Social Mobility Committee Report

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, and her committee on its report. It is absolutely brilliant. I have read it. It has everything in it, including the kitchen sink. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fraser of Corriegarth, on joining the House. I hope he has a very pleasant time. I have been in about nine months, and it has been a holiday; it has been great. Everybody has been incredibly nice, which is great.

I do not like the term “social mobility”. The only reason we use it is because we are talking about people who are not mobile. If you are mobile, you do not say so. If you go to Eton or Harrow, or Oxford or Cambridge—if you are Ed Balls, for instance—you would never talk about your social mobility, although he probably came from meaner circumstances. I would rather that we used the term “social opportunity”. Social mobility is a recognition of failure, a recognition of the fact that society is made up of certain tiers and certain people do not move up. Therefore, we have to put a label on it and bless everybody with the hope that we—Governments, social investors, trusts, charities and so on—can move on.

My problem is that we do not recognise several things which are a bit outside the report. One is that what we are trying to give a child who comes to the age of 14, 16 or 19 and moving on in life is social literacy. We want to make them literate, so that they can read and write; we want to make them socially literate so that when they go before someone who asks them, “So what do you think about the war in Syria?”, or “What do you think about the football results?”, they have a loquacity and openness. That is what you get if you go to a public school—I have not been to a public school; I have been to a prison, which is a bit like it in certain ways.

What the middle or upper-class child has been sold, what their parents have been buying for centuries, is social literacy. They go on to university or they do not, but they move on and have an ease and ability to move around society and take on a job. They may not be trained in insurance or banking, but they fit in well and very quickly they rise and assume a position of prominence. That is social literacy—it is the ability to be chummy, to be open, to take on new knowledge and be excited about life. That is what we are trying to give our young people from the age of 14 to 16. Unfortunately, we are not doing very well, which is why there is a need for us to form a committee and call it the Social Mobility Committee.

We do not seem to be dealing with the economic forces behind the fact that we have been happy for decades to produce people who do not have social mobility. When the Beatles came along and made more money than God, we all realised that the world was divided and asked: “Isn’t it strange that some people who come from the back of beyond get out of it, get a shedload of money, move on and buy big houses?”. For many centuries, we were quite happy with the fact that there was no social mobility; it was not really important. I went to a Catholic secondary modern school at the age of 11, having failed my 11-plus. I came out at 15. Nobody was particularly upset that I could not read and write, because you do not need that on a building site. You need a pair of tough hands and to be able to drink, but not at work, and to take the battering that takes place when you are loading concrete into a basement.

All that has disappeared. What is to replace it? The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has been working very hard on colleges, and he asks: why do 70% of German young people have some understanding or work experience of engineering? It is very simple. Our banks lend 87% of their money to the buying and selling of property, and put only 13% into business. In Germany, 20% of the money lent by banks is for the buying and selling of property; 80% is invested in business, new technology, infrastructure, universities and even libraries. We must reject the old system of the lack of social mobility because we know, as Mark Carney was saying the other day at John Moores University, that 15 million skilled people—people from the middle-class—will be lost. We already know that 95% of accountants will disappear in the next five to 10 years, and over the next 10 to 15 years there will be a real shedding of labour.

We are in a precarious situation yet we are, rightly, talking about social mobility. It is an expression of the fact that a child will leave school at the age of 14 and move into some form of training which will lead them to a fulfilled life, a life full of social opportunity. That is exactly what we want, but to achieve that, we will have to break out of the silos that government operates in. Do the Ministers for education, social mobility, this, that and the other ever meet people in the marketplace? We have an enormous investment crisis on our hands, so that we now cannot even afford austerity, but we seem to be going on with it. All these things come together when we are talking about social mobility.

We need to scrap the curriculum and come up with one that reflects the needs of a society which is utterly devoted to making our children, our young people, cognitive democrats. That means that they know the difference between things. What was the Brexit thing? As I said in the Moses Room the other day, all the people I met who wanted to leave did not know what they were talking about, and all the people I met who wanted to stay did not know what they were talking about. We do not live in a cognitive democracy. We are not experts and we do not train our children to be experts. The world will have to be a world of experts in the future. The world will have to be totally and utterly different if we want to make Mark Carney eat his words. That is one of the problems that we have.

I was with a group of teachers the other day. I gave a talk and did all sorts of stuff. I spoke to them afterwards and asked, “What are your biggest problems?”. They are teaching five to 11 year-olds. They said that their biggest problem was that they could not get on with teaching because they are testers. They said, “That is what we do. We keep testing, testing and testing. We want to know where the children are and are never allowed to get on with our pure role of teaching”. They also said, “We have to be policemen because there is breakdown in society. We have to be coppers. We have to be mums and dads. We have to be Big Brother and all that”.

If we are talking about social mobility, the only thing I would add to the report is a couple of hundred pages about the crisis in which we are living, which is about the marketplace. The marketplace has to be reformed. We have to make enormous investments into business so that we can grow the businesses that will need the children, and we will have to spend a shedload of money in education. We spend £19 billion a year directly on education—not all the other stuff that goes with it—but it should be twice that.