Social Mobility

Lord Coaker Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) on securing this debate. Obviously, party political points can be made about funding and the closure of Sure Start and children’s centres and suchlike but, leaving those to one side, I hope the Minister will not be defensive. He was very defensive in responding to one or two of the comments made and said, “Oh, this is what the Government are doing.” My hon. Friend had a powerful message: there is a need for a national crusade to tackle inequality and social mobility in our country. The various reports that have been mentioned have a powerful message. They state that there has been progress, but under successive Governments it has been slow and the gap between people has increased. It is now a national disgrace that, in one of the richest countries in the world, life is so unequal and so lacking in opportunity for people born into certain situations. The Minister needs to respond to that challenge rather than say, “This is what we are doing.” There is a time for a party political debate, but this is not the right time.

I will explain why I think this issue is so important. I started teaching in 1976. After my post-graduate course, I was able to choose which school I went to. I had studied social background and educational attainment, so I chose to go to a school with some of the most difficult challenges. The school was in an educational priority area. Teachers were paid more money to go there and the best people were recruited. If we went back to that area now, 40 or so years later, we would find that many of the same families are still stuck in a state of poverty and low achievement. I am not a prophet of doom, but that tells us that that situation simply cannot be right. It is simply unacceptable that we drive round our cities or our rural areas and can almost point to where there is low achievement and low aspiration. The challenge to the Government—hopefully the next Labour Government—is what are they going to do about it? We cannot go back to the policies that have not worked or have worked too slowly.

This is difficult for the Minister. We cannot pass a law that says there should be good parenting, but some of our families and parents need more support. It cannot be right that sometimes when a child goes to school or nursery, they cannot use a knife and fork. Something is wrong and we need to look at how we support families to get their children to the point they need to be at to enter our schools or our nurseries. We need to get them to the point where we can really say social mobility is the priority of whatever Government of the day.