Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

That this House takes note of the educational opportunities available to children and young people from working class backgrounds.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to introduce this debate today. I think this is one of the most important issues facing the nation and I am delighted that so many people have volunteered to speak and to stay late on a Thursday.

I suspect that many noble Lords are going to be quite critical of the Government’s performance as regards the opportunities available to working-class children—I know I am—so I want to say at the start that there are very many working-class children who now occupy places in our professions and in business. They are leaders and campaigners, they contribute to all areas of the economy and they contribute to society in full; indeed, they are Members of the House of Commons and they are Members of the House of Lords. There is nothing inevitable about being born into a working-class family and not having the opportunity to succeed in life. This is a complex issue.

We could spend the whole debate defining “working-class”, but I hope we are not going to do that. I am conscious that it is not only about money and income: it is about the support you get from your family and the neighbouring community; it is about the attitude and the aspiration that you have; it is about whether you meet a teacher, at some point in your life, who believes in you and gives you the extra push; it is about whether you yourself decide to seize the opportunities and run with them; and, at the end of the day, it is about working hard as well. Sometimes, though, young people from working-class backgrounds say that if they have succeeded because of those things—because of a teacher or a parent or because they seized the opportunity—they feel that they have done so in spite of the system, not because of it.

We know that at every stage of our education system there is a correlation between parental income and educational attainment, and that the gap gets wider the older a child gets. At age five, 50% of children from this sort of background will go into early years education with a language deficit. At year 1, the gap between them and the wealthier pupils in their class will be 14%, rising to 18% at the end of key stage 1, 22% at the end of key stage 2 and 28% at the end of key stage 4. These children are less likely to stay on at school in the sixth form. They are less likely to go to university and, if they do, they earn less after graduation, and 80% are less likely to enter a profession.

When you put the regional, gender and ethnic differences in attainment on top of that, what is stark—and this must be our agreed starting point—is that our education system has an unacceptable and unenviable link between the income of your parents at the time of your birth and your life chances throughout life. We know that it need not be like that: it is not like that in other developed countries; they manage to succeed. That is the kernel of this debate, and I hope that today we will hear suggestions as to how we could change things.

There have been some successes; it is not all failures. I think that these are my successes from my time both in politics and in education: a national curriculum—not necessarily the national curriculum we have, although that of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, was very successful—the London Challenge, Sure Start, literacy and numeracy strategies, the pupil premium and of course the Open University. All of those were sustainable initiatives. They were comprehensive, well-funded and ambitious, they involved taking risks, and they are still with us in the shape of the people who benefited from them.

However, littered among all that are the many small initiatives over the years that have been more about a press release and a headline than they have ever been about sustained and important change, or improvement in opportunities for working-class children. We have had breakfast clubs, after-school clubs, holiday clubs and catch-up clubs; we have had this zone, that zone and the other zone; we have had tsars. Every initiative that the Government launch has a paragraph at the end saying, “You must take extra care to target this at children from deprived backgrounds”. I am not critical of that—at least it shows intent—but the questions for us now are these. Have we learned from what has gone on in the past? Can what we have learned be seen in the policies before us at the moment? Are those policies likely to improve the situation?

We should be clear: in every stage of our education system, from early years right through to employment, there are problems. I want to look at three areas in particular that I think are important. The first is early years education. When you hear the statistics about the growing social-class gap as children move through school, you can conclude only one thing: once a child falls behind, it is very difficult for them to catch up. That is not because they get the poorest teachers or go to the worst schools or because no one tries; it is because it is damned tough to catch up if you have fallen behind at the age of five. The only conclusion can be that early years ought to be our prime focus; it ought to be where we put our resources if ever we have the chance. Yet when we look at that area, we see staff who are less qualified. Some 45% of childcare workers claim benefits or tax credits; it is essentially a low-skilled workforce. You have to have a PhD to teach a university student but you do not even have to have a level 3 qualification to teach the nought to fives. So we have learned what is needed but failed to take action.

I have to say that Michael Gove’s action in abolishing Sure Start was nothing short of politically criminal. I hope he has lived to rue the day, when he sees that nothing has been done—in fact, the gap at age five is growing, not closing. I believe that there is a review of the future of children’s centres, and it would be helpful if the Minister could give us some reassurance about what is happening. This is not just about the child; institutions such as Sure Start and children’s centres work with the parents. If you are going to get it right at aged five, that is the opportunity to bind together that most important of educational partnerships, not between teacher and pupil but between parents and children. We are wasting opportunities there.

Secondly, I want to look at schools. Again, I would say that the many schools that succeed do so against the odds, in the most extraordinarily challenging circumstances and working harder than many of us can imagine. Many individuals will talk about how they owe their life chances to the school that they went to and the teacher who taught them. But there is a danger in this debate that we pick out individuals or groups and say that it worked for them, but forget to look at the overall picture. Schools are still struggling to close the gap between social class and educational attainment.

The figures and statistics belie the actuality of what is happening because the biggest difference in attainment is within schools, not between them. We measure the difference between schools, saying, “This school got that and that school got the other”, but, no matter how affluent the catchment area of the school or where it is situated, poor children in those schools do worse. If poor children make up 1% of children in a middle-class school, guess who does the worst in that high-achieving middle-class school—the 1% of poor children. I worry about the Ofsted figures in this respect as well. When you look at the Ofsted gradings for outstanding schools, you see that they correlate to schools in middle-class areas taking middle-class children. It is not an exact fit, but a school is far more likely to be in special measures or to require improvement if a number of its children are on free school meals.

That means that we are not asking the right questions. You cannot just look at the performance statistics and say what is right or wrong. The reality is that even in high-performing schools, working-class children are not doing well. That means that our approach to failing schools and schools that have a lot of working-class children should sometimes be more empathetic than I fear it is. To be honest, there is little incentive for schools to tackle long-term inequality: you do not get many badges for it and you run the risk of ruining your overall performance, with all the consequences that that has.

I want to bring up one more important item in relation to schools. I do not mind the emphasis on literacy and numeracy—indeed, my time in office as a Minister, during the first term, was focused on the literacy and numeracy strategies—but I worry about, and am pretty cross about, the narrowing of the curriculum. If you want to help children from working-class backgrounds, you have to teach them to read and write to prepare them for secondary school and for life, but you also have to give them access to that wider, richer curriculum. That is what will give them the foundations to be brave enough to make decisions, and confident enough to visit places that they may not otherwise have gone to. If we have schools where is there is no creativity—no art, no music, no band or orchestra—but there is an awful lot of phonics teaching, we are not going to build children up. They might be able to pass the phonics test, but they will not have the confidence that is essential to get on in life.

I turn to a topic that for me is a tragedy equal to that of abolishing Sure Start. Since 2010, the Government’s priority on the schools agenda has been to try to force every school in this country to become an academy or a free school. I am not making a judgment—there are many such schools that are good—but I am absolutely confident that the amount of time, resource, leadership and effort that successive Ministers in the Department for Education have put into forcing schools to academise could have been spent on tackling the problem that we are discussing today. It is a tragedy that that has not been the case.

My third area is post-16 education. I will be honest: I was not quite as up to date on the statistics as I thought I was, before leading on this debate. I had not realised what a segregated system post-16 has become. Quite simply, twice as many young people from disadvantaged backgrounds go on to further education than stay at school. At post-16 we now have working-class children taking one path and middle-class children taking another. But which is the most underfunded sector of our whole education system? It is further education. Which sector has taken a 20% reduction in funding, compared to 8% in schools? It is FE. The salary of college lecturers is, on average, £2,500 less than that in schools—no wonder the average college had 16 vacancies at the start of the 2017-18 academic year. That cannot be right. I am not making a judgment about where children choose to go, but if they choose to go to further education, and if we are serious about closing the attainment gap, that is where our priority must be and where investment ought to be made.

I finish on this: education is the most powerful lever for change that we have. I stand second to none in believing in the power of education to change lives, and I pay tribute to everybody who chooses to spend their life in this sector. But I also believe that they cannot do it by themselves. Too often, our response is to blame them, because they have not got our policies right. They cannot do it by themselves; it is our responsibility to make sure that there are things around them to help them do their job better. It is difficult to close a social-class gap during a time of austerity. If being poor means that you are more likely to do badly at school, why do we make more children poor, as we have done since 2010? If we believe that a broader co-ordinated service is important, why do we cut social services, the probation service and the numbers of health visitors who go into schools?

What is happening in schools? Teachers know that if they are going to do the best for their children, they have to not just teach them but help them overcome the barriers to learning. These barriers are not necessarily educational: they are domestic, social and aspirational. Teachers do it because there is no one else to. We have a situation in which teachers are taking time out from teaching to help a parent who comes in with a money problem, or a child who comes in dirty because there is no bath at home to wash in, or a child who needs fed because they have had no breakfast. When Labour was in Government, we moved away from that. It is far more challenging to close that social-class gap during a time of austerity than at any other, and I lay that at this Government’s door.

This remains one of our biggest challenges. If our education system and our politicians want us to be the sort of society we say we want, we should put our hands up and volunteer to be judged by how much we can close the gap between the poor and the rich. We are not without successes and some evidence of how it can be done, and we are not without the wish and the will to do it. But I fear that, at the moment, we are without the ability to look at what has happened and seize the evidence of what works, and to turn that into policies that could shape a different future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I will respond briefly, primarily to thank everybody for their contributions. It has been an excellent debate. I do not think I have been in a debate in which as many Peers have spoken from personal experience as today. As I whispered to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, I suspect that if we looked at the backgrounds of the Peers who decided to speak in today’s debate, it would probably not be representative of Members of the House. That is a good thing, really, because it means we bring those experiences with us and remember to talk about them. It also allows me to say to the Minister that listening is extra important, because people have not spoken theoretically but from their own childhood or working experiences.

I will not go over the points, because it has been a long debate and, when people have had four minutes to speak, I do not want to take four minutes winding up. I will say just a few things. The message about early years could not be stronger, given the number of people who have spoken about it. I want to acknowledge the people who spoke about adult skills and universities, because I did not; I thank them for adding that to the debate.

I have confidence that the Minister will take this seriously. I have worked with her in this place long enough to know that she cares about this just as much as me or anybody else. I know she will find her way around all those sections of the department. It is not easy for politicians—I am not sure I would have done it myself—but what we need at this time is a great degree of honesty about what has and has not worked. I will not criticise the Minister if she says that something has not worked.

Of the 12 opportunity areas, seven have seen the gap between the poor and the rich in early years widen rather than narrow. That is a problem. It is public money and we might be wasting our time. For the north-east, £24 million is not a lot; it is our most underperforming region and it was not included in the opportunity areas. It pales into insignificance against the money put into London Challenge, which was successful.

As I say, I thank the Minister for listening and for her responsiveness, and have every confidence that she is the sort of Minister who will ask the right questions. Unless you ask the right questions, you will never get the right answers. In that frame of mind, I again thank everybody for contributing and wish the Minister well in her work trying to solve this problem.

Motion agreed.