Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Meg Hillier and Kelvin Hopkins

Monday 29th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

14. What assessment he has made of the 2012 GCSE English results; and if he will make a statement.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

16. What assessment he has made of the 2012 GCSE English results; and if he will make a statement.

Social Mobility

Debate between Meg Hillier and Kelvin Hopkins

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this vital debate. I think that on this occasion we have common ground, and we are all hon. Friends. It is easy to talk the talk, but I want to talk a bit about how we can walk the walk, in ensuring that we achieve some results.

I declare that I am now happily a vice-chair of the all-party group on social mobility. It is appropriate that I take on that responsibility because I represent one of the poorest boroughs in the country. I do not want to bombard Members with statistics, but it is important to set in context some of the reasons why I am particularly interested in this issue. The latest child poverty statistics from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, from 2009, show that the London average for children living in poverty is 29.6%, and the national figure is 21%, whereas the figure for Hackney is more than double that, at nearly 46%.

A decade ago, Hackney schools were not delivering results; they were a byword for people fleeing Hackney. People were coming to see me about how they could get their children into schools outside the borough, but now they beg me to do anything I can to get their children into schools in Hackney. Through the London Challenge, and the local authority and elected mayor embracing every opportunity provided by any Government, we have new, fresh-start schools. The Labour Government provided us with academies and we have had another, along with a university technical college, agreed under this Government.

In Hackney in 2004, the figure for pupils achieving five A* to C grades, including maths and English, was 29%, and in 2011 it was 57%. There were some very high achieving schools, including Mossbourne community academy in my constituency, which achieved 84% such grades, and nine offers of places at Cambridge the year before last. A number of our schools are, of course, not yet at the GCSE stage because they were fresh starts. We are seeing huge achievement in schools. We are also seeing that background poverty is not an excuse for lower achievement, and that we can challenge that stereotypical assumption. With good rigour and good teaching in schools, we can achieve results.

Hackney may have its poverty, but there is no poverty of ambition, as the results show. Education maintenance allowance take-up was high in the borough, with 3,611 young people receiving it, and that was a significant factor. I met one young woman who said that on a Thursday she would use her allowance to put money on the electricity key, so that she could have light and heating in the house, for the family to live and for her to do her homework. The allowance was used for very basic things. In a debate a couple of weeks ago, I raised my concerns about what is happening to the young people who really need the support. Although there have been some attempts to bridge the gap, I am not yet convinced that those attempts will do what the education maintenance allowance did for young people in Hackney.

A really good example of what Hackney schools are achieving is that we are seeing huge results, even though the free school meals take-up at secondary school level represents 40% of pupils—in London as a whole the figure is 25%, and nationally it is 16%. Those figures are another indicator of the challenges but, in spite of that, 40% of Hackney pupils in maintained schools went into higher education in 2008-2009, according to the latest figures available from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

The Minister will know that the statistics are not perfect, because tracking is difficult, and I completely endorse the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles about having an alumni system, because there is not enough follow-through for young people. Nationally, the percentage of children on free school meals who go on to university is 17%, so we are achieving well in Hackney, with what might be described as a challenging cohort. There is a good track record, but improving educational results is clearly not enough.

From talking to young people, I have picked up that they very much need the kind of networks that my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles talked about. I will say a little about that, and about why I have got involved in helping to develop the idea locally. Members might have read a book by Andrew Adonis—now Lord Adonis—entitled “A Class Act”.

The book is out of print, and I am urging him to update it. It highlights the closed nature of professions, which is an issue that has been brought bang up to date by the Government’s independent reviewer on social mobility, Alan Milburn, in his report entitled “Fair Access to Professional Careers”, which has already been cited. I will not repeat everything that the report says—I am sure many Members are familiar with it—but one thing it recognises is that professions will account for 83% of all new jobs in Britain in the next decade. Unless we get greater access to professions from across all groups, we will be cutting out an awful lot of people from new jobs.

Some professions have made good progress. In the civil service, for example, of the top 200 civil servants in 2012, 27% were privately educated, compared with 45% just three years ago in 2009. That has happened as a result not of this Government’s activities or even, to a degree, those of the previous Government, but of an organisation recognising that it did not represent the people whom it serves.

We need to look at the professions’ grip on how they recruit. I visited a school in Hackney the other week—I will touch on what I am doing with some schools—whose pupils said that they needed contacts, particularly in banking, an industry in which I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) formerly worked. Some 90% of jobs in banking go to people who have already had some work experience, but those placements usually go to the children of partners or clients. That cuts out pretty much everybody in a Hackney school, yet we are on the edge of the City and have very good links with UBS, which sponsors an academy in Hackney, and with KPMG—another bank and accountancy firm—and the City of London, which both sponsor another academy. We must keep challenging, and I will touch on some of the work that I have been doing in that regard.

Another issue raised by Alan Milburn’s report is the desire to make internships paid positions and accessible to all. I want to focus on accessibility. I do not completely disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles. We need properly paid internships, but my worry—we need to be careful about this—is that if that is the only route that we follow, we will move the point at which young people will be selected for those positions to the interview stage. Are all our young people ready for that? If we are going to do this properly, it is about not just securing payment for internships, but ensuring that young people are prepared so that they are not as nervous my right hon. Friend was when she went for her first interview. They need to be ready.

We have all heard horror stories about interviews and I want to share one that will sound unbelievable. I will not name the source, because it might embarrass him. A young person from another part of the country—not my own—was keen to study medicine and had an interview at Cambridge. He had done a lot of preparation, but when he turned up for the interview and walked into the room, he saw three men sitting on the floor, ready to conduct it. That is a recent example.

We have all heard stories like the one involving a tutor who threw a rugby ball when candidates entered the room to see whether they could catch it. If they caught it, they got a place, and if they converted it, they got a scholarship. Such stories may be anecdotal, but they demonstrate that there are issues with regard to how universities admit students. I will touch on that later, if I have time. As with internships, we need to look at all aspects of access, not just the money, and make sure that people feel comfortable.

Our local sixth form college in Hackney, BSix, has introduced something called the red room. It has kitted out a room in the college to make it look like an Oxbridge don’s study. It is book-lined, has low chairs and has a courtyard outside. A fellow from Oxford turns up every week to talk to pupils, teach them in the room and give them a feel of what it is like to be in such an environment.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I agree strongly with what my hon. Friend is saying. One of the points that I have made to our sixth form college is that one’s oral expression is absolutely key in interviews. So often it is those from private schools and the middle class who have an enormous advantage simply as a result of how they speak. Giving people the opportunity to learn a more elaborate way of speaking gives them much more of an advantage at interview.

[Meg Hillier]

Absolutely. That is important. The Government buy a lot of business from a lot of organisations, so I ask the Minister whether it would be possible to include a requirement in Government contracts to provide support to young people from the types of background under discussion.