Education: Social Mobility

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is interesting that I have not totally disagreed with anyone who has spoken in this debate—it is always nice when you can pretend you totally disagree with someone. But the theme that is coming across from the debate is that everyone understands that it is complicated and difficult to talk about social mobility, the lack of it, how to encourage it, and the role that education plays. We all agree that it has a role. Education allows you to become more socially mobile.

It is also worth pointing out—no one has done so yet—that if you fail in education you can become downwardly socially mobile. I have made that point because I want to draw attention to hidden disabilities as a factor in this cocktail of reasoning and pressure. I will talk primarily about dyslexia because I am dyslexic and know more about it than the other conditions, but hidden disabilities are a group of conditions that covers such things as dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia, to which can be added the higher-functioning areas of autism and numerous other conditions. It means that you do not relate to your environment, particularly your educational environment, in the way in which others do. It means that you are always going to have more problems with the educational part of your life than others will.

This is probably very much accepted now. When I first spoke about this subject nearly 28 years ago in this Chamber, it was more of a revelation. People asked, “Is it there? Is it really happening?”. Now the vast majority of people understand and accept dyslexia. We still occasionally hear from the “It doesn’t really exist; I have a miracle cure” brigade. However, if we accept that these factors are there, how do they affect this argument about social mobility?

After first accepting that the factors are there, we must then identify them. If we cannot do so, it does not really matter what is in place or what understanding we have because we will not be helping the right person at the right time. We have a history of saying, “Yes, we should do something”, but not putting enough in place to do it. All political parties bear a degree of blame for this, because it is much easier to pass a piece of legislation than it is to change structures, provide funding, and change the structures that administer the funding. There is not much doubt about that.

How does this affect our outcomes? What if you cannot access, for instance, the written word successfully enough to get a qualification that says you have passed? Most structures and exams are training paths towards taking a job that provides status and money. Both are factors in social mobility; having enough confidence in yourself to apply or encourage your children to do so is another factor that we should not forget. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, talked about things that are “not for us” and not relevant. These things are still happening, not in exactly the same terms but the principle is still there, based on the assumption that we know what normal is—“Normal is me”.

What do we need to do to improve this situation? The first thing we must do is to train our foot-soldiers—that is, our educationalists at all levels—to identify these problems early. This situation is better than it was, but we are still not investing enough in the teaching profession as a whole for it to be able to say with confidence, “I think that person is dyslexic and they should see X and Y”. There are still far too many cases in the dyslexia world of the parent going to the teacher and asking, “Why is my child not succeeding?”, and that is what inspires the movement through the machinery which this House and others have put in place.

Of course, my noble friend will point out that the big change that we are celebrating today—the big change in that recent Bill—means that we now have a duty to identify the problem, and to identify those at risk, if I remember correctly. When the Bill was going through the House, I said that this was a fundamental change, but do we have the foot-soldiers in place to do this easily and well? I would say that at the moment the situation is better than it has ever been, although it is still nowhere near good enough. However, at least having that duty is a step forward, so let us not get bogged down in it too much.

However, what happens if we do not identify those at risk? If we do not, we find ourselves with that hard core whom we cannot reach, and that hard core is reinforced by the factors that I have already spoken about. When you choose a life partner, one of the big things that you tend to look for is that a person has had the same educational experience as you. Two people who can discuss books, theatre and so on, and who at least had a chance to go to university, have infinitely more in common than a couple where one of the two has consistently failed. Increasingly in the dyslexia world, we find that generations of families have all had dyslexia and nobody has passed an exam. We are increasingly finding that the people in the last couple of generations of such families have never had a job, and that contributes to the downward spiral. That happens when you fail to be identified as dyslexic, when you are not given the necessary support and when your parents do not have the desire, the money or the time to make sure that you get the help that you need within the education system. This goes back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. It happens when you are not economically active and do not receive the support to catch up.

It should be remembered that one of the problems is that you are on a conveyor belt in the system. You have to hit targets at points in your life that are directly related to your age, and if you are not achieving, you are slipping back. Also, if you are told that you are a failure, you are even less open to that prolonged process of still having to achieve things which you know other people have already done.

Whatever progress we have made in the nearly 30 years since I first spoke about this, unless we concentrate on the early recognition of this problem, we will always compound it. There is an argument within the prison system about whether dyslexics are over-represented by a factor of two or a factor of five. We know that the prison population has the lowest level of literacy compared with any other part of the population, at 50% to 70%. Possibly having some more substantive academic work done in that field would help, but these are the groups where you find the by-product of reinforcing failure by not identifying it.

I hope that my noble friend will have some words of encouragement on this, because unless we start to get to this hard core at the bottom of the pile—this group that reinforces failure—it will always be there. It will always be difficult to reach and to help. People in the education system need to start saying, “I think you have a problem”, as opposed to individuals having to go to the education system and saying, “I think I have a problem”. First, we should remember what some people know as normal—that nobody in their family has passed an exam—and, secondly, we should remember that people do not want to be told one more time that they are stupid. If we do that, we will start to chip away a little at our hard core and make the system a little more accessible to the people in that group. It is not a miracle cure but it might take away some of the problem.