Education and Social Mobility

Simon Danczuk Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady). I am also pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) initiated this important debate. She made an excellent speech. I am sure that the whole House will agree that education is the most powerful engine for social mobility that there is. It broadens horizons and opens doors, and it should be accessible to all. There is nothing more inspiring or transformative than people increasing their knowledge, realising their potential and changing their life circumstances. I owe my grandmother a debt of gratitude for pushing me to do well at night school and giving me a lifelong love of reading. Education later in life gave me the opportunities that changed my life, and I want others to have those same chances.

However, the Government’s Social Mobility Commission’s “State of the Nation” report shows that the engine is spluttering rather than firing on all cylinders. It concludes:

“The rungs on the social mobility ladder are growing further apart.”

Those words should be a call for action, yet the Government appear to offer only words. The action that we need should not be to fall back on the failed prescriptions of the past, such as trying to revive grammar schools. We need a future-facing overhaul to bridge the gap between education and employment. The traditional world of work is rapidly changing, but much of our curriculum hopelessly lags behind the pace of change.

If education is to be a powerhouse of social mobility, it needs to work in tandem with the demands of the modern economy. The Government seem to recognise that fact only in fits and starts. They launched a half-baked “year of code” initiative, which rightly drew a great deal of criticism, not least because its executive director did not even know how to code. Advisers were quitting, saying that they wanted nothing to do with it, and the Government have gone scurrying back to their comfort zone of 1950s Britain where privileged children learned Latin and grammar schools were the great hope. That is where we are now, and it is just not good enough. There is a wealth of evidence to highlight how ill prepared we are. An “Unleashing Entrepreneurs” study by OnePoll reveals that a lack of digital skills—or “digital poverty”—is causing the failure of far too many UK start-ups. But it is not just vital tech skills that we are failing to equip our children with. Failure to meet engineering skills demand is costing the United Kingdom £27 billion a year, according to Engineering UK.

The gap between the new world of work and education continues to widen. We need to start narrowing the gap between education and employers. A survey by the Gatsby Foundation found that in only 40% of schools did a young person have an encounter with an employer at least once a year from year 7 onwards. We can do better than that, and Labour—the party of work—recognises that education cannot exist in a vacuum. Unless education adapts to the changing employment landscape, we will be setting our children up to fail. With recent research by Oxford University and Deloitte suggesting that 850,000 public sector jobs could be lost to automation by 2030, it is clear that we should be preparing now for a brave new world. Let us hope that the Chancellor is able to rise to this challenge in the autumn statement and kick-start a vision of social mobility. If the Government do not act, those who are just about managing now—the JAMs—will soon become the LOTS: those who are left on the scrapheap.

If any vision of social mobility is to have a chance of putting down roots and being seen as credible, Parliament will need to start being seen as a proper, living example of social mobility. We have seen the reaction in America to the Clintons and the Bushes as the American dream of social mobility has withered away. People want their Governments to get real and to create a genuine stakeholder society where everyone has a chance to get on. In Britain, they want the British promise that hard work will be rewarded to mean something again. That is now the challenge for this Government.

[Several hon. Members rose—]