Social Mobility

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this vital debate. I think that on this occasion we have common ground, and we are all hon. Friends. It is easy to talk the talk, but I want to talk a bit about how we can walk the walk, in ensuring that we achieve some results.

I declare that I am now happily a vice-chair of the all-party group on social mobility. It is appropriate that I take on that responsibility because I represent one of the poorest boroughs in the country. I do not want to bombard Members with statistics, but it is important to set in context some of the reasons why I am particularly interested in this issue. The latest child poverty statistics from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, from 2009, show that the London average for children living in poverty is 29.6%, and the national figure is 21%, whereas the figure for Hackney is more than double that, at nearly 46%.

A decade ago, Hackney schools were not delivering results; they were a byword for people fleeing Hackney. People were coming to see me about how they could get their children into schools outside the borough, but now they beg me to do anything I can to get their children into schools in Hackney. Through the London Challenge, and the local authority and elected mayor embracing every opportunity provided by any Government, we have new, fresh-start schools. The Labour Government provided us with academies and we have had another, along with a university technical college, agreed under this Government.

In Hackney in 2004, the figure for pupils achieving five A* to C grades, including maths and English, was 29%, and in 2011 it was 57%. There were some very high achieving schools, including Mossbourne community academy in my constituency, which achieved 84% such grades, and nine offers of places at Cambridge the year before last. A number of our schools are, of course, not yet at the GCSE stage because they were fresh starts. We are seeing huge achievement in schools. We are also seeing that background poverty is not an excuse for lower achievement, and that we can challenge that stereotypical assumption. With good rigour and good teaching in schools, we can achieve results.

Hackney may have its poverty, but there is no poverty of ambition, as the results show. Education maintenance allowance take-up was high in the borough, with 3,611 young people receiving it, and that was a significant factor. I met one young woman who said that on a Thursday she would use her allowance to put money on the electricity key, so that she could have light and heating in the house, for the family to live and for her to do her homework. The allowance was used for very basic things. In a debate a couple of weeks ago, I raised my concerns about what is happening to the young people who really need the support. Although there have been some attempts to bridge the gap, I am not yet convinced that those attempts will do what the education maintenance allowance did for young people in Hackney.

A really good example of what Hackney schools are achieving is that we are seeing huge results, even though the free school meals take-up at secondary school level represents 40% of pupils—in London as a whole the figure is 25%, and nationally it is 16%. Those figures are another indicator of the challenges but, in spite of that, 40% of Hackney pupils in maintained schools went into higher education in 2008-2009, according to the latest figures available from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

The Minister will know that the statistics are not perfect, because tracking is difficult, and I completely endorse the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles about having an alumni system, because there is not enough follow-through for young people. Nationally, the percentage of children on free school meals who go on to university is 17%, so we are achieving well in Hackney, with what might be described as a challenging cohort. There is a good track record, but improving educational results is clearly not enough.

From talking to young people, I have picked up that they very much need the kind of networks that my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles talked about. I will say a little about that, and about why I have got involved in helping to develop the idea locally. Members might have read a book by Andrew Adonis—now Lord Adonis—entitled “A Class Act”.

The book is out of print, and I am urging him to update it. It highlights the closed nature of professions, which is an issue that has been brought bang up to date by the Government’s independent reviewer on social mobility, Alan Milburn, in his report entitled “Fair Access to Professional Careers”, which has already been cited. I will not repeat everything that the report says—I am sure many Members are familiar with it—but one thing it recognises is that professions will account for 83% of all new jobs in Britain in the next decade. Unless we get greater access to professions from across all groups, we will be cutting out an awful lot of people from new jobs.

Some professions have made good progress. In the civil service, for example, of the top 200 civil servants in 2012, 27% were privately educated, compared with 45% just three years ago in 2009. That has happened as a result not of this Government’s activities or even, to a degree, those of the previous Government, but of an organisation recognising that it did not represent the people whom it serves.

We need to look at the professions’ grip on how they recruit. I visited a school in Hackney the other week—I will touch on what I am doing with some schools—whose pupils said that they needed contacts, particularly in banking, an industry in which I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) formerly worked. Some 90% of jobs in banking go to people who have already had some work experience, but those placements usually go to the children of partners or clients. That cuts out pretty much everybody in a Hackney school, yet we are on the edge of the City and have very good links with UBS, which sponsors an academy in Hackney, and with KPMG—another bank and accountancy firm—and the City of London, which both sponsor another academy. We must keep challenging, and I will touch on some of the work that I have been doing in that regard.

Another issue raised by Alan Milburn’s report is the desire to make internships paid positions and accessible to all. I want to focus on accessibility. I do not completely disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles. We need properly paid internships, but my worry—we need to be careful about this—is that if that is the only route that we follow, we will move the point at which young people will be selected for those positions to the interview stage. Are all our young people ready for that? If we are going to do this properly, it is about not just securing payment for internships, but ensuring that young people are prepared so that they are not as nervous my right hon. Friend was when she went for her first interview. They need to be ready.

We have all heard horror stories about interviews and I want to share one that will sound unbelievable. I will not name the source, because it might embarrass him. A young person from another part of the country—not my own—was keen to study medicine and had an interview at Cambridge. He had done a lot of preparation, but when he turned up for the interview and walked into the room, he saw three men sitting on the floor, ready to conduct it. That is a recent example.

We have all heard stories like the one involving a tutor who threw a rugby ball when candidates entered the room to see whether they could catch it. If they caught it, they got a place, and if they converted it, they got a scholarship. Such stories may be anecdotal, but they demonstrate that there are issues with regard to how universities admit students. I will touch on that later, if I have time. As with internships, we need to look at all aspects of access, not just the money, and make sure that people feel comfortable.

Our local sixth form college in Hackney, BSix, has introduced something called the red room. It has kitted out a room in the college to make it look like an Oxbridge don’s study. It is book-lined, has low chairs and has a courtyard outside. A fellow from Oxford turns up every week to talk to pupils, teach them in the room and give them a feel of what it is like to be in such an environment.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I agree strongly with what my hon. Friend is saying. One of the points that I have made to our sixth form college is that one’s oral expression is absolutely key in interviews. So often it is those from private schools and the middle class who have an enormous advantage simply as a result of how they speak. Giving people the opportunity to learn a more elaborate way of speaking gives them much more of an advantage at interview.

[Meg Hillier]

Absolutely. That is important. The Government buy a lot of business from a lot of organisations, so I ask the Minister whether it would be possible to include a requirement in Government contracts to provide support to young people from the types of background under discussion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Rosindell, to serve under your chairmanship. I apologise to hon. Members for not being here earlier, but I was speaking in the main Chamber in another debate. It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price), and I was fascinated to hear what she had to say. Her experience was similar to my wife’s experience. She came from a working-class family, and passed the 11-plus. Her parents did not understand what the 11-plus or GCSEs were, but she eventually went to teacher training college and became a teacher. However, she would never have been able to go through college had she not had two things: free tuition and a full grant. She would not have had any income from anywhere, but she received free tuition and a full grant. That was one reason why I spoke in this Room in 1998 to oppose the introduction of fees and charges for students, and the abolition of grants. That remains my position even now. I believe that we should restore free tuition and full grants for students.

I want to talk about the deeper divisions in our society, which I think still exist. The churn in social mobility is within the top 20%, 40% or even 60%. Our society is deeply divided between the elite academic layer and the great mass of people who have no aspiration and very little achievement. If one looks at the OECD statistics for educational achievement, we have the best at the top and the worst at the bottom. Something is profoundly wrong with what we do with our young people in that bottom 10%.

On a recent visit to Denmark with the European Scrutiny Committee, I spoke to politicians and officials about pupils speaking English. We were told that 95% of people in Denmark speak English. One cannot imagine 95% of people in Britain speaking any foreign language, apart from those who have come here from abroad with two languages. There is something different about Britain. I think that there are historic reasons for it, which have, I think, been touched on by George Orwell and other writers. We have preserved in aspic the divisions in our society, which go back to Shakespeare’s time. If we look at “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and the attitude of the king and others when they are watching the play within a play performed by Bottom, the weaver, we can see that it is a case of, “Let us be nice to the simple folk.” That social division was vast then, but it is still recognisable today. We have not changed as other societies have changed.

I used to work as a research officer for the National and Local Government Officers association and was often trundled out to talk to visiting foreign groups. I was describing British society to some social workers from Hamburg. They were very uncomfortable and said, “By your definition, all Germans are middle class.” That was because their attitude to education and aspiration are so different from ours. They do not have such deep divisions.

I am chair of the all-party group on social science and policy. We recently had a breakfast seminar on social mobility, in which Professor Paul Gregg from Bristol university said that the divisions within our society are still there and that social mobility at the lower level has reduced rather than increased in recent years. I am strongly in favour of making education the best it can be and of ensuring that everyone learns, but there are still attitudinal divisions within our society. The hon. Member for Thurrock told us how her friends said, “Why are you bothering to go to university? Why not stay with us?” My wife had the same pressures. “You don’t want to go to school. You want to come and get a job and get some money in your pocket,” they said, but she said, “No, I want to be a teacher.” She had to fight against the attitude of her social class and family. That attitude was common in those days, and is still there today.

Bryan Gould, who was an MP many years ago, went back to New Zealand because, as he said, he was so depressed about the social divisions in Britain. There was this attitude, he said, that somehow education was “not for the likes of us”. There was deference. Instead of being angry about being in a lower social class, many just accepted their lot. He felt that that was deeply conservative and very depressing.

Clearly, we must have the best possible education. We also need to intervene to try and change our culture, and get it across to young people that the possibilities in life are much greater than the horizons that they are looking at, and that if they do study well at school and have the right education, they can expand their horizons; they can learn a foreign language and know about things.

I have so many anecdotes to tell because I have read about this subject for a long time. In the 1980s, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research did a lot of research on this matter and it had an exchange of teachers between Moscow, in the then Soviet Union, and London. The Russian teachers spoke English and were quite happy to come and teach here. The English teachers could not speak Russian, but they went to teach in Moscow. They came back and said that the standard of education in Moscow was astonishing. They said that the children were doing things at 16 that we do at university. The Russian teachers were asked what they thought about the English pupils. They said, “The children were very nice and we enjoyed teaching them, but they didn’t appear to know anything.” We have had serious problems in our education and in our culture, but people did not seem to worry about it. We have started to do things differently.

The advocacy of the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) for the 11-plus and selection is mistaken. They were a social divider, which hived off one in five of the population. In my family, passing the 11-plus and going to university were compulsory. My parents were academics, and therefore it was expected. The thought of failure was unacceptable. That was opposite to my wife’s experience. We can talk about such things.

The 11-plus divided families and friends, and gave people completely different attitudes to life and what they could expect from it. My theory, and it is only a theory, is that that division has rippled forward through generations. Those who went to university from working-class backgrounds became middle class and their children did the same; those who did not do so carried on with working-class culture. That cultural division has remained with us, which is one reason why I so oppose the 11-plus.

[Mark Pawsey]

On the hon. Gentleman’s last point, why has social mobility reduced since the abolition of the 11-plus?

[Kelvin Hopkins]

As I said, I think that the divisions have rippled forward. I think that we have also failed in education. We are addressing the problem now.

[Hazel Blears]

We had this debate in the all-party group. Does my hon. Friend agree that an implication of the 11-plus and a selective system is that the more academically able are inevitably creamed off? In the past, what was left was not a comprehensive school, or even a very good secondary school, but a secondary modern in which the choices that young people had were often very limited and directed specifically to the kinds of jobs that they were expected to get in the long term. They did not do a foreign language or English literature, but woodwork, metalwork and needlework. It was a very narrow curriculum, which was certainly not good for social mobility or the country as a whole.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

My right hon. Friend is right, and those divisions have continued. They have become more rigid due to the failures of our education system.

What I am going to say now will annoy teachers. What I wanted from comprehensive education was a grammar school education for everyone. We did not get it. At the same time as creating comprehensive schools, we introduced informal child-centred teaching methods, which were a disaster. We have had two or three generations of such methods, which are fine for kids from middle-class families, who have books, educated parents and extra tuition to get them through exams, but not fine for working-class kids whose only chance is school. They need rigour. We are now all talking about the need for rigour in schools, particularly in primary education.

We have made some terrible mistakes. The juxtaposition of comprehensive education with informal teaching methods and attitudes caused the problems. One can only look at what has happened on the continent of Europe—I do not have much time, but I want to tell hon. Members about one of my closest friends, who lives in France. His children go to French schools and the rigour for six and seven-year-olds is astonishing. We do not take that seriously. I have upset many of my wife’s dear friends. A head teacher at one of her schools said, “You’d have them all sitting quietly in rows, wouldn’t you?”, and I said, “What’s wrong with that?” It is interesting that we are now doing it in academies. We do not need to call a school “an academy” or change the nature of it, we need to change what is done in the classroom in the school.

We need to tell young people when they are very young, “You have a chance to have a life beyond your imagining, if you follow education. There are people who started where you are now, who have a life you cannot imagine. If you talk properly and learn well, you will have a more exciting and rewarding life, in every sense, not only financially and in terms of living standards. A more exciting and interesting life.” Getting that across to children when they are very young is vital. We need to say to them, “That’s why you’re going to sit down, be quiet and listen to me—because I’m going to make sure you have that good life.”