Social Mobility/Child Poverty Strategy

Debate between Graham Stuart and Hazel Blears

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered social mobility and the child poverty strategy.

I was tremendously moved and impressed by the depth of knowledge of my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) and the other Members who contributed to the previous debate. It was a pleasure to listen to their contributions.

The second debate this afternoon is also on a very important topic on which there is a great deal of cross-party consensus. We may differ on some issues, but, like protecting children in conflict, social mobility raises a sense of passion, commitment and determination to improve things, which should be a matter for celebration among hon. Members. I look forward to their contributions.

I thank my fellow members of the all-party group on social mobility, some of whom are in the Chamber, although Baroness Tyler cannot be here because she is a Member of the other place. I pay tribute to her work on character and resilience, and on the manifesto she has published. I also pay tribute to the in-depth academic and practical information she has drawn together, which almost gives a new perspective on social mobility, and which we have debated for a considerable period. I will mention later a couple of the points she makes.

I also thank Alan Milburn, chair of the commission on poverty and social mobility. All the members of the commission are doing a tremendous job on behalf of the House. In the introduction to his “State of the Nation” report, he says he was appointed to hold the Government’s feet to the fire. He is pleased about that, and he has not pulled any punches in his recommendations. He has excellent people with him on the commission. In my view, they make not only academic observations, but practical recommendations not only for the Government but for employers, hon. Members, parents, families and citizens of our country. For the Government, taking the step to appoint the commission was brave, because having an external body that holds their feet to the fire is not always the most comfortable situation, as I can testify as a former Minister. However, external bodies give different views, information and perspectives. The report has therefore been tremendously helpful for all of us. The work that has been done is absolutely meticulous. The research conducted means that we now have a body of evidence on child poverty and social mobility that we did not have previously. That has been translated into pretty accessible language that I think most people can understand. The commission has given us a new impetus to take these issues forward.

The question we will all be asking ourselves at the outset is this: why does social mobility matter? Why is it the subject of regular debates in the House? Why, increasingly, are employers concerned about it? Why does it affect every bit of our community?

For me, this is a very personal issue. My mum and dad left school at 14. They did not have the opportunity to stay on into further education, let alone have access to higher education. They were absolutely determined that their children would have the opportunities that they had not had. My mum probably coined the phrase “Education, education, education” long before our previous Prime Minister did. That has been the sense for many years in our country: the people who did not have the educational opportunities, money and resources to pursue their own dreams wanted to make sure that the next generation would have that chance.

My mum—I just want to place this on record as a tribute to my mum—won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts when she was 14 years old. She was an immensely talented artist. Her father was at the war. She came from a very poor background and did not have the money to take up the scholarship in London. She was, therefore, unable to go. If anything, that absolutely redoubled her commitment to education. She took her first O-level at the age of 38. She took an A-level in English in her 40s. Her lifelong love of education was absolutely apparent. In our lives, sometimes the people in our families are our inspiration to try to make things better. She was certainly my inspiration.

I think the issue matters because it is about fairness. Most of us are committed to fairness and ensuring that, as far as possible, people have a platform to succeed and to reach their potential. It is also about merit—a characteristic that is deeply embedded in most of us in this country and in countries across the world. That sense of a meritocracy—that if someone is good enough they will be able to get on in life and break through barriers—is a really powerful driver.

It is also, perhaps in more prosaic terms, a financial issue. Research undertaken by the Sutton Trust states that if we do not tackle the issues of social mobility, the subsequent waste of talent and skills could cost this country £140 billion by 2050. There is an ideological justification, but also an absolutely compelling practical and financial justification too.

Where are we at the moment? I am afraid that the report does not paint a very happy picture:

“We see a danger that social mobility – having risen in the middle of the last century then flat-lined towards the end – could go into reverse in the first part of this century.”

It is part of Britain’s DNA that everyone should have a fair chance in life, but at the moment Alan Milburn warns that Britain could become “a divided country”. Those comments should make us all take a step back, reflect on where we are and redouble our efforts to make sure that the situation does not continue, and does not continue to get worse, in the coming years.

There has been some extremely good research by the Sutton Trust and I want to outline a few sharp bullet points that might help to put the debate in perspective. The state we are in now in the 21st century, in a modern industrialised, relatively wealthy affluent nation, causes us all a great deal of concern. Children in the poorest fifth of families are already nearly a year behind children from middle-income families when they start school at the age of five. I see this in my constituency day after day. I see children coming to school with speech and language problems—they are not even ready to access education. I see children, because of difficult family backgrounds, falling behind almost immediately when they come to school because they do not have the back-up from home and the community.

At the other end of the scale, 3,000 state-educated pupils achieve the A-level grades necessary to enter the country’s most selective universities, but who, for a variety of reasons, do not end up there. There are 3,000 children who are good enough academically, but are not able to take that next step into higher education. Four private schools and one elite college sent more students to Oxbridge over three years than 2,000 schools and colleges across the United Kingdom. State school pupils, when they do get there, are far more likely to get a 2:1 or a first class degree at university than their private school counterparts with the same A-level results. It is therefore not that children from working class backgrounds are not capable of achieving some extremely high academic outcomes; it is that there are barriers in the system that prevent them from achieving their potential.

Those are worrying facts. We clearly need to take action to ensure, as far as possible, that we get rid of the barriers that are not about how clever, bright, determined or hard-working pupils are. They are systemic barriers that have dogged us for generations. We are making some progress. I acknowledge that Government action is taking us along, but it is so slow and so inch-by-inch that I think there is more we can do more quickly to make that happen.

Alan Milburn, in a very important previous report, raised the ability of children to access professions. He talked about the rising use of unpaid internships to access many professions, whether law, journalism, fashion, couture and, dare I say it, politics. Internships increasingly became the way to access professions, but they were denied to many young people from less-affluent backgrounds. Working for free does not come cheap. Most of the internships that provide access to professions are based here in London. If people cannot afford accommodation and do not have the bank of mum and dad, it is virtually impossible to come to London and take them up.

Many companies have made progress on internships in the past few years. The social mobility business compact, working with employers, has begun to highlight the fact that offering long-term unpaid internships is utterly unfair. It is a bad practice and it should not be carried out by the best firms in our country. We now have a whole range of companies providing first-class paid internships, with proper development opportunities. Companies such as KPMG, Ernst and Young, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and Fujitsu, which operates in my area, are offering paid internships and developing young people’s skills and talents. CH2M Hill, a massive engineering firm, has just set up a scheme for paid internships, particularly to draw more women into science, engineering and consulting. Johnson & Johnson, the medical and pharmaceutical industries and BP are just some of the examples I know about where firms have changed their practice. In the past, they may have had unpaid internships, but now that practice is no longer acceptable. That is making a key difference to young people, not just in attaining education but in providing the access to professions and jobs that will ensure that they earn a decent income and can have an exciting future.

We used to have a lot of unpaid internships in the House some years ago. I am delighted to say that with the advent of the Speaker’s Parliamentary Placement Scheme, which I helped to establish with the 100% backing of Mr Speaker, I think and hope the number of MPs who take people on unpaid internships can now be counted on the fingers of one hand—maybe just one or two Members. We all now recognise that that might have been the culture in the past, but excluding young people from working-class backgrounds from getting into politics is not just unfair to them: it is bad for our politics. We have a lot of complaints about the political class. I did some research. In 1979, 3% of MPs of all parties came from that career transmission belt of being special advisers working for Ministers and so on. At the last election, it was nearly 25%. We have a real problem getting people from diverse backgrounds to Parliament. I am pleased to say that Mr Speaker’s scheme is making a significant difference. I am grateful to the companies that have supported the scheme. I am beginning a dialogue with the Government on how we can ensure that it is sustainable in the long term. I am extremely encouraged by the all-party commitment to the scheme, which has been endorsed by the three party leaders. That is evidence of consensus across the House. I hope we can achieve sustainability.

There are problems at the beginning of life and with early-years development. There are problems with A-level achievement, problems with access to university and problems with access to professions. These are all systemic barriers.

However, as we get better at tackling each of those issues, the problem seems to settle in different areas. An example of that arose from a case in my constituency involving postgraduate education. At first I wondered why postgraduate education was a social mobility issue: surely, I thought, by the time people reached that stage, they would have gone through the system, obtained their degrees and so forth. However, when a young man in my constituency, Damien Shannon, applied to Oxford for a place on a postgraduate course, he was required to meet certain conditions. Not only did he have to find £11,000 for tuition fees; he also had to find just over £10,000 to cover living expenses, and he had to prove that the necessary liquid cash was available to him. The “living expenses” included entertaining, dining in hall, and being able to sustain an “Oxford lifestyle”.

Damien comes from Salford, and he is a very bright young man. He decided that, one, the requirement was not fair, and two, he could not possibly meet it. He could get a career development loan for the tuition fees, but there was no way in which he could get a loan to enable him to have an “Oxford lifestyle” in the form of dining and entertaining. He therefore decided to bring a legal challenge, and we have worked on that together for the last 18 months. I initiated a very good debate about the matter in the House, to which the Minister for Universities and Science responded. We had endless conversations with Oxford university, which, I am delighted to say, has now changed its admission requirements for postgraduate education, and has abandoned the requirement for applicants to show that they have sufficient living expenses.

Damien has taken up his place at Oxford. He is absolutely delighted, and he is doing really well. I want to place on record my admiration for a brave, clever, determined young man who was not going to let the system beat him. I have no doubt that he will have an absolutely brilliant career in the future. However, we really cannot have that in this day and age, in our top universities. We cannot allow them to hark back to another age when people may have spent slightly more time punting than they spent attending lectures and gaining academic achievements. There is still a wide range of barriers, and I think that we still have a long way to go.

The report also deals with poverty and poverty pay. Many children are finding it very difficult to achieve in the same way as their colleagues because of poverty. The Government will tell me that many more families are now in work, and that the number of completely workless households has been dramatically reduced. However, there is still poverty in families who are out there working hard, doing all the things that we ask them to do, playing by the rules and supporting the system.

The problem of the cost of living and low incomes is a really stubborn one. We need to deal with it, because that poverty is feeding through to children. It is very difficult for them to have a platform for achievement when they are living in difficult housing conditions with no room to do their homework, their parents are extremely low paid, and life is a real struggle. The report recommends that the minimum wage should be increased, and that we should try to give people access to the living wage. I think that that is the least that we can do if we want to give children and young people a chance to get on in life.

Another significant issue raised in the report is one to which I referred earlier. The issue of character and resilience is very new in this area. In the past, people used to say that children at private schools somehow acquired the character and resilience that they were taught in that environment, whereas children at state schools did not have the “grit” that is, increasingly, a foundation for success. As was shown in the “Character and Resilience Manifesto” produced by my noble Friend Baroness Tyler, that quality of character and resilience is not something that people are born with. It is not necessarily in their genetic make-up, and they do not have it because they come from the best families in the land. Character and resilience can be taught.

I have been fascinated to learn that character and resilience, and the ability to get on in life, are about three things. First, one must have a work ethic and be prepared to focus, concentrate and apply one’s mind to a task for a long period. That can be taught. Secondly, one must be prepared to accept deferred gratification and be prepared to invest for the longer term, rather than wanting success immediately. That means saying “If I work now, I will get results. I may get them a little further down the line, but it will be absolutely worth it.” Thirdly, in the context of social mobility, one must have the ability to bounce back from adversity. There is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that those three things can be taught, and they are crucial to the personal ability of someone to succeed in life.

Let me ask the Government specifically to look into what we are doing in our state school system to inculcate in youngsters from tough backgrounds the ability to work hard, focus and concentrate, the ability to accept deferred gratification—it will not all come now—and that essential resilience and ability to bounce back from adversity. If we do that, we shall be doing something which I think will be sustainable in the long term. Rather than developing a programme or a specific initiative, we shall be training our young people to recognise that it is their responsibility as well to acquire the tools that they need in order to make progress.

Alan Milburn has made some very interesting practical recommendations about what the Government could do in regard to educational attainment in particular. He refers to, for instance, the need to ensure that we can have the best teachers in the worst schools. We have talked about that for a long time. I remember, before I was in the Government, looking at our manifesto and asking “Is there a way in which we can reward the teachers who are prepared to come and teach in difficult inner-city schools where life can be really tough?” We have experimented with various schemes and programmes such as Teach First, but I think we must recognise that teaching in some of our most challenged schools is an extremely hard job. I should like to see something in the system, rather than a scheme or a project, which recognises that and rewards teachers for doing it.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The right hon. Lady is making a powerful speech, and I think that she and Alan Milburn are absolutely right to focus on the need to embed those incentives in the system. The combination of the pupil premium and the changes in accountability are systemic approaches to provide the wherewithal to reward people for coming in to teach in those schools, and to ensure that we do not have an accountability system whereby those in more prosperous areas are less likely to be found wanting than those in areas where the educational fight is fiercest.

[Hazel Blears]

Obviously I support the pupil premium, because it is a way of putting a substantial amount of money into the system to be targeted at the children and young people who need the most help. However, I have to say that I have been very disappointed by the monitoring and the accountability of the pupil premium. I know of many schools where—unsurprisingly, at a time of really tight budgets—it is being used to back-fill what could be described as conventional posts, rather than being targeted at the children for whom it was designed. The challenge for us is to ensure that the money is used in the way in which it was intended, to raise the achievements of the poorest children to the level of, at least, the average achievements of the rest. I shall refer to some schemes that have been able to do that, but let me say to the Minister now that better monitoring of the use of the pupil premium is essential.

Alan Milburn also talks about action by employers, and refers to the living wage, apprenticeships and fair internships. Those are practical measures, and if we can persuade all employers to adopt them, we shall make a difference. Alan also makes what I think is quite a brave suggestion; he is well known for being prepared to be brave. He talks of breaking the last “taboo”, which he says is parenting.

I am a former Home Office Minister who was responsible for the antisocial behaviour programme, the respect programme and the beginning of the troubled families programme. The Government are continuing some of that work, but at the time it was highly controversial territory: why were the Government telling parents how to bring up their children? However, all of us will know from our constituencies that in some families the responsibility for setting boundaries, and for supporting children and encouraging them to do their very best, simply is not there. I believe that there is still a huge gap in that regard. There should be more support for parents to enable them to do for their children what they no doubt want to do, but for various reasons are incapable of doing. All politicians should be as brave as the commission has been in saying that we need not just to talk about that problem, but to take action on it, before the family are so dysfunctional that we have to have a troubled families programme, with all the intrusion and intervention that that entails.

What practically can we do through early intervention? In his most recent Ofsted report, Michael Wilshaw said that the big problems of educational under-attainment have moved from the inner cities to some very poor coastal areas, remote areas and suburban areas. I was fascinated to see how that has happened. A lot has been said about the London challenge and how that has transformed schools in London. When I came into Parliament in 1997, about 22% of children in Salford were getting five A to C grades. Now the figure is 76%. There has been a fantastic transformation in the quality of the schools in my inner-city constituency. That is where the focus has been. The big problems of social mobility are now in communities that have not had access to such provision and are not well-off—they are quite poor and almost not on the radar. Michael Wilshaw has done us all a great service in highlighting that. He said:

“Today, many of the disadvantaged children performing least well in school can be found in leafy suburbs, market towns or seaside resorts.

There are stark consequences for our nation if we do not act with sufficient urgency.”

That reinforces the view I took when I was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government that there were pockets of deprivation in otherwise affluent areas and that, for reasons to do with the data and the information we had, they were not addressed. What are the Minister’s plans to ensure that children in those areas receive the attention that they need?

I find it fascinating that, if there is early intervention in schools through a specific programme where there is evidence that it can make a difference, the transformation can be dramatic. I want to single out two schemes of which I have personal experience. The Place to Be scheme operates in six primary schools in my city and helps families and children who are in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Many of the children’s parents have problems with alcohol and drug addiction. Many of the children are not able to go to school sometimes because of family difficulties. Place to Be provides a support and counselling service. It has been operating with the pupil premium—that is the reason that money has been provided. I have seen evaluated evidence that is incredibly impressive. The rate of progress of the children in the worst families is now the same as the average rate of progress among the other children in those schools. It is almost a miracle, dare I say it. The head teachers who chose to use the pupil premium for that project have done a great service to their community.

The Shine on Saturdays scheme does Saturday schools. It does Serious Fun on Saturdays. It has a fantastic evidence base. Owing to the work it does on Saturdays, it is helping the most deprived communities. In many places, people will say, “We do not have the money to do that extra programme, on top of what we are already doing.” I ask the Minister to consider carefully—I have spoken to the Secretary of State about the matter—the possibility of mobilising social investment to fund such community-based interventions, which are able to make a dramatic impact and have a strong, rigorous evidence base. That social investment can be repaid through the savings that we make when those children get on in life, rather than causing myriad problems, including welfare dependency and criminal action, which cost us a fortune. It is an excellent way to invest for the long term. Now that we have an evidence base, we have a responsibility to find out how we can spread that across the country. I will declare my unpaid interest as a member of Big Society Capital’s advisory board. The things I have seen, which can be done if we mobilise private investment for public good, are impressive and I ask the Minister to take that into account in his closing remarks.

I had a couple of other questions for the Minister; I think I have raised most of the questions that I had. I have no doubt that he will be pressed for time. Social mobility is sometimes a relatively academic term for something that most of us know in our hearts: all families want their children to have a decent start, to get a good education to get on in life and to be able to bring up their own family. If we are not careful, we are in danger of not seeing that generational improvement. I do not want to live in a society in which people are not motivated to get on and do their best and succeed. It is a primary responsibility of any society to provide a framework in which that can happen.

I was always told growing up, “If you work hard, the world’s your oyster. You can do anything. You can achieve anything.” That has motivated me throughout my life. I want us to be able to say that to every child in this country—if they work hard, the world is their oyster, they are as good as anyone else in this country and they will succeed. It is a huge challenge for us and I look forward to what colleagues and the Minister have to say.