Social Mobility (Wales)

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Chris Elmore]

I do not think for one second that Communities First funding was wasted. In fact, as a county councillor, I did work through some of the Communities First schemes in my county. Communities First has had positive outcomes across Wales. The Welsh Government have admitted that they now want to review how that funding will move forward, but the Minister cannot say that investing in our communities is a waste of money. It is nice to know what the Tories think of investing in communities up and down Wales.

We face real and deep challenges, but it is positive that Welsh Government Ministers are genuinely committed to addressing these complex societal issues. There are social mobility problems for us to reverse, but we should not forget that progress has been made. Unfortunately, that progress is grinding to a halt as a result of UK Government policy. The Welsh Government are working hard to increase prosperity and to help people out of poverty, but a continued agenda of cuts from Westminster and the severity of UK Government austerity is putting progress at risk. It is not simply that there is inaction on improving social mobility; there is an agenda that is taking us backwards.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, 37% of children in the UK will be in relative poverty by 2022, which represents a reversal of all progress made in the past 20 years. On top of that, Shelter said that 128,000 children will wake up homeless in Britain on Christmas day. That fact alone should bring shame on the Government. If children grow up homeless or in poverty, their chances of success in life are greatly reduced, which puts a roadblock in the way of social mobility. Unfortunately, the Government in Westminster have shown no intention of focusing on social mobility and improving equality of opportunity.

Wales’s Children’s Commissioner and her three UK counterparts recently called on the Government to take action on the roll-out of universal credit, which is plunging the poorest children into poverty and will surely leave lasting marks on their life chances. Unfortunately, the rampant roll-out of universal credit is not the only Government policy that has led to children being plunged back into poverty. The bedroom tax, cuts to tax credits and the knock-on effects of cuts to Welsh Government block grants, which are leading to cuts in children’s services and youth services across the board, are having a detrimental impact on children’s life chances. If the Government carry on with their dogmatic cuts agenda, the impact on young people, and in turn social mobility, risks leaving a generation behind. Each of those policies is hitting children hard. As a result, one in three children in the UK is now growing up in poverty, and more than 1 million people are reliant on food banks.

The “Good Childhood” report published in August 2017 by the Children’s Society highlighted the fact that children and young people’s happiness is in decline, which has implications for attainment and social mobility. I am sure I do not need to remind Members that only a few weeks ago Alan Milburn and the entire board of the Government’s social mobility commission resigned in protest at the issue being “an afterthought”.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend confirm that the resignation—I agree that it was hugely significant—included a former Conservative Cabinet Minister, Gillian Shephard? Social mobility is not a partisan issue; it is something we all need to be worried about if we care about the future of our countries of Wales and Britain.

[Chris Elmore]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The baroness in question is a former Secretary of State for Education and Employment. When a Conservative of that stature says, “This is not acceptable,” and that social mobility is now “an afterthought”, it is hugely concerning, so that mass resignation was worrying.

The commission’s “State of the nation” report and its focus on Wales are what I would like to draw to the attention of Members. The commission found that the percentage of individuals living in poverty in Wales is higher than in all regions of Great Britain except London and the west midlands, and that 26% of people earn an income below the living wage. Much of that seems to be due to the UK Government’s implementation of a public sector pay cap in Wales, which has denied our hard-working public sector employees a fair pay increase in seven years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I do not for a moment underplay the wider challenges. I agree with the hon. Lady about a holistic approach that involves support for teaching, but at the moment I am merely remarking that all the data suggest that those early years are important to the results achieved later, in particular at age 16.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore mentioned the achievements of the previous Labour Government on child poverty, which are extremely important. It was the greatest of disappointments, to say the least, that in 2015 the UK Government chose to change the definition of child poverty, which seemed to me simply a way of escaping the problem, not facing it.

There seems to be a historical problem with vocational qualifications. Most people understand that in the post-war era the Butler Education Act 1944 created a system of grammar schools and secondary moderns, but it was never intended to be bipartite; it was meant to be tripartite and to include technical schools as well. In post-war Britain, we have not developed those technical schools as perhaps we should have done. That is not to neglect fine work on apprenticeships. In my constituency and elsewhere I have seen the work of the Welsh Government in that regard, but without doubt there is still more to do to promote apprenticeships as a career path and give them parity of esteem with academic qualifications.

Last summer I visited an ITV apprenticeship scheme. It was outside Wales, in Leeds, but none the less what I experienced there makes the point. I saw a very fine apprenticeship scheme in which people worked around television sets and so on, gaining skills that could be used in that environment or in a broader trade. The problem was that most of the apprentices told me that they had had to find the information about the opportunity themselves, on the internet; they did not hear about it from their career advisers. We need to promote the apprenticeships route at a far younger age throughout the United Kingdom.

University is not for everyone, but the fact remains that many of those in top public and private sector jobs around our country have attended Oxford, Cambridge or other universities in the Russell Group. A lot of recent statistics should alarm us. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) has produced a report showing a geographical domination of all those elite university places by students from the south-east of England. Freedom of information requests to local authorities paint a stark picture. From 2010 to 2015, eight students from the bottom eight local authorities, which includes Torfaen, received offers to go to Cambridge University. Contrast that with the top eight, which includes Surrey and Kent, where 4,800 offers were made in the same period. That division has to be dealt with. Frankly, it is not sustainable in the long term.

I worked as an Oxford University tutor and lecturer for 14 years from just after I graduated in 2001 until I was elected to Parliament in 2015. I had a great deal to do with the admissions process during that period, and I learned three clear lessons. Aspiration is of course vital. Whether we are talking about Oxford and Cambridge or about other elite universities, it is critical that people actually want to apply and are able to think, “This is something for me.” However, that is not enough in and of itself—there needs to be support around it. It always seemed to me that what marked out successful interviewees was their confidence and their ability to sell themselves. In the cases of Oxford and Cambridge, that applies to interviews, but it also applies more broadly across the university sector to personal statements and people’s ability to express what they have done.

The third lesson was about networking skills, which were always demonstrated in people’s personal statements by their extracurricular activities and work experience. People who existed in fine networks to begin with always had far more opportunities to use in the university admissions process than those who did not. We need to teach those skills right across our schools sector so that people have them at ages 15, 16, 17 and 18.

[Susan Elan Jones]

There are some chilling figures about that. I appreciate that it is quite a long time since I was at university, and I know that my old university, the University of Bristol, has improved considerably in this regard, but when I was there more than 70% of students in my faculty were independently educated. In one department in the faculty that figure was 91%, which is staggering.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. On average, around 7% of each cohort goes to fee-paying schools, but that percentage is far higher at our elite universities. Why might that be? My experience was that there were never enough applicants from the state sector in any cohort. As I indicated, we have to tackle that by demystification—by making things clear by saying to people: “There are no places that are not for you if you have the talent to get there.” That sounds easy, but I appreciate that it is a huge challenge.

My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) mentioned the report of the Oxbridge ambassador for Wales, which I was pleased to play a small part in producing before I entered the House. Its author was my predecessor as Member of Parliament for Torfaen, Lord Murphy. The report, which, as my hon. Friend set out, was published in 2014, sought to address the scale of the problem and suggested a series of practical measures, which are being rolled out across Wales. We probably will not see the results of those measures immediately—we will have to see how they pan out in the years to come—but central to the report’s recommendations is the idea of having regional hubs in Wales. The skills that I have talked about—networking skills, and the ability to sell oneself in an interview and on paper—can be looked at on a regional basis. Schools can identify people who have the potential to go to our elite universities, and those people can go to hubs to be provided with that support. I firmly believe that that can make a difference. It has to, because the report highlighted that parts of Wales—incidentally, this applies not just to Wales but to other parts of the UK—are, frankly, deserts for Oxbridge applications.

We talk about university applications. Of course we want our universities to continue to be world leading. This is not about some sort of social engineering occurring at age 18; it is about the interests of our country. We must not lose some of our most talented people simply because they do not apply to universities because they think they are not for them.