Social Mobility: Local Roots, Lasting Change (Social Mobility Policy Committee Report)
Lord Crisp Excerpts(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend and her colleagues on an excellent and timely report, and on her speech. I will make two quick points. The first is to add my voice to the point about local partnerships and how vital they are. You cannot just have a national policy that can be applied; this is a lot of very detailed work locally, which requires the empowerment of local leadership from across the sectors, including, as the noble Lord has just said, business, alongside education, health and others. Noting that my noble friend Lord Mawson is in his place, I say that this is what he describes as a 360-degree society. This is a problem for the whole of society.
I will raise one point that has not yet been raised— I note that the committee could not cover everything—about the first years of secondary school, when children are aged 11 to 13, and what I believe is technically called key stage 3. That is a time when the body and indeed the brain change fundamentally, and it happens at the same time as people move from a primary school where they had one teacher who knew them into a situation where they may have six, seven or whatever the number is, and move from an individual pastoral approach, as it were, to a less clear one.
Research shows that educational attainment declines during that period. It then tends to come back up again, but the people for whom it does not are from disadvantaged backgrounds—increasingly, girls in that group. I do not know what the reasons for that are, but one could speculate that the link with the individual teacher in primary school being replaced or not being replaced may be part of that. It is good to see that an independent and government-supported taskforce, which I believe is called the Key Stage 3 Alliance, is looking at this, and that there is a whole series of other reviews around this. I would be very interested in the Minister’s observation on the importance of this stage in an educational career, and about how this can be tackled.