Social Mobility

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government policies on social mobility.

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. This debate builds on debates that were called in the previous Parliament. I believe that social mobility—or the lack thereof for the many—is the big issue of our time. It is creating a divided Britain, which not only is bad for our economy and our future, but is the defining issue of our time, as we have seen in recent elections and referendums.

[Thelma Walker (Colne Valley) (Lab)]

The recent report on social mobility confirmed the points that have been raised about our divided nation. Over the past 20 years we have come to have a new geographical divide, an income divide and a generational divide. The geographical divide is between successful city regions and places such as my constituency of Colne Valley and Kirklees, which have seen a lack of regional investment, leading to cuts that are affecting the most vulnerable. This Government have failed to address social inequality in all three areas.

[Lucy Powell]

I thank my new hon. Friend for raising those important points, which I will elaborate on further.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Not that the hon. Lady needs any time to prepare her answer to that question, but may I just say that I think the gentlemen might be suffering a little with the heat? It is very warm, so colleagues should please feel free to remove their jackets.

[Lucy Powell]

That is why some of us wore dresses.

There is the intergenerational inequality and the lack of opportunity for today’s young people to progress, which I think was brought to the fore in the general election, and there is also the huge regional inequality that my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Thelma Walker) mentioned.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on such an important topic. The Government are currently undertaking the youth full-time social action review, and last year I was lucky enough to visit City Year UK, which is a full-time social action programme. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important to support such organisations and that the Government should listen to the review’s recommendations when they are published in December?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I sure that the Minister will listen to what he has to say.

We have huge regional inequality and many communities have been left behind, which I think was expressed in the Brexit vote. We have stubborn wealth inequality, with a growing divide between rich and poor. Our country’s failings on social mobility is the national challenge. As the Social Mobility Commission’s excellent report “Time For Change: An Assessment of Government Policies on Social Mobility 1997-2017” shows, despite some progress and well-intentioned policies, progress by successive Governments over the past 20 years has been painfully slow. The report by the commission, which is chaired by the right hon. Alan Milburn, states that

“successive governments have failed to make social mobility the cornerstone of domestic policy”.

That is the argument that I am putting forward today.

[Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is right to refer to the report, because it is a powerful document. Much of it talks about the need for investment in early years and schools as the vehicle for social mobility. How does she think the Government can square that with the cuts to early years and schools? For example, Parrs Wood High School in my constituency—a school she knows well—faces losing the equivalent of 30 teachers between now and 2020.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Parrs Wood High School, which I attended and which my son now attends, is an outstanding comprehensive school, but it will struggle to continue to be so if those cuts come forward.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

rose—

[Lucy Powell]

Perhaps we will hear more from the Minister on that point.

[Mr Goodwill]

I thank the hon. Lady for calling the debate, which provides us with a good opportunity. Will she welcome the fact that in her constituency 29,686 more children are in good or outstanding schools than were in August 2010? Is not that great progress from this Government?

[Lucy Powell]

We have seen some great progress and I will come on to that. In my constituency most of that progress has come from local leadership as well, and I will mention that later.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

What the Minister says is belied by the fact that in further education in Coventry there have been cuts of roughly 27% and in the youth service there will be no funding for youth leaders, which does not exactly help the situation. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we are not careful we will create another lost generation?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Post-16 and youth service funding is critical to the debate and I will touch on that later.

I urge all colleagues to read the Social Mobility Commission’s powerful report. It highlights the fact that the challenges we faced in 1997 are very different from those we face in 2017. It rightly calls for social mobility to be at the heart of all Government policy, decisions and actions, because it is only through a prolonged, determined and comprehensive Government-wide strategy that we may actually start to change the entrenched inequalities and the lack of social mobility for the many. The social mobility agenda is about the many, not the tiny few we often hear about who manage to get themselves from the council estate to the boardroom or around the Cabinet table. The Prime Minister says that she is looking for a national purpose that brings all parties and the country together, and I say to her that if she made tackling social mobility her calling and the key test for her Government, against which all her actions were tested, she would get wide support from across the House.

Before looking at some of the policy areas where more needs to be done, let us remind ourselves why tackling the divides in Britain is so important. The Sutton Trust has found that failing to improve Britain’s low levels of social mobility will cost the UK economy a staggering £140 billion a year by 2050, or the equivalent of 4% of GDP. On current trends, by 2022 there will be 9 million low-skilled people chasing just 4 million low-skilled jobs, yet there will be a shortfall of 3 million higher-skilled people for the jobs of the future. The economic divides are even starker when we look at the regional disparities. Output per person in London is more than £43,000 a year, yet in the north-east of England it is less than £19,000. London and some of our renewed cities, such as my own city of Manchester, are increasingly the home of graduates and have vibrant growing economies.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Getting kids from ordinary backgrounds to university is a key way of enabling them to move up and get on. Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating the previous Labour Government on increasing student numbers, while acknowledging that there is still work to be done, particularly in post-industrial towns such as Ashfield, where we send only 21% of 18-year-olds to university, compared with an English national average of 32%?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend’s excellent point fits entirely with one of the main thrusts of the Social Mobility Commission’s report, which is that there are huge regional inequalities, particularly between our growing and vibrant cities, where many graduates live and work, and our heartland towns and former industrial places.

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is being very generous in giving way. Does she agree that it is not just geography but ethnicity that makes a difference? We sing long about the successes of London, but if we look at who is doing well in our schools, we see that it tends to be young people from black and Asian backgrounds, with white working-class kids still not making progress.

[Lucy Powell]

That is another excellent point. My hon. Friend will know about that issue from her own constituency.

[Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks)) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lucy Powell]

Yes, but then I will have to make some progress.

[Rishi Sunak]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way, and I commend her for securing this debate on a topic I know she is passionate about, and about which she has spoken passionately in the past. She was just talking about access to higher education. Will she welcome the fact that access for working-class families is at an all-time high, with students from working-class backgrounds now 70% more likely to apply to university than 10 years ago? Indeed, that was one of the areas on which the Milburn report gave a green light when evaluating the Government’s progress.

[Lucy Powell]

I am happy to accept that point, which the report talks about more broadly, but challenges remain. There are some warning signs on the horizon and we should be careful that we do not end up taking a backward step in this important area.

The Social Mobility Commission has found that the generational divide is yawning. Over the past 20 years, poverty among pensioners has halved and their income today, on average, exceeds that of working adults. Meanwhile, young people’s earnings have fallen. That cannot continue. It is no wonder that we saw a huge upsurge of anger, activism and engagement from younger voters at the general election. The wealth and income divide has also become much wider over the past 20 years, with top pay increasing much faster than the incomes of lower earners. In 1998 the highest earners were paid 47 times that of the lowest. By 2015 the highest earners were paid 128 times more than the lowest. Gaps in wealth have also grown exponentially, with home ownership and house price inflation benefiting the lucky few who already own their home. It is not just about the economic price we pay for these failings; as a society, these divisions are causing unrest, anger and resentment. That is leading to political volatility and, arguably, the rise of populism.

Those are just some of the reasons why the social mobility agenda is so important. It needs to be not only at the heart of all Government policy, but a national mission for our country. Successive Prime Ministers—Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and our current Prime Minister—have spoken a great deal about social mobility. Most recently, the current Prime Minister spoke about the “burning injustices” of our society. However, the Government’s approach, while making progress in some areas, has not matched the rhetoric and has been piecemeal and disconnected.

Let us look at what could be done about social mobility. There are many recommendations in the Social Mobility Commission report and from the Sutton Trust, Teach First and many others. Recommendations should not be limited to education policy—far from it. Every Budget, every Bill and every policy should be judged against whether it tackles inequalities and boosts social mobility for everybody, everywhere. There needs to be a single cross-departmental plan to deliver social mobility.

[Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and making an excellent opening speech. We know that the challenge with social mobility begins in childhood. An estimated 3,300 children in my constituency are living in households with problem debt. One suggestion has been to give a breathing space to families facing problem debt by giving them 12 months to try to get back on their feet. Does she agree that that is one step the Government could take to make a big difference to families getting themselves out of problem debt?

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[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. That is another great idea that I hope the Minister will respond to, and it shows the extent to which these policy areas need to be looked at across the piece.

Tackling social mobility also means looking at difficult issues such as inheritance tax, transport spending and social care. All those policies need to be looked at through the lens of social mobility. However, today I will focus on a few areas for which the Minister has responsibility, and for which the evidence and action needed are known and relatively straightforward. The first is early years, which colleagues and the Minister will know is a bug bear of mine, so I hope they will allow me to expand on that for a moment. It is well documented that by the time children reach the age of five there is already a big gap in school readiness or development between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers. Action for Children found that more than half of children from low-income families do not reach the expected milestones by the age of five. Often that gap is never fully closed during a child’s schooling.

Given that we know some of what works, why are we not doing more? Over the past 20 years we have made some progress through family support services, Sure Start centres, quality early education and targeted approaches, such as the offer for two-year-olds. However, in recent times and with what is upcoming, the agenda seems to be moving backwards.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that one of the Departments that needs to be brought into this conversation is the Home Office? I am thinking specifically about incidents of domestic violence, which have been increasing in my constituency. Experiencing and being a victim of domestic violence impacts on children, particularly very young children, and their educational attainment.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Being in a domestic violence setting at home can have the most profound impact on the outcome of any child. We need to link that with children’s services and other family support services. She is absolutely right.

The Government’s emphasis is now almost entirely on childcare support for working families. That is a laudable aim in itself, but it perhaps focuses huge resources away from social mobility outcomes. Almost all the money for the 30 hours of free childcare for working families and tax-free childcare will go towards better-off families. Those policies are taking the Government’s focus away from other issues. By definition, the most disadvantaged do not get the extra support, and the delivery of the new policies is also having a real impact on quality institutions

[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady must understand that people working 16 hours on the minimum wage qualify for the additional 15 hours of funded childcare. Indeed, many people who cannot get into the workplace because of the cost of childcare will take the opportunity of 30 hours of childcare from September. That policy is a great achievement and will improve social mobility among people on low wages.

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[Lucy Powell]

By definition, the most disadvantaged will not benefit from the policy. What we are seeing in some places, certainly in Manchester and other local authority areas, is that free childcare was given to the most disadvantaged, but that is now having to be switched from them to deliver the 30 hours for working families, and that surely is not what the Government intended. The Minister needs to have a look at that. Another unintended consequence of the new offer is the impact on our maintained nursery schools, which are an outstanding resource. Every single one—100%—of our maintained nursery schools are good or outstanding. Nearly all of them are in areas of high deprivation and disadvantage, but due to the new funding formula and the changes to funding, they are now under threat. Ministers need to look at the policies they are delivering and ensure that they meet the social mobility test and are not simply about getting people back into work.

Action for Children, the Social Mobility Commission and many others are calling for a clear plan to boost social mobility in the early years. That must include quality teaching, family support, children centres getting the resources they need and boosting the early years pupil premium. What happened to the life chances strategy that the Government spent two or three years working towards? It seems to have evaporated overnight.

Next, I want to turn my attention to schools. I do not want to take up too much time, although I have taken lots of interventions. As Teach First has shown, the social mobility challenge in our schools remains. While much progress has been made at primary, progress remains slow at key stage 4. One in three teenagers from poor families achieves basic GCSEs, compared with two thirds overall. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) highlighted, if bright children from poor families had the same support as others, four in 10 would go to a top university. Today, only one in 10 does.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing an important debate. She is making some excellent points, but in improving the life chances of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, is there not a case for putting money behind university outreach programmes to identify young people with ability and talent, as happened under the previous Labour Government? That would make opportunities for those people so that they can be helped into careers that they otherwise might not have thought were even possible, such as healthcare, where there is a real lack of people from working class and disadvantaged backgrounds.

[Lucy Powell]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The widening participation agenda has been successful in places and is important, but other barriers to getting those jobs remain for kids who perhaps do not have the same social networks or support at home, even if they have the same qualifications as some of their peers.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech in this important debate. I think we can build a cross-party consensus, based on the report, about access to social and emotional learning. I might call it character education—I think one of her predecessors as shadow Secretary of State for Education and I debated that issue. Persistence, resilience and grit skills, as well as self-confidence and self-belief, are very important. They are often not given the same weight and therefore those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds do not get that access; access to extra-curricular activities is picked up in a similar way. Would the hon. Lady agree that that is something from the debate that could benefit from cross-party working?

[Lucy Powell]

I strongly agree with the right hon. Lady. I thank her for the joint working we have done on some of the issues in the past, and I hope that that will continue. When she was Secretary of State for Education, she was a strong champion for character education and extra-curricular education. I hope that that is something we can all work on going forward.

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)]

All the additions are absolutely right, but the foundation has got to be strong as well; the funding for our school places is important. If my son Jack decides to go to university, he will be the first in our family to do that, but the school that he is attending faces losing 19 teachers. The sixth-form college that he would almost certainly go to faces losing 22 teachers. At the same time, the Government have wasted more than £10 million on a failed university technical college and a failed free school. How can that make sense?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend raises a very important point. I know that he has been championing the issues in Oldham, and I hope to work with him to continue to do that. I will say something on school funding in a moment, if I could make some progress.

Of all the measures and policies of the last 20 years, one that stands out as transformational for our schools is the London Challenge. London went from having some of the worst schools to now achieving the narrowest attainment gap of anywhere in the country. It is a key part of the overall London effect; 30 of the top 50 constituencies for social mobility are in London.

There are two key learnings from the London Challenge, which are now seriously at risk. The first is the supply of great teachers. The Minister’s colleague in the Department for Education has finally started to recognise that recruitment and retention are major issues. Figures obtained by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) show that a quarter of teachers who have qualified since 2011 have left the profession. Statistic after statistic backs that up, and we know that it is the poorest children and the struggling schools that suffer most when teacher numbers drop.

Teachers deserve a pay rise. Yesterday’s pay settlement is a huge disappointment. Real wages of teachers are down by more than 10%. But it is not just about pay; it is about workload and the constant changes to curriculums and expectations. Ministers really must get a grip of the issue and do it fast.

The second learning from the London Challenge is about funding, which my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) mentioned. The increase in school budgets over many years, coupled with targeted support such as the pupil premium, has had a real impact on the attainment gap, which was narrowing until very recently. It has narrowed significantly in London, where funding was boosted the most. The real terms cuts to schools’ budgets that schools are now having to make—before we even get to the national funding formula—will, again, hit the poorest hardest. Interventions, extra support and supported activities all benefit the poorest most. Recent teacher polling has shown that a third of school leaders are now using the pupil premium to plug the gaps in general funding, that almost two thirds of secondary heads had had to cut back on teaching staff and that schools with more disadvantaged intakes were the most likely to report cuts to staffing.

The Government are totally kidding themselves if they think that the real terms cuts to school budgets, together with the teacher supply crisis, are not going to show in a widening of the attainment gap and a major step back in social mobility in our schools.

[Gloria De Piero]

I met with the headteacher of Ashfield Comprehensive yesterday. The school faces a budget cut of almost £1 million from last September to this September, and he is facing a choice between bigger class sizes and fewer subjects. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is the sort of thing that hinders social mobility?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Those are some of the unpalatable decisions that headteachers are having to make. There is no question but that those decisions will have a real impact on outcomes, so I am sure we would all support the Minister going back to the Treasury to say that the real-terms cuts need addressing, and quickly.

Social mobility should be at the heart of education policy; every part of the system should work to unleash the talents of all young people. That means that existing grammar schools must do more to tackle the issues, rather than entrenching advantage and damaging wider social mobility. I am very pleased that the Government have dropped their plans to open new grammar schools. However, they said that they would tackle social mobility in existing grammar schools. Figures that I have released today show that since 2016, the number of children on free school meals in grammar schools has hardly shifted at all—it has gone up by just 0.1 percentage point—despite calls from Ministers that existing grammar schools should increase their intake of low-income children.

In the “Schools that work for Everyone” consultation, Ministers said that existing grammar schools needed to do more. They are now saying that they feel that they have fulfilled that objective and so are dropping plans to require existing grammar schools to address the issue. If existing grammar schools do not reform their admissions and play their part in boosting social mobility, they should cease to receive public funding. We should be rewarding the schools that do the most for pupil progress for the majority of pupils, and that narrow the attainment gap, which is why we should reform league tables so that they show not just attainment but pupil progress, and progress in narrowing the attainment gap.

I cannot cover everything in the short time we have. Needless to say, huge gaps remain in post-16 education. I hope that the new T-levels and quality apprenticeships will help to address that, but that will happen only if they remain focused entirely on social mobility outcomes and people do not get distracted by other agendas. As others have said, and as the Sixth Form Colleges Association and others have shown, post-16 funding in Britain is still among the lowest in the OECD. We need to address that too.

As we have discussed previously, access to university and, crucially, outcomes and access to work beyond university remain a huge concern. Too few graduates are working in graduate jobs; in fact, we have the third lowest level of graduates working in graduate jobs of all OECD countries. The only countries behind us in that league table are Greece and Estonia. That is a travesty and it brings into question whether the debt, and the exercise, is worth it. Destinations of graduates and others are still most determined not by qualification and ability but by networks and social connections.

We could have a whole other debate about regional inequalities and how we boost social mobility everywhere. The devolution agenda that we all support must also have social mobility at its heart.

I know that the Minister will want to tell us why we cannot afford any of these plans. I would say that we cannot afford not to do them. Our economy and society pays a heavy price for people working below their ability and for wasted talent and wasted communities. The Minister’s economics are false economics and will end up costing us dear in the long run. Achieving a step-change in social mobility for the many, not just the lucky few, is the challenge of our time. Opportunity and progress for the young, a new deal for left-behind communities and a radical rethink on tax and spend policies all need reshaping around a new national mission to make Britain a world leader in social mobility, not a country that sits towards the bottom of the pack, as we do today. Although Brexit will dominate and define, I am sure that we across the House will all come together around that national mission.

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[Mr Goodwill]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. When I was first elected, I visited a school in one of the most deprived areas of my constituency. The head, who had come from another part of the country, said, “If we were in the middle of Rotherham, Bradford or Hull, we would be getting about 30% more money because of the school funding formula.” People in North Yorkshire certainly look forward to that being addressed.

As well as increasing school quality, we are strengthening the teaching profession, opening up access to higher education, transforming technical education, delivering 3 million apprenticeship places and investing in careers education. Beyond that progress, the Department is delivering against its social mobility priorities in several specific ways. We are tackling geographic disadvantage by focusing efforts on supporting specific areas that face the greatest challenges and have the fewest opportunities. We are investing £72 million in 12 opportunity areas—social mobility “cold spots” where the Department is working with a range of local partners to break the link between a person’s background and their destination. Those areas face some of the most entrenched challenges, as described in the Social Mobility Commission’s index last year.

Our approach goes beyond what the Department for Education and central Government can do alone; it extends to local authorities, schools, academy sponsors, local and national businesses, local enterprise partnerships, further education colleges, universities and the voluntary sector. Through that process, we will not just build opportunity now but lay the foundations for future generations. I was in Oldham on Thursday, and I was particularly impressed by the ambition and motivation in that opportunity area. Indeed, I am no stranger to some of the challenges in such areas—one of them is in my constituency. Hon. Members will note that that opportunity area had already been designated when I took on my current role.

Tackling geographic disadvantage is important, but so is investing in the long-term capacity of the education system. We are absolutely clear that some of the biggest improvements in social mobility can be achieved by deploying high-quality teaching. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Manchester Central said in her opening remarks, we have more teachers in our schools than ever before. There are now more than 457,000 teachers in state-funded schools throughout England, which is 15,500 more than in 2010.

[Lucy Powell]

I know that I will have a moment to sum up at the end, but just for the record, although we may have more teachers than ever before, there are also many more pupils than ever before. In relative terms, there is a chronic teacher supply issue.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Order. Just for the record, there is no guarantee that the hon. Lady will have time at the end. The Minister might wish to give her two minutes to wind up, but it is entirely in his gift.

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[Lucy Powell]

I thank the Minister for his wind-up speech and for allowing me a short moment to thank those who have spoken in the debate. There have been some really thoughtful speeches and much agreement across the Chamber. I hope that that spirit can continue in these debates.

As ever, there were fantastic and important speeches from my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), from my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on social mobility, and from my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), who raised some important points. I could also agree with almost the entire speeches of the hon. Members for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton) and for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson). I thank them for their contributions.

The turnout for the debate shows that there is a huge appetite to get cross-party agreement on these issues. I hope that that continues over the coming months, and that social mobility becomes part of a national mission we can all get behind so that we can really create the equal and fair society we all aspire to.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered Government policies on social mobility.