Social Mobility Commission: State of the Nation Report

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

I associate myself with all the remarks made about the senseless, horrific events of yesterday, and with the tributes paid to the people who lost their lives, including the brave police officer who was defending us all.

It is important that we continue undeterred to debate this important “State of the Nation” report by the Social Mobility Commission. I was an academic sociologist before I came to this place. Having turned into a politician, I sometimes feel that there is something of a mismatch between theory and practice. Academics kind of think that something works if it works in theory, but, as politicians, we might have the media in our face and have to think of a quick soundbite, or there might be someone in our surgery who needs a problem resolved quickly. I am still grappling with the same questions of social class and life chances that I grappled with as an academic.

It is important that we all reject the notion that we have had enough of experts, and part of the reason that I wanted to speak in this debate is that the people on the commission are eminent academics and practitioners. I want particularly to focus on chapter 2, which is on schools. I am incredibly privileged to represent the constituency I grew up in. I recall the same schools that I visit now in the ’80s, when they had buckets strategically positioned to catch the drips under leaky roofs. Those schools were transformed under Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme: some of them look like spaceships now. My alma mater, Montpelier Primary School, where I achieved my lifetime ambition in June 2015 by cutting the ribbon at the fête, should particularly go on the record.

This morning, the Prime Minister praised London as the greatest city on earth, and I am proud to be a London MP. People have mentioned the so-called fair funding formula, but 70% of London schools will be worse off under these new arrangements.

In my constituency, school budgets will be down by a whopping £5,524,197 by 2019—that is 137 teachers. An average child will receive £485.52 less funding. The problem is most acute in Acton, where we have wards in some of the poorest deciles. I will be doing my surgery in Acton High School tomorrow, and my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) mentioned how people come along to our surgeries with horrific stories about their housing conditions—they bring their mobile phones with pictorial evidence of the conditions they are living in—and about how they have been shipped far away because of the bedroom tax. However, Acton High School will be down £961 per pupil and 26 teachers, and its budget will be down by £1 million.

The recommendations in chapter 2, on page 53, talk about how children from poorer backgrounds are experiencing a worrying drop-off in progress at secondary. The gap in progress between low-income families and their more affluent counterparts has been widening year on year since 2012, and we should be very concerned about that. One of the report’s recommendations is to ensure that funding cuts do not exacerbate the problem of less well-off pupils failing to make good progress at secondary, so the idea that this funding formula is fair is simply laughable.

As has been said, school education does not exist in a vacuum; the whole context of children’s learning is important. I was very fortunate to address a conference by a group called What About the Children?, which deals with nought to three-year-olds. As a parent, I was lucky enough to use Sure Start centres. Sure Start was an amazing, joined-up programme, with education and health services to give kids a good grounding. But the children’s centres I used to use now face devastating cuts and closures. We have also seen cuts in health promotion, with fewer health visitors. All that is contributing to a picture that is getting bleaker. It is little wonder that it was revealed this week that baby teeth removals—extractions of baby teeth from children!—have gone up 24% in the last decade.

The right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) mentioned parents’ evenings. I have to say that because of the five-hour lockdown yesterday, I managed to miss my parents’ evening—some people might say, “The lengths people will go to to get out of parents’ evenings!” However, the right hon. Lady is absolutely right that all these things—and having books in the house—make for a positive learning environment.

There is a lot that could be said about this report. Chapter 3 goes on to post-16 education and training. I worry about rising tuition fees. In my seat, I have the University of West London, and I have had representations from staff and students that applications are down because of tuition fees and also because of the vote on 23 June—Brexit has created a climate in which international students no longer feel welcome. The removal of the nurse bursary—the university teaches nurses—is also detrimental to post-16 training and education and to jobs, and chapter 4 talks about jobs, careers and earnings for future generations.

In their Budget just the other week—it feels like it was ages ago, but it was only the week before last—the Government announced not only that they are ploughing on with their dangerous selective school experiment, but that they will provide free transport to grammars, which seems such a misplaced priority at a time of straitened circumstances.

There is much more that could be said. The eye-catching new 30 hours of free childcare sound good in theory, but try finding a provider in practice who can live up to that manifesto pledge by delivering those 30 hours and who thinks that the funding will be adequate to cover the increased costs it will incur in my seat. It is like looking for hen’s teeth. Things are harder than they should be anyway. In London, families spend £15,700 a year on average on nursery fees. We all want the holy grail of affordable, good quality, flexible childcare, but it is a challenge to find it, to put it mildly. The childcare proposal is one of those things—like the decision to have an in/out referendum on Europe—that seem good in a manifesto but do not measure up to their promise.

Many sociologists these days consider the concept of life course, and my casework involves people right across the age range. We heard in the previous debate about the Equitable Life pensioners. The WASPI women, who were born in the 1950s, had high hopes for their futures and their life course, and they feel as though the trajectory of their lives has been thwarted twice by Tory Government changes to their pensions.

As everyone has pointed out, there has largely been consensus in this debate, with its cross-party ethos, and that is very welcome. Rather than pursuing an academic idea of making things work in theory, we need to work together to fix them in practice. It is assumed that every generation will do better than the previous one, but the evidence in the Social Mobility Commission’s report suggests that we are going in the wrong direction. Yesterday we were faced with lockdown, and we really were all in it together. At times like that, cross-party friendships and alliances flourish. Let us continue in this spirit, and let us heed the warnings and correct our erroneous direction of travel.