Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make a statement in response to the report of the Social Mobility Commission, Social mobility between 1997 and 2017: time for change, published on 28 June 2017.

We welcome the Commission’s report, published on 28 June, which considers efforts to improve social mobility over the last twenty years. The Commission rightly concludes that too often life chances can be determined not by effort and talents but where you come from, your parents’ situation and what school you attend. The Department will set out further details on policy to tackle this social injustice in due course.

Thanks to the Government’s reforms, there are 1.8 million more pupils in good or outstanding schools than in 2010, and we are delivering three million apprenticeship places, opening up access to our higher education system and investing £500 million a year into technical education.

Improving social mobility requires support from all parts of society: government, employers and civic organisations. Last year, we launched our £72 million Opportunity Area programme. In these 12 social mobility ‘coldspots’ we are working with a range of local partners to break the link between background and destination. We know these areas face some of the most entrenched challenges, as described by the Social Mobility Commission’s Index last year. Our approach here goes beyond what the Department and central government can do – extending to local authorities, schools, academy sponsors, local and national businesses, Local Enterprise Partnerships, FE colleges, universities, the voluntary sector, and more.

I spoke at a Westminster Hall Debate about government policies on social mobility and the Commission’s ‘Time for Change’ report on 11 July. The debate and my speech are available in Hansard at this weblink: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2017-07-11/debates/D9AB2665-13E3-4AE4-90CD-528E30853ED0/SocialMobility