Social Mobility

Shabana Mahmood Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, as it was to serve under that of Mr Hollobone earlier.

This is an extremely important subject, and I congratulate the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on securing the debate, and on their excellent introduction, which helped to set it in a wide context. I pay tribute to the work of the all-party group on social mobility, and its excellent report, “Seven Key Truths about Social Mobility”, which has done much to inform the debate, both in Parliament and beyond.

The debate has been excellent and wide-ranging, with passionate speeches on both sides. The hon. Member for East Hampshire set, as I said, a strong context for the debate, and made the point that at each stage of the education and employment spectrum it is normal to blame the previous stages for social mobility problems. I can relate to that—I am sure that the Minister can too—because in my conversations about university admissions with vice-chancellors, they often say, with some justification, that what counts is what goes on before, rather than just what happens when they get involved.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles made a powerful speech, in which she touched on the importance of personal skills, confidence, resilience and emotional well-being, which I will deal with towards the end of my speech. That is a much under-discussed part of the wider debate. I am also glad that she was able to get back to the firm that so cruelly rejected her. Given that she went on to become a Secretary of State, that is a great example of social justice in action.

The hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) made a plea for financial education, which I endorse, although I must confess that I am not sure that I could do the sums he set out in his speech without the aid of a calculator—given the looks on the faces of some of the other hon. Members present, I am not sure they could either.

I welcome the involvement of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) in the all-party group. Many of the issues that afflict her constituency also afflict mine. She is right that poverty should not mean a poverty of ambition, and we should all take that point forward.

The hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) spoke powerfully about support for troubled families. He also spoke about grammar schools, and in Birmingham we also still have a grammar school system—I failed the 11-plus, which is a badge I wear with great pride. He made the important point that university is not the only route to social mobility, and we should celebrate other routes and life choices.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) reflected powerfully on his own experiences as someone not born in this country. I was struck by what the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) told us about her parents saying, when she was younger, that they wanted her life to be better than theirs. That is a key point for all parliamentarians, and one reason why we get into this work is our desire to see the current generation do better than the one before it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) spoke about the cultural change needed to get across to young people that their horizons are and can be much wider than they might think, might be told or might realise. He made the important link—something discussed in the all-party group report—between social mobility and teaching standards.

The hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) confessed to having given unpaid internships in his office—I am glad he has moved towards paid ones—which raises the wider point of what we as Members of the House of Commons can do to promote internships going to people from a wider range of social backgrounds.

Finally, the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) reflected that the individual life stories of the Members who have spoken today have informed the debate and brought to life the issues that we are considering. That is important—particularly so with social mobility, above almost any other topic—because, as parliamentarians, we bring our life experience to what we debate.

I have a slight temptation to focus my remarks only on the relationship between higher education and social mobility, given that both the Minister and I have a education brief. I will do my best, however, to resist that temptation and to focus on some of the wider points as well.

In government, Labour did a lot to begin to fracture the link between people’s history and their destiny. Our policies focused on extending the ladders of opportunity, especially through the Sure Start programme and the right to free early-years education, which is important because we know—as the all-party group confirms—that the point of greatest leverage for social mobility is what happens between birth and the age of three. We dramatically increased support for schools with disadvantaged pupils, so the gaps in attainment between those from more and less advantaged backgrounds started to narrow. A recent university of Bristol study showed that family background had less influence on the results of those who took GCSEs in 2006 than it did on those who took the equivalent exams in 1986. The education maintenance allowance also dramatically increased participation rates post-16, and all of that sat alongside the expansion of higher education and the cementing of a widening participation agenda, which helped to make real gains in social mobility.

We made progress, but certainly not enough, and there is a long way to go. I am concerned that the cumulative effect of some of the Government’s current policies in education and higher education will set us on a backwards trend, with long-lasting and damaging consequences for social mobility. When the Minister responds, I will be grateful if he can tell us more about what the Government are doing to ensure that that is not the case in relation to four specific areas of policy.

First, in my experience—my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch made the same point—the removal of the EMA remains the biggest issue for young people in my constituency, directly affecting their ability to participate in education post-16.

[Hazel Blears]

My hon. Friend raises the issue about the education maintenance allowance, which we have discussed in the all-party parliamentary group. I am sure that she is aware that in Salford, several thousand young people were in receipt of the EMA. The situation now is that our local college has had to replace the EMA from its own reserves. It can manage to do that for a period of two years, but that is about to expire. As soon as the EMA was taken away, we saw the numbers of young people staying on at 16 decrease quite dramatically. As we used to be the worst place in the country for post-16 education, I share her concerns about the allowance, and I welcome her pressing the Minister on the matter. I hope that she will continue to do so.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right and her constituency experience accords exactly with my own. Young people in my constituency use the EMA to pay for their travel—to be able physically to get to their place of learning—and books. I was really struck by the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch when she said that somebody used it to pay for their electricity key, which shows the different ways that the allowance was used and how damaging it is that it has now been lost. We will continue to press the Government on the impact on participation rates of the removal of EMA.

We have already touched on the second policy area—that is unsurprising given the higher education element of my role—which is the trebling of tuition fees. Although almost all the attention is focused on 18-year-old would-be graduates, one of my biggest concerns is the impact on mature students taking first degrees. The number of those applications is down 11.9%. Mature students making the decision to improve their life chances by going to university were largely responsible for the gains that were made in widening participation in higher education, and they are one of the main reasons why we got so close to the 50% target set by the previous Labour Government for participation in higher education. The important point that was raised in the debate today as well as in the all-party group’s report is that our social mobility story should not end at 18. What happens later is important, too, and the ability of mature students to go back into university is an important part of that.

[Meg Hillier]

In my constituency, we have seen a trend in which children are doing better at school, which is great news, but at 18 a lot of young women from particular backgrounds are getting good results and then dropping out. That is one reason why UBS bank helped to support an event that I held for young women. There is a cohort who are going off without a career path and then having to get back on to a career path after they have had children, which is much more difficult. That illustrates my hon. Friend’s point.

[Shabana Mahmood]

My hon. Friend is right. There is the drop-off, and then the difficult decision to get back in is really important.

We have seen the Government axe the Aimhigher scheme that was designed to widen participation in higher education. I am concerned that the national scholarship programme will not be an adequate replacement for it in money terms and that it also disadvantages universities that recruit a large number of students from backgrounds in which we want to widen participation. The programme is also based only on data in relation to free school meals, which misses out those who come from further education colleges and also mature students

Finally, let me turn to the changes in the provision of information, advice and guidance. High-quality and accessible information, advice and guidance is crucial for ensuring that all young people know of the opportunities that are open to them. Providing the right support can make the difference to young people in determining their future pathway. Proper information, advice and guidance should not be exclusively available to young people from better-off backgrounds. The Government must ask themselves whether the changes that they have introduced will ensure that proper advice and guidance is there for the many and not just the few. There will be a gap in provision this summer as the funding for Connexions has finished, but the replacement for schools will not be coming online until September.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I was listening very carefully to the hon. Lady’s comments and to the catalogue of emerging policy. One of the elephants in the room on social mobility in our country is that we have a two-tier education system, with quite a high proportion of children going to independent schools and boarding schools. Much of that is allowed through tax subsidy or tax allowances. What is the Labour party’s position on the efficacy of that tax allowance in terms of social mobility?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am not going to make tax policy on the hoof, but I would like to get to a position where independent and private schools are redundant because the same sort of education and quality of education is available in the state sector.

To finish my point about information, advice and guidance, there is real concern that good advice will not go to the most disadvantaged and those who need it most. Much of the work will now be done online, but we must recognise the importance not just of innovative high-quality and low-cost solutions, but the face-to-face element in the provision of advice and guidance. I endorse what my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles said about the Government being able to learn more from organisations such as Future First, and schools throughout the country that are drawing on alumni to inspire and raise their pupils’ aspirations.

As I said at the beginning of my speech, I will not focus only on the brief that I shadow, because the debate is much wider. Social mobility is not just about changing the odds of young people from poor backgrounds making it to university. We must improve opportunities for those who do not make it to university. We must get away from the thinking that there is only one kind of success or only one pathway to success, and that everything else is a failure of some kind.

One of the biggest problems in our society is our collective and automatic assumption that if something is different it must be either better or worse. That holds us back, and the way in which we perpetuate class in our country is unnecessary baggage and very depressing. I would like to get rid of that, and two things jump out at me in relation to it: the value that we give to vocational education, and entrepreneurship.

First, vocational study should never be treated as a second-class option. The Government have a role to play in bringing that about, but the attitude of society as a whole is as important. I cannot help but be jealous of the position in Germany where middle-class parents boast about their kids doing great apprenticeships. We should do more to get to a place where vocational education is just as much a gold standard as academic education. We must make sure that there are good opportunities to switch between the two.

Secondly, entrepreneurship has an important role to play in increasing and improving social mobility. My boss, the shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, recently made a speech about the link between entrepreneurship and social mobility. He told a powerful story of his father, who came to this country from Nigeria in the 1960s, and set up his own business. That gave his father opportunities that were denied to him elsewhere. It is clear that entrepreneurship has more of a role to play. I am pleased to see an increasing number of universities focusing on enterprise opportunities for their graduates and undergraduates, but we should guard against the “graduatisation” of entrepreneurship. It should remain an opportunity that is open to all in our society.

I want to pick up on the importance of the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles about skills around confidence, emotional well-being and personal resilience—the so-called public school confidence skills—by reflecting on my experience. As hon. Members can see, I am an Asian woman. I am also a practising and observant Muslim. That is an important part of my identity and how I choose to live my life. I was born and raised in Small Heath in Birmingham, which is a very diverse city where many people who look like me live. In Small Heath particularly, many people are like me and believe in the same God as I do. The local school I went to had lots of people like me. I went to a different school to do A-levels, and it was more mixed, but there were still plenty of people like me. Nothing in my previous life experience had prepared me for my first night as a law undergraduate at Oxford, where I was the only non-white face in the junior common room. I was certainly the only Muslim woman in the whole college, which had an undergraduate body of 300. For someone to enter a room and find that they are the only one of their kind is a weird experience, even if they are self-confident, as I am. Apart from being weird, I also found it intimidating. It took me a solid month before I could enter any room in my college, such as the JCR or the hall for meals, without taking a deep breath and saying a silent prayer,

When I was qualifying to be a barrister, I experienced the same thing on my first day as a pupil barrister in chambers, although this time it did not take me a month to normalise to being the only one of my kind. It took me only a couple of weeks, which was a good downward trajectory because, by the time I got to Parliament, it meant that I was not afraid. In fact, it had become a depressingly normal part of my existence.

I raise that point because, while I was at university, I was involved in the Oxford access scheme. When I graduated, I taught as a volunteer at a supplementary school. I have done lots of mentoring of young people from my kind of background—my race background, my religious background and my socio-economic background—and the one thing that I always try to focus them on is not how to do the interview or the application, but a sense of self-confidence, by which I mean not just innate confidence in themselves, which they might have anyway, but the skill of faking confidence when they do not feel it. That is incredibly important. The techniques include taking a deep breath before entering a room and looking people in the eye. They also need to be physically robust in order to make their presence felt and to not be intimidated. What we call soft skills are not soft at all—if people do not have them, they are hard. It is difficult for people to take such things on board if they have not been a part of their previous experience. I would like us to think more deeply about what more we can do to bring those things about.

In conclusion, it is clear that we have to intensify and broaden our approach to social mobility in the future, not just because social justice demands it, but because our capacity for economic growth requires it.