Social Mobility

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. Listening to her stories, I commend to her Alan Johnson’s memoir of his childhood, which tells a similar and brilliant story. I say at the outset that I have just started working for Brent Council, chairing a commission on social mobility, which reflects on the achievement in their schools, which are now outperforming the national average but with no impact on social mobility or poverty. The council wants to understand that. That reflects my interest in community social mobility as much as individual social mobility. I very much welcome the debate and the way in which it was introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler.

By happy coincidence, today is also marked by Ofsted publishing its excellent report, Unseen Children: Access and Achievement 20 Years On. It is a welcome return by the Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, to focus on outcomes for disadvantaged pupils in England. Ofsted has found that underperformance is no longer dominated by areas with concentrations of deprivation. There is an explicit acknowledgement of the success of Labour’s London Challenge, set up by Stephen Twigg MP and then taken over by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, the subsequent Manchester Challenge, overseen by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, and the Black Country Challenge, which I looked after. Those challenges used data to shine a light on underperformance and to identify top-performing leaders who could then support and challenge those schools and leaders who needed it most. The report therefore points to the importance of collaboration and to Governments taking a strategic approach to focus attention where improvement is needed.

I very much welcome the message from Ofsted that the rest of the country can learn from London. If Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets can raise results for free school meal pupils by 20% over five years and be 15% to 20% better than the national average, then anyone can. In the same period, my home county of Dorset managed only a 2% improvement for free school meals children, remaining 10% below the national average for those poorer pupils. It is high time that we shook schools in rural and coastal areas out of any complacency and used data to expose the underachievement of those who need good education more than most.

If we solve those problems in school, would we solve the problems of social mobility? Sadly, we need to do more. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, we need to build resilience, to build the capability of all of us to deal with mistakes, to take risks and to learn from failure, to celebrate that failure, to have the traditional stiff upper lip but with empathy. That resilience is being strategically built in London boroughs such as Newham and Islington at both community and individual level. Alongside Every Child a Reader and Every Child Counts, Newham has Every Child a Musician as a programme and, as a council, has a huge volunteering programme for 7,000 elderly people. Elsewhere, organisations such as the Transformation Trust and Future First are doing a great job in offering after-school activity and state school alumni programmes which mirror some of the success of the private sector.

If we build resilience, will that do the trick? Another great obstacle remains. That is the poverty trap. I cannot see how children can get the support that they need at home, working with schools, or a richness of aspiration when they are burdened by acute poverty. Growing numbers of families, in Devon as much as Durham, are dependent on food banks to feed their families. The shortage of affordable housing to rent or own is common across rural and coastal areas and leads to overcrowding and very difficult study environments for children. Free-school-meal children need free school meals, but they are being cut. Rising debt leads to relationship breakdown. All of those features of poverty are getting worse. We need a welfare state that is not about managing poverty but more about helping people get out of poverty.

The Government are making life very uncomfortable for people dependent on welfare, but lack of time prevents me giving your Lordships anecdotes of the stories I have heard by those affected by the single-room rate and the benefit cap in Brent. The poverty trap is deepening, and increased homelessness, criminality and child poverty is the natural consequence. That in turn will further damage the social mobility and our country will continue to pay the price in a tragic waste of talent.