the debate and I will touch on that later.

I urge all colleagues to read the Social Mobility Commission’s powerful report. It highlights the fact that the challenges we faced in 1997 are very different from those we face in 2017. It rightly calls for social mobility to be at the heart of all Government policy, decisions and actions, because it is only through a prolonged, determined and comprehensive Government-wide strategy that we may actually start to change the entrenched inequalities and the lack of social mobility for the many. The social mobility agenda is about the many, not the tiny few we often hear about who manage to get themselves from the council estate to the boardroom or around the Cabinet table. The Prime Minister says that she is looking for a national purpose that brings all parties and the country together, and I say to her that if she made tackling social mobility her calling and the key test for her Government, against which all her actions were tested, she would get wide support from across the House.

Before looking at some of the policy areas where more needs to be done, let us remind ourselves why tackling the divides in Britain is so important. The Sutton Trust has found that failing to improve Britain’s low levels of social mobility will cost the UK economy a staggering £140 billion a year by 2050, or the equivalent of 4% of GDP. On current trends, by 2022 there will be 9 million low-skilled people chasing just 4 million low-skilled jobs, yet there will be a shortfall of 3 million higher-skilled people for the jobs of the future. The economic divides are even starker when we look at the regional disparities. Output per person in London is more than £43,000 a year, yet in the north-east of England it is less than £19,000. London and some of our renewed cities, such as my own city of Manchester, are increasingly the home of graduates and have vibrant growing economies.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Getting kids from ordinary backgrounds to university is a key way of enabling them to move up and get on. Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating the previous Labour Government on increasing student numbers, while acknowledging that there is still work to be done, particularly in post-industrial towns such as Ashfield, where we send only 21% of 18-year-olds to university, compared with an English national average of 32%?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend’s excellent point fits entirely with one of the main thrusts of the Social Mobility Commission’s report, which is that there are huge regional inequalities, particularly between our growing and vibrant cities, where many graduates live and work, and our heartland towns and former industrial places.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend raises a very important point. I know that he has been championing the issues in Oldham, and I hope to work with him to continue to do that. I will say something on school funding in a moment, if I could make some progress.

Of all the measures and policies of the last 20 years, one that stands out as transformational for our schools is the London Challenge. London went from having some of the worst schools to now achieving the narrowest attainment gap of anywhere in the country. It is a key part of the overall London effect; 30 of the top 50 constituencies for social mobility are in London.

There are two key learnings from the London Challenge, which are now seriously at risk. The first is the supply of great teachers. The Minister’s colleague in the Department for Education has finally started to recognise that recruitment and retention are major issues. Figures obtained by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) show that a quarter of teachers who have qualified since 2011 have left the profession. Statistic after statistic backs that up, and we know that it is the poorest children and the struggling schools that suffer most when teacher numbers drop.

Teachers deserve a pay rise. Yesterday’s pay settlement is a huge disappointment. Real wages of teachers are down by more than 10%. But it is not just about pay; it is about workload and the constant changes to curriculums and expectations. Ministers really must get a grip of the issue and do it fast.

The second learning from the London Challenge is about funding, which my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) mentioned. The increase in school budgets over many years, coupled with targeted support such as the pupil premium, has had a real impact on the attainment gap, which was narrowing until very recently. It has narrowed significantly in London, where funding was boosted the most. The real terms cuts to schools’ budgets that schools are now having to make—before we even get to the national funding formula—will, again, hit the poorest hardest. Interventions, extra support and supported activities all benefit the poorest most. Recent teacher polling has shown that a third of school leaders are now using the pupil premium to plug the gaps in general funding, that almost two thirds of secondary heads had had to cut back on teaching staff and that schools with more disadvantaged intakes were the most likely to report cuts to staffing.

The Government are totally kidding themselves if they think that the real terms cuts to school budgets, together with the teacher supply crisis, are not going to show in a widening of the attainment gap and a major step back in social mobility in our schools.

[Gloria De Piero]

I met with the headteacher of Ashfield Comprehensive yesterday. The school faces a budget cut of almost £1 million from last September to this September, and he is facing a choice between bigger class sizes and fewer subjects. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is the sort of thing that hinders social mobility?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Those are some of the unpalatable decisions that headteachers are having to make. There is no question but that those decisions will have a real impact on outcomes, so I am sure we would all support the Minister going back to the Treasury to say that the real-terms cuts need addressing, and quickly.

Social mobility should be at the heart of education policy; every part of the system should work to unleash the talents of all young people. That means that existing grammar schools must do more to tackle the issues, rather than entrenching advantage and damaging wider social mobility. I am very pleased that the Government have dropped their plans to open new grammar schools. However, they said that they would tackle social mobility in existing grammar schools. Figures that I have released today show that since 2016, the number of children on free school meals in grammar schools has hardly shifted at all—it has gone up by just 0.1 percentage point—despite calls from Ministers that existing grammar schools should increase their intake of low-income children.

In the “Schools that work for Everyone” consultation, Ministers said that existing grammar schools needed to do more. They are now saying that they feel that they have fulfilled that objective and so are dropping plans to require existing grammar schools to address the issue. If existing grammar schools do not reform their admissions and play their part in boosting social mobility, they should cease to receive public funding. We should be rewarding the schools that do the most for pupil progress for the majority of pupils, and that narrow the attainment gap, which is why we should reform league tables so that they show not just attainment but pupil progress, and progress in narrowing the attainment gap.

I cannot cover everything in the short time we have. Needless to say, huge gaps remain in post-16 education. I hope that the new T-levels and quality apprenticeships will help to address that, but that will happen only if they remain focused entirely on social mobility outcomes and people do not get distracted by other agendas. As others have said, and as the Sixth Form Colleges Association and others have shown, post-16 funding in Britain is still among the lowest in the OECD. We need to address that too.

As we have discussed previously, access to university and, crucially, outcomes and access to work beyond university remain a huge concern. Too few graduates are working in graduate jobs; in fact, we have the third lowest level of graduates working in graduate jobs of all OECD countries. The only countries behind us in that league table are Greece and Estonia. That is a travesty and it brings into question whether the debt, and the exercise, is worth it. Destinations of graduates and others are still most determined not by qualification and ability but by networks and social connections.

We could have a whole other debate about regional inequalities and how we boost social mobility everywhere. The devolution agenda that we all support must also have social mobility at its heart.

I know that the Minister will want to tell us why we cannot afford any of these plans. I would say that we cannot afford not to do them. Our economy and society pays a heavy price for people working below their ability and for wasted talent and wasted communities. The Minister’s economics are false economics and will end up costing us dear in the long run. Achieving a step-change in social mobility for the many, not just the lucky few, is the challenge of our time. Opportunity and progress for the young, a new deal for left-behind communities and a radical rethink on tax and spend policies all need reshaping around a new national mission to make Britain a world leader in social mobility, not a country that sits towards the bottom of the pack, as we do today. Although Brexit will dominate and define, I am sure that we across the House will all come together around that national mission.