The government’s plan to improve social mobility has been dealt a series of blows over the past week. New education data show that trends towards a more ‘socially mobile’ Britain are pointing in the wrong direction.
Nick Clegg launched the government’s social mobility strategy last April, promising to ‘open the doors of opportunity’ to children from disadvantaged homes as they move into adulthood. Children from poor homes are half as likely to achieve five good GCSEs as their better off peers, and they account for less than one in a hundred Oxbridge students. Clegg rightly pointed out that this is both unfair and damaging for the competitiveness of our economy.
A key way to improve social mobility is to raise the educational achievement of children from poor backgrounds, and help more of them go to university. This goal is at the core of the government’s social mobility strategy, which sets out to narrow the huge difference in results between pupils from different social class backgrounds. People with degrees on average earn 85% more than those who leave school after GCSE, and are far more likely to work in the top professions such as law and medicine.
But recent figures from a number of different sources are all pointing in the wrong direction for improving social mobility. Most strikingly, we learned this week that applications for university courses are down 12% on this time last year, largely as a result of the rise in tuition fees. Of particular concern is the dramatic decline in mature students applying to university – which has seen a fall of over a fifth since last year. Studying later in life is often the best way of enabling people to improve their lot, especially if they have been let down by their education in childhood.
Meanwhile, eyebrows are being raised at the publication of the latest school exam data. Pupils at independent schools are three times more likely to achieve an A* grade at A-level than students from comprehensive schools. Given the top universities now require most applicants to have A* grades, it doesn’t seem likely that the gulf between the number of private and state school students getting into top universities will be closing anytime soon. This situation is likely to get worse following today’s revelation that spending on sixth form students is facing bigger cuts than other areas of the education system.
Dig into the data for GCSEs, and other worrying trends emerge. If children from disadvantaged homes are to get into top universities to study for subjects like physics or engineering, then they will have to take ‘hard’ subjects at GCSE and A-level – because it is these subjects that are preferred by admissions tutors. But only 20% of pupils in comprehensive schools took individual science GCSEs last year, with the remainder taking a ‘combined science’ course that leaves them poorly prepared to study the science subjects at A-level. This in-turn means they are less likely to go to a top university, as well as reducing the all important science base of the nation. Compare this to grammar schools – where 70% of pupils are studying individual science GCSEs – and the size of the gap that has to be closed becomes clear.
Of course going to university is not the only way to improve social mobility. There is much that can be done by employers to help open doors for young people to move straight into work, or for people to study in further education colleges. But it doesn’t look like the labour market holds many answers given its current state, with youth unemployment the highest it has been for a generation and the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training about to top one million.
With all the underlying indicators pointing to reduced social mobility, action needs to be taken to both stimulate jobs for young people and improve educational achievement. IPPR is calling for a job guarantee for young people who have been out of work for more than twelve months; a strengthening of apprenticeships and vocational qualifications through much greater involvement of employers ; making the pupil premium an ‘entitlement’ to guarantee that the extra cash reaches the pupils who need it, and a school accountability framework that focuses on the progression of all children, not just those achieving grades C or above. Taken together, these actions could form the basis of a proper offer for young people, and a strategy for raising social mobility with real impact.
Jonathan Clifton is Research Fellow at IPPR.
‘The Independent View‘ is a slot on Lib Dem Voice which allows those from beyond the party to contribute to debates we believe are of interest to LDV’s readers. Please email [email protected] if you are interested in contributing.
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8 Comments
Though you say that the university application figures are “largely as a result of the rise in tuition fees”, that’s not actually what the evidence shows: https://www.libdemvoice.org/?p=25677 For example, if that was the case, we’d see a much more different pattern between applications where people will be covered by the new English tuition fees scheme from those where the applicant is covered by the unchanged Scottish tuition fees scheme.
The Lib Dem and Coalition policy to improve social mobility is the pupil premium. This long term effort can only be judged over years, and with value added data coming from schools themselves.
The data and the argument made by Jonathan Clifton is essentially an analysis of the current problem, not an assessment of how the pupil premium is working so far.
I agree that education of all sorts, and including initiatives such as the pupil premium, is a sine qua non for improving social mobility but the claims that, “trends towards a more ‘socially mobile’ Britain are pointing in the wrong direction “ are sadly unsurprising.
For even more than it’s about education, achieving social mobility is about jobs – having plenty of good quality ones that empower folk to, as one might say, to mobilise themselves. We should not forget that in this context the point of education is as just one of the necessary ingredients of a successful economy. But it’s far from being the only one and may not even be the most important one. For years one of officialdom’s primary strategies (if you can call it that) has been to paper over the cracks with the public payroll. From the “job guarantee” link in the post, “Evidence suggests that the public sector has been filling in for insufficient private sector job creation over the last 20 years.” This can’t and won’t go on; we need a structural fix which isn’t yet in the government’s programme.
I suggest that what is most important to fix is costs – as in the costs of doing business in this country are too often too high so firms fail outright or fail to thrive and create jobs as they should. The difficulty is that “cost” is a problem that the left/liberal end of politics typically doesn’t like to think about because it usually taken as code for either (a) cutting workers pay and/or numbers, or (b) cutting public services which hits those that depend on them and of course also cuts jobs . So the right wing has always “owned” the issue of cost and has predictably made it thoroughly toxic.
But there is, or rather there should be, a liberal view that says that the whole point of running the economy is to pay people well (and not just FTSE 100 bosses per today’s news!) but still contain costs so that companies remain competitive in world markets. Indeed it is only if they are competitive that they can either pay well or expand.
So what is the usual right wing framed debate (such as it is) on costs missing?
Surely, it is that over time many people and firms at the top of society have found ways of extracting “economic rent” from the economy. Most obviously this is through property but it’s become commonplace throughout the economy. Banks do it by creating credit at the click of a mouse – the more they create the more their profits and the more the economy wilts under the debt service load (the limit was reached only when the burden overwhelmed the economy leading to the financial crisis). Lawyers do it by (probably subconsciously) creating ever expanding complexity necessitating longer (and for them) more profitable cases – does anyone seriously think that £18 million was a reasonable price tag for sorting out Dale Farm? Supermarkets do it by exploiting their control of the supply chain, extracting superprofits by underpaying suppliers and overcharging customers. The overpricing could be as much as 30% which happens to be about what Aldi and Lidl, firms with a business model forged in the much better managed German economy, claim.
I could go on, but the point should be clear. The savings that could be made by running things better would hugely boost the competitiveness of the UK economy and with that would come new and better jobs in large numbers. The poorer and disadvantaged would be big winners because of improved access to cheaper housing, food etc.
So, the question for liberals is this; do they want to become experts in dividing up an ever-shrinking cake or in the sort of structural reforms that might actually work?
Whenever an article like this is published the main debate that follows is usually one about statistics. I would like to know how the government intends to measure the improvements in social mobility that they would like to see happen.
I have to admit I am sceptical about the government being able to improve social mobility with current policies. I cannot see how it can be done when public services are being cut and inequality is increasing. The pupil premium is a good idea but I do not think there is enough money behind it, and it is coming out of the education budget anyway. The shift to Free Schools, although thankfully small so far, will I think have a net impact of reducing social mobility.
Gosh “Labour think tank in criticism of Coalition shock”
Wouldn’t a better headline be: “Labour’s social mobility strategy failed”
@Simon going for the man rather than the ball again I see.
Incidently I checked the IPPR website and it does not say anything about being aligned with Labour. Not only that, did you not notice that the article supports the pupil premium?
@Geoffrey Payne
“I have to admit I am sceptical about the government being able to improve social mobility with current policies. I cannot see how it can be done when public services are being cut and inequality is increasing.”
I share your scepticism, but for a slightly different reasons.
The deficit was always going to mean lower future spending. Whatever the pace of deficit reduction, the same amount of structural deficit needs fixing. As public spending tends to be geared towards addressing social problems like the lack of social mobility, it was never going to help. The coalition can try to spend less money more effectively, but it was always going to have less money, whatever it chose to do. (Unless it raised taxes in a way that Gordon Brown refused to do)
I am also somewhat sceptical about the ability of the state to fix social mobility. Children are educated, not just by schools, but in the home. And when it comes to emotional development, the schools, while important, are secondary to the home life and the community from which the child comes. This environment that children are raised in varies enormously. If a child lives in a house where there is not a single book, they are less likely to enjoy reading. Children with parents who don’t have the time or motivation to find other activities for them than sitting in front of the television, are going to find school harder.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to improve schools, and it doesn’t mean that a good school can’t dramatically improve the education for some pupils, but it’s always going to be a challenge to narrow the educational attainment of children from such widely different backgrounds.
I like the pupil premium. But let’s not pretend that it will completely solve the problem.
As for @Jonathan Clifton’s title. Come on, Jonathan. You know perfecly well that it takes years for these policies to have a significant effect. You know that Labour would have to tackle the deficit as well. And regarding tuition fees, you know, as Tim Leunig has shown in https://www.libdemvoice.org/tim-leunig-writes-the-problem-with-labours-proposed-tuition-fees-cap-25430.html , that Labour policy would make no difference to students who earn low wages. Writing an article that implies the opposite just sounds like party politicking. What I’d have much prefered is an article that focusses specifically on one or two or your policy alternatives, such as your job guarantee proposal. Then we could have a debate focussed on a concrete policy.
@Geoffrey Payne
Re the IPPR’s independence. It is independent, but it has close links to the Labour party. The current director is Nick Pearce, a former Head of the No 10 Policy Unit and special advisor to David Blunkett MP. Former members of staff include Patricia Hewitt, David Miliband and Tristram Hunt. Nothing wrong with it having close links to Labour, but, no question about it, it does.
@Mark Pack
Good for LibDemVoice in allowing an IPPR to contribute an Independent View. Debate with those outside the party is a very good thing.