Equality of Opportunity for Young People

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak in this debate and to follow some inspirational and knowledgeable contributions. I thank my noble friend Lady Grender for her powerful introduction and for the way she set about organising this debate—listening to young people, holding a webinar and putting together a package of proposals. It is a model for how other debates might be organised.

I am the father of a child born in the millennium—I never say “millennial”—and work from time to time with young researchers and interns in Parliament. I have been thinking quite a bit about the gap between Peers and the current generation of young people—not just in years. I am not particularly religious but I recall a verse from Matthew chapter 13, verse 12:

“For whoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance. But whoever does not have, from him shall be taken away even that which he has”.


This sounds like a pretty good account of the 21st-century reality for many young people.

Certainly, most of us in this Chamber were among those who, according to Harold Macmillan in 1957,

“never had it so good”.

We grew up in a country where the then Prime Minister was able to claim that,

“you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime—nor indeed in the history of this country”.

We remain one of the world’s wealthiest countries, and even during the great austerity, our generation has continued to benefit from free prescriptions, free TV licences, bus passes and the winter fuel allowance. Compare that with what our young people have lost in the name of austerity: education maintenance allowances, affordable bus services—if there are any at all—the decimation of youth services, the decline of services provided by the voluntary sector, and dare I mention university fees?

We have heard much—perhaps too much—about social mobility as the golden thread that is meant to underpin many of the Government’s policy initiatives. Everyone in government, from the Prime Minister down, talks about a moral responsibility to reduce inequality. Too many young people suffer many of the injustices that the Prime Minister spoke of in the speech she delivered in Downing Street just a couple of years ago. On equality of opportunity, the current Administration are word perfect when they talk the talk but trip and stumble whenever they try to walk the walk. There is perhaps no finer or more detailed analysis of how unequal opportunities are than the latest report of the Social Mobility Commission. Noble Lords will recall that the previous commission resigned en masse 15 months ago. The new commission’s message in its analysis, the State of the Nation 2018-19, can be summed up as: on social mobility we are going backwards.

I want to talk about schools and education. I listened with great interest and awe to the contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and I agree with everything they said. I will add just two other things. First, the EBacc has seen the creative and arts subjects in our schools squeezed and squeezed. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, rightly said, we see the maintained sector having fewer opportunities with regard to creative and arts subjects than the independent sector.

The second issue, which was briefly mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, is our teachers, who are crucial to providing opportunities for our children and young people. I do not believe that you can train a teacher over a five-week intensive course, call it whatever you want—Teach First, or whatever. That is not the way you train a quality teacher. Teachers need to learn about child development, psychology and special educational needs to be able to motivate their children and young people. They themselves need to be highly trained, to have continuing professional development and to be respected—to be the linchpin of our education system. Sadly, we now see schools where there are shortage subjects, so supply teachers are brought in or the subject is taught by teachers who have no passionate understanding or knowledge of it. We also see a workforce strategy for teachers where we have to quickly try to recruit people in all sorts of different ways.

I am saddened by how we have allowed this situation in our schools to happen. In our primary schools, at one stage, it was a period of joy: looking forward to education. We now have a regime that develops SATs, creates league tables and puts pressure on children. That is not the way that children should develop. They should enjoy and be encouraged to enjoy the thrills of learning and discovery.

We are one of the wealthiest countries on this planet. It is surely a disgrace that while the number of banks is decreasing—admittedly, because many people use online banking and pay for everything with a credit card—the number of food banks is increasing. According to Napoleon, an army marches on its stomach. Many of our young people do not march but walk unwillingly to school or college on an empty stomach. Only yesterday, the End Child Poverty report showed that poverty is the new normal.

If we put to one side those who are really poor—as the Government seem to do without too much concern—children and young people have a very different quality of life compared with the life experiences of those of us in this Chamber. The children I taught in Liverpool at the beginning of my career lived simple but limited lives. They had a television, but no one had a telephone at home or a motorcar, as they were then called, and few went on holiday.

In the 21st century, there are still children who live similar lives, but even those without a smart device at home have access to the internet at school or in the local library—those that are still open. This has brought a whole range of opportunities to every young person. They can set up an email account, open a Facebook page, join a WhatsApp group or join Instagram.

The internet does not make judgments on the basis of your accent, what school you attended, what your parents do, whether you went to university and, if so, which one, whether you are rich, and so on. The collection of judgments about people that underpin our class system and ensure that the few maintain their superiority over the many are not made by Google, although it and other companies collect data that enable them to get to know you very well.

However, the downside of the internet is the pressure put on young people, especially the vulnerable. Social media works 24/7, and unless you switch off your smartphone, iPad or computer, there is no escape from it. Young people today are under huge pressure to meet what is promoted as the norm, particularly in terms of body image. Everyone promoting themselves—and, often, commercial products—on the internet is always a perfect shape, with high-fashion clothes and the latest gadgets. We hear about the reality of their lives only when they go into a clinic because of drink, drugs or mental health issues.

In the previous debate, we learned much about what is happening to the mental health of our young people and the need for the Government to make urgent headway to improve mental health services. We are training teachers in every school to identify mental health issues in young people, and there is now a scheme to train sports coaches to spot young people with mental health issues. These measures are welcome—early intervention is always better than a cure—but it is not enough simply to respond to crises in young people. Months after a Green Paper pledged to make Britain the safest place in the world to be online, it took—very sadly—the suicide of a young girl to speed up the Government’s response to taking seriously the contribution of social media to young suicides. Perhaps in the same way, it took a suicide to persuade ITV to take “The Jeremy Kyle Show” off the air.

In my final minute, I make a challenge to young people themselves. They have it in their own hands to change the way we think by going to vote, by using the ballot box. It is very alarming that 18 to 30 year-olds are the lowest percentage of voters, while those aged 50 to 70 are the highest. If young people went out to vote, Governments of the day of any political colour would take note and, when they took note, some of the issues that we have been raising and are concerned about would be acted on.