Social Mobility Strategy

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords—

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, we have not yet heard from UKIP. May I suggest that we do so and then hear from the noble Baroness?

[Lord McNally]

I am not sure that I can—all my briefing for the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, refers to Europe, so I am not sure. I also see too many educational experts around for me to play this one on the hoof. I do know—as we all know over our lives—that some of the most inspirational people we have ever met have been our teachers. We also know that some of the people who take the toughest jobs and help the very young people we are talking about are teachers in deprived areas. So I am not going to make any comments on teacher quality. I am pleased with the scheme that encourages graduates to go into teaching for a time. It is a very good idea and I am pleased that some of them, having experienced it, stick to it. But I am sure that the noble Lord is right that a high-quality cadre of teachers is part of the solution to social mobility.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, perhaps I may take a rather different line. Quite a lot of criticism has been coming in the direction of the Minister, but I should like to congratulate him and the coalition Government on the approach that they have taken to the issue, particularly the fact that the issue now appears to be high up on their agenda. However, as we are referring to the life-cycle approach, I should like some reassurance that this will include, and not place in a separate category, the need for early intervention as described in the two important reports by Frank Field and Graham Allen which we have discussed in your Lordships’ House. That alone would enormously help the whole business of social mobility.

[Lord McNally]

I fully accept what the noble Baroness says. With regard to the source of those reports and Alan Milburn’s involvement, I hope that we can attempt this with some degree of cross-party consensus. It is not the case that we have just discovered the problem of social mobility; as I said before, it has been around for a long time. Without playing prolier-than-thou, I come from a working-class background and in my childhood I was surrounded by what I call the aspirational working class. My father, who was a process worker, was one of the best-read men I know. How we instil in some of the more deprived families the kind of aspiration that there was in, say, the Welsh mining community and other, older working-class communities, I do not know. As my noble friend Lord Dholakia said, one sees it in some of the immigrant communities. There are factors that hold people back but poverty and deprivation are not the only ones. That is why just throwing money at some of these problems is not the solution either.

The fact that this has been announced—slightly differently from the way I announced it, evidently—by the Deputy Prime Minister, with the machinery in place overseen by Alan Milburn to check against results, means that this is not just about motherhood and apple pie but is a genuine attempt, building on some of the work of our predecessors, to be tested against results, to try to deal with a problem that, as I say, has challenged our society since at least the Second World War.