Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Baroness Wilcox of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I have almost 35 years’ front-line experience as a classroom practitioner teaching in the state sector. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for the introduction of training days during my career—the start of teachers doing it for themselves—and my noble friend Lady Morris, not just for an excellent speech setting out all the priorities but for the threshold she introduced for teachers and the significant pay rises that brought to the profession after 20 years of stagnation. I have a lifetime of working in comprehensive schools far away from leafy suburbs but containing some of the UK’s finest teachers and many incredibly talented and clever youngsters.

When I began researching and writing this speech, it became obvious that two words were missing from the debate’s title: “lack of”. As many noble Lords have expressed, education is a solution for disadvantage: the route to skills and learning, well-paid jobs and opportunities. But at its worst the education system merely replicates and perpetuates the class inequality that already exists, pushing advantage to the already wealthy and locking disadvantaged pupils into poverty.

The odds are not simply stacked against low-income young people at birth but made worse by this Government. The Government talk about social mobility, but the academy and free school movement has made things worse for working-class children, with more segregation and polarisation. Despite free schools and academies receiving more funding per pupil than state comprehensive schools, they typically educate fewer children in receipt of free school meals and have a more advantaged intake than comprehensive schools.

Wales, with a Welsh Labour Government, is an academy-free zone and Welsh schoolchildren do not have this immediate disadvantage in funding, although lack of funding for education in England has a disproportionate effect through the Barnett funding formula.

England does not appear to have an education system that is serious about realising the potential of all children. Those on free school meals and receiving the pupil premium are 27% less likely to achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, or 9 to 6 as we have in England now.

Research suggests that the wealth and inclination of parents, rather than the ability and efforts of the child, have the most bearing on a child’s educational success today. A working-class child starts the race half way around the track, behind the middle-class child whose parents do an awful lot via extra resources and activities. Government money that has gone into the academy and free schools programme has been taken out of the comprehensive school system. Free schools receive 60% more funding per pupil than local authority primaries and secondaries, and the £96 million originally intended for improving underperforming schools was redistributed to academies.

Research from University College London found that the average spending on a privately educated primary pupil is £12,200 a year, compared with £4,800 on a state pupil. For secondary, it is £15,000 per pupil, compared with £6,200. The gap between rich and poor is greater than it was 30 years ago. Austerity continues to punish the poor and the limits on educational opportunities for working-class children continue to contract. It is an unsustainable position. We leave so much talent and ability untapped in our schools. I and many like me did our best to address the inequalities, but there is a limit to how much individual teachers can do to fight the system that is so patently skewed in favour of the better-off in our society.