National Education Trust Fourth Annual Lecture

Inner Temple, London, 9th March 2010

It is a great honour to be asked to give this 4th annual lecture organised by the National Education Trust.  Your work has helped set what is probably the most important agenda facing those responsible both for delivering and making policy on education – how to ensure that our education system helps develop talent and merit among our country’s young people, regardless of their background, so that Britain is a genuinely open society. It is that subject I wish to speak about tonight. 

Social mobility has become the new holy grail of public policy.  Spurred by intractable levels of social inequality and, until recently at least, a flat lining in social mobility politicians from across the political spectrum have pinned their colours to the meritocratic mast.  It is a development I regard as most welcome. We are all – or at least claim to be – progressives now.

This Government of course has as its core objective, the creation of an opportunity society.  That is what has underpinned policies from the creation of the minimum wage to the primacy accorded to education. It is an agenda that continues to gather pace.   Last year the Prime Minister asked me to chair the Panel on Fair Access to find new ways of making the professions open to as wide a pool of talent as possible.  My Panel was independent of government and cross-party in its make up.  We received a deluge of evidence – 13,000 pages in total - from countless organisations and individuals.  Last July we issued our final report, Unleashing Aspiration.  It made 88 recommendations to the professions, to government and to other organisations. The Government made its formal response earlier this year and I am pleased to say accepted the vast majority of those recommendations. 
 
In essence our conclusions were these.

First the UK’s professions are growing in importance.  Our teachers, doctors, lawyers and armed services – among many others – make an enormous contribution both to our society and our economy. One in three jobs today are professional or managerial but some experts believe that once retirements are taken into account we will need up to seven million new professionals in employment by 2020. 

Second, the chances of social mobility are greater if there are more professional opportunities and if more people get the chance of a professional career.  The huge growth in professional employment that took place after 1945 created unheard of opportunities for millions of men and women.  In the decades since that first great wave of social mobility birth not worth has become more and more a determinant of life chances in our country.  But that long-running decline may now have bottomed out.  And a new expansion in professional jobs is creating the conditions for a second great wave of social mobility. 

Third, a more fluid society will not just emerge by chance.  It was Government action after the Second World War that was crucial to help people realise the new opportunities that economic and social change were producing.    Like millions of others I felt the benefit of full employment, universal education and a new welfare state.  Likewise, providing we make the right policy choices today the UK can look forward to that second great wave of social mobility from which this and future generations benefit.  Our very first recommendation is any future government should make social mobility its top social policy priority. 

Fourth, there is a long way to go.  Our report is peppered with wonderful initiatives run by the professions to mentor children, reach out to schools and broaden the base from which they recruit.  We were deeply impressed with what we saw and I hope our Report goes with the grain of their efforts.  But despite those efforts and the good progress government has made to tackle disadvantage the glass ceiling in our country has been raised but it has not yet been broken. The gender pay gap has narrowed but the top professional jobs still tend to go to men not women.  And most alarmingly of all the evidence we have been given suggests the UK’s professions have become more not less socially exclusive over time.  It is not just that 3 in 4 judges or 1 in 2 senior civil servants have a private school background.  The data we have seen suggests that tomorrow’s professional is today growing up in a family richer than seven in ten of all families in the UK.

Fourth, the default setting in too many professions, particularly at the top, is to recruit from a narrow part of the social spectrum.  In this sense the professions simply reflect a wider problem in British society: a governing assumption that is still present in too many of our institutions that progress can be achieved on the basis of a limited pool of talent having access to a limited set of opportunities.   It is not just that such elitism is unjust socially.  It can no longer work economically.  The UK’s future success in a globally competitive economy relies on using all of our country’s talent not just some of it.  Any vestiges of a closed shop mentality – either in the professions or in our society – need to be banished once and for all. And it is in the professions’ interest to do so.  If they are to properly serve a Britain that is characterised by its rich diversity they need themselves to embrace the notion of becoming more diverse. 

Fifth, this is more than an issue for those at the very bottom of society.  It matters to what President Clinton once famously called the ‘forgotten middle class’. If that growth in social exclusivity is not checked it will be more and more middle class kids, not just working class ones, who will miss out.   Take internships.  They tend to go to the few who have the right connections not the many who have talent.  Or careers advice in schools.  The Connexions service seems to have focussed on the disadvantaged minority to the detriment of the aspirational majority.  Across the board too many able kids from average middle income families are losing out in the race for professional jobs. It has long been recognised that the UK is a highly unequal society in which class background still too often determines life chances.  Hence the welcome focus in recent years on tackling poverty.  But we need a new recognition: that a closed shop mentality in our country means too many people, from middle income as well as low income families, encounter doors that are shut to their talents.  And, therefore, we need a new focus – to end the closed shop society and create in its place an aspirational society.  Doing so means unleashing aspiration not just beating poverty. 

Of course not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer – and not everyone will want to be – but those with ability and aptitude need a fair crack of the whip to realise their aspirations.  And in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country we need to go further still.  We have to enter what is new territory for public policy and find new ways of systematically raising the expectations of those youngsters and families who simply do not believe they will ever progress. 

It’s not that many young people do not have aspirations.  It is that they are blocked. It is not that they do not have talent.  To coin a phrase, Britain’s got talent – lots of it.  My contention is that it is not ability that is unevenly distributed in our society.  It is opportunity.  Of course there is no single lever that on its own can prize open the professions or make Britain more socially mobile.  And no single organisation can make it happen either.  It is far too complex an issue for that.  It’s as much about family networks as it is careers advice, individual aspirations as school standards, university admission procedures as well as career development opportunities. 

My Panel’s Report made recommendations on each of these areas.  We called for a new national drive to raise aspirations driven by a national army of volunteers, including school alumni, formed from university students and young professionals.  We proposed reforms to give every child good careers advice to replace the inadequate Connexions service with schools controlling budgets for careers services.  We proposed ways of making university education more affordable and admissions procedures fairer.  We argued that internships should be brought out of the informal economy where they are at present and made far more widely accessible.  Because we had seen how the collection and publication of data on gender and race and disability had shone a light on discrimination and changed behaviour, we proposed that the senior civil service should trial the collection and publication of data on the socio-economic background of the people it decides to employ. We showed how entry to the professions could be opened up by devolving more professional functions downwards and by developing more apprenticeships.  And we proposed a fundamental shake-up to our country’s complex and inflexible training system by giving individuals their own government-funded skills budgets so in future they can design their own training to meet their own career needs. 

88 recommendations are a lot to make.  Each is important.  But when I am asked what would make the biggest difference to social mobility in our country I have no doubt – it is reforms to our schools system which hold the key. And it is that issue that I wish to devote the remainder of my lecture this evening. 

What I want to argue is not just that education reform needs to find a second wind but that it needs to take a different form.  There will be those – maybe even some here tonight ¬– who inwardly groan at the prospect of yet more change in our schools.  A period of calm is what they most desire not another storm of change. 

And I understand that sentiment.  Change is tough.  It always is.  Schools have seen a lot of it in recent years.  Indeed it is easy to forget just how fundamental the change has been.  When New Labour came to office and we examined the reforms needed in the public services what was so striking was the virtual absence of means and incentives to bring about improvement.  Standards and targets were largely absent.  Today both are focussing effort and delivering results.  Pay systems were in disarray.  Reform here has delivered not just better recruitment and retention but new careers whether for classroom assistants or nurse consultants.  Then local leadership was left to chance.  Now through programmes like Teach First it is actively cultivated.  In the past poor performance was all too often hidden from public view.  Today services are rated and information is published.  Good services earn rewards.  Poor services get support and intervention.  Back then the old monolithic structure of public services was still dominant.  Now devolution is the order of the day with city academies and trust schools, primary care trusts and NHS foundation hospitals, police basic command units and elected mayors.  And for all the Thatcherite talk of markets and choices back in 1997, both were largely missing.  It took a Labour government to open up the public services to a bigger role for the private and voluntary sectors and, for the first time, to empower NHS patients to choose hospitals and parents to establish their own state schools. 

When I look around my own constituency, Darlington, I can see how these reforms - led by pioneers like Andrew Adonis - when allied with record resources have had a transformational impact on schools and colleges across our country.  Surestart is changing life chances for a whole generation of children.  But it more than the new buildings.  Or the 40,000 new teachers or the 200,000 extra support staff.  Or the better pay and the higher status they enjoy.  Or the improved GCSE and A level results they have helped pupils achieve. Or even that simultaneously schools standards and university admissions have both risen.  It is even more fundamental than that.  It is the fact that education is now a national priority in a way that was simply not the case before.  And there must be no going back.

I say that because education is a good in itself.  At its best, it is the alchemy that takes the potential in a child and turns that promise into progress.  It opens minds.  It develops characters.  It enriches lives.  It produces good citizens.

In the modern world education has become a necessity both for the citizen and for the country.  In a competitive globalised and increasingly knowledge-based economy the premium is ever more on skills and education.  The more you learn the more you earn.  And that is as true for each nation as it is for each individual.  Which is why in country after country investment and reform in education sit so high on the public policy agenda. 

Education though is not just a force for economic progress.  It is a force for social progress.  Its potency in realising individual talent is the best way of overcoming social disadvantage.  A good education opens doors that would otherwise remain closed.  In my life it gave me the opportunity to rise from the council estate to the Cabinet.  It is the motor that can drive social mobility.  Indeed there is a strong correlation globally between higher levels of education spending and higher levels of social mobility.

So there are many positive reasons for ensuring that education remains a policy and political priority and that whatever the short term pressures for public spending reductions education must remain a long term priority for investment.  But there is another more negative reason – and it is to this that I now want to turn my attention.

In the UK our education system is characterised by world-beating centres of excellence, at every level from primary schools to higher education institutions.  But we also have a long tail of education under-achievement, captured in the shameful fact that our country has the second highest level of young people not in education, employment or training (the so-called NEETs) in the OECD.  It is no longer sustainable for our education system to produce a cohort of youngsters who lack the skills to compete in the modern labour market.  The changing nature of our economy demands that every child must be given better opportunities to learn and choose careers.

In the last decade there has been a substantial effort on the part of government to raise educational attainment across the board.  The priority given to education is paying dividends in improved results, modern schools and higher standards. Over the last decade there have been substantial improvements in the number of young people obtaining good GCSE and A level grades.  The number of schools deemed to be failing has fallen sharply. And there is evidence of progress in narrowing educational inequality.  Children who receive free school meals have seen their GCSE results improve at a faster rate than those who do not.  Similarly, some ethnic minority groups – such as black afro-Caribbean boys – have also closed the attainment gap.  Primary schools in the poorest areas have improved almost twice as fast as those in the most affluent and in secondary schools city academies are improving results at four times the national rate despite having twice the number of pupils on free school meals. 

Despite this progress, the attainment gap by social position is still substantial.  And it starts very early in life. The Sutton Trust points to US research showing that half of the school attainment gap is present at the start of school.  This makes the case not only for continued investment in early years education but also for better targeting of resources, alongside greater engagement of parents, so that the communities who most need support receive it.  At primary school the attainment gap narrows, albeit only slightly, before widening again after age 11. 

Today the chances of a child who is eligible for free school meals -   roughly the poorest 15% by family income - getting good school qualifications by the age of 16 are less than one-third of those for better-off classmates.  Attainment at age 16 is key to children’s future life chances.  Without it the likelihood of a professional career or progression to university diminishes.  According to the Government’s own figures nine out of ten students, whatever their class or background, who get two or more A-levels go on to university.  The problem is that currently about half of 16 year old students a year do not achieve the minimum standards to stay on to study for A levels.

This pattern reflects the fact that in terms of attainment, only 37% of the lower socio-economic groups gain 2 or more A-levels, compared to 59% of the higher socio-economic groups. This in turn reflects performance at age 16; only about one third of children from the lower socio-economic groups get 5 GCSEs at A-C levels, compared to about two-thirds from the highest socio-economic groups. For those eligible for free school meals that figure falls to 22%. 

It reflects something else too.  An uncomfortable truth.  There is a strong correlation between poor areas and poor schools.  Over half of secondary schools in the 10% most deprived parts of England do not achieve the Government’s benchmark for a non-failing school.  In the 10% least deprived areas it is just 3% of schools that are deemed to be officially failing. 

It is sometimes argued that parents in the most disadvantaged areas are less aspirational for their children than those in better-off areas.  The figures on schools appeals repudiate such assumptions, with a large number of parents in disadvantaged parts of the country using the appeals system to try to get their children out of poorly performing schools and into better ones. The problem is not a shortage of parental aspiration.  It is a shortage of good schools.  The growing numbers of parental appeals – across the country as a whole – indicates that despite the progress in raising standards there remains a gap between demand for good schools and the supply of them.  That is the case in many different sorts of communities but it especially so in the most disadvantaged.  That is why further reform is needed. 
 
Thankfully this is a rich time for education policy.  With an election coming there is a feast of reform proposals on offer.  There is lots of focus on developing teachers and leaders.  There are ideas for reforming the curriculum and personalising it too.  There are plans to change how schools are structured and how they are funded. 

There is much to welcome in all of this. But sometimes it can be hard to see the wood for the trees.   It is easy to lose sight of the fundamentals.  Good schools are a product of the right ethos, strong leadership and good teachers.  They focus relentlessly on raising standards and the potential of individual pupils.  And over the last decade the Government has put in place many of the reforms needed to develop precisely these attributes.  These reforms need to be driven forward.  But if we are to genuinely make schools motors of social mobility there will need to be a new focus for further reform.  I have three priorities in mind.

First, moving the focus from targets to outcomes.

Second, moving power from the centre to the local. 

Three, moving control from providers to parents. 

So first how we move from targets to outcomes.  Educational attainment unlocks social progress.  That is why a focus on the educational basics – especially English and maths – remains vital.  Softening the drive to raise standards might offer comfort some but risk undermining the progress that has taken place over the last decade.  Schools need to be judged on their success in delivering good academic results particularly at GCSE and A Level since these open the door to a university degree and a decent career.  Clear standards here have delivered improved results.  That is why the blasé idea of simply abolishing targets is so flawed.  It lets under-achievement off the hook.  It is a recipe for lower standards not higher.  And for a widening, not a narrowing, in the educational attainment gap.

Of course too many targets – like too many cooks – can spoil the broth.  So some change is needed.  Fierce competition for university places and graduate-entry jobs means that having an exemplary academic record is no longer a guarantee of success.  Schools nowadays need to provide a rich experience for young people that goes beyond qualifications and which helps them to build up a CV of soft skills not least because that is what employers are increasingly looking for.

My Panel heard from the Russell Group how both universities and employers are using such extra-curricular activities to differentiate candidates for places and jobs.  We also learned with interest from the Headmaster of the City of London School that what often differentiated independent schools from state schools was the former’s support for pupils’ extra-curricular activities. 

There is a strong case for all state schools doing more to build up their pupils’ softer skills by ensuring they are given the chance to participate in a range of extra curricula activities – and that schools should be assessed on how well they do this.  That is why we recommended that Ofsted should ensure that school inspections assess how well schools are doing at providing good quality extra curricula activities.

I know there has been much debate about whether schools are too narrowly focussed at present on simply delivering exam results or whether they should be focussing instead on citizen development.  My Panel argued that it is not a question of either/or.  It is both. 

We welcomed the new School Report Card which is to be introduced in 2011, as part of the 21st Century Schools agenda. However, whilst this is an encouraging direction of travel, the Panel also believed that the report card could go further still.  We recommended that the Government should use the School Report Card to provide greater transparency and accountability about schools’ performances on improving pupils’ outcomes.  We argued that in future appropriate destination indicators and data should be developed so the progress that pupils make between starting school, leaving school and their destinations after school could be properly assessed.  And we called on the Government to consider how schools could be better incentivised – including financially – to improve pupils’ overall outcomes.  As we have seen in other parts of the public services where rewards follow results performance tends to improve.  I think of the increase in hospital activity rates – and falls in waiting times – following the introduction of a payment by results financial incentive. 

That would be a radical departure in education.  It would mean schools being paid less according to the number of pupils they teach and more according to the outcomes they achieve.  The aim would be to move the focus from quantity to quality.  Such a change is underpinned by a belief that if education is indeed to be an engine of accelerated social mobility the objective of education policy has not only to be about eradicating the tail of underperforming schools.  It also has to incentivise more schools to move from being satisfactory to becoming excellent.  In other words, it is not just a question of closing the gap.  We also have to continually raise the bar. 

A means of doing so is contained in my second proposed focus for future reform: shifting power from the centre to the local, from Whitehall and the town hall on the one hand to the school and the local community on the other.  That journey has already begun.  Now it needs to be speeded up.  

 In New Labour’s first term the accent was on top-down targets and prescription from the centre. I for one quickly learned that improving services run by caring professionals will not happen through finger pointing or blame gaming.  So in the second and third terms there has been a welcome change in tone towards greater devolution and diversity.  We have seen a clearer division of labour emerge between local councils and local schools.  We have seen new forms of more autonomous school organisation in the shape of city academies, trust schools and the first parent-run schools.  And greater autonomy has produced better results.  The contrast between Hackney Downs School – where only 11% of pupils achieved 5 good GCSEs – and its replacement – Mossbourne Community Academy where 86% do - is but one example of what happens when schools are given greater flexibility and the freedom to deliver innovation.  There should be no trimming back on this agenda.  Rather it should be driven forward.

There is no single silver bullet that can deliver school improvement.  Raising standards requires a mix of levers. Top-down pressure from central government has a key role in driving improvements through stable funding, sensible standards and a flexible system of regulation. But if public service improvement is to be self-sustaining rather than top-down driven, other sorts of pressure are needed. And if innovation is to become the norm, we need to free local public service organisations and local communities to develop their entrepreneurial skills and ideas. Hence the need to intensify the sideways pressure of competition and incentives. So just as in the NHS it is the Government’s ambition to make independent NHS Foundation Trusts universal across the health service so in education there should be a clear timetable for making all schools, primary and secondary, autonomous.  There need be no single model.  They could become academies or trusts.  They could be parent owned or community controlled.  They could be run by faith groups or voluntary organisations, by social enterprises formed by teachers or by chains run by private sector bodies.  The point is that in each local area, starting with the poorest, the next government should have a clear plan with a firm timetable for making autonomy the norm not the exception in our school system. 

And where there are schools that are consistently under-performing or where the number of parents who do not get their first preference of school goes above a set threshold, the supply of education places should be opened up to greater competition. New providers, whether they be chains of state schools or schools sponsored by groups of parents or private sector bodies, could be brought in to replace, take over or work with underperforming schools.  As the Prime Minister indicated in his speech last month, such competition could be triggered by giving parents the right to bring about a change in school leadership. 

That brings me to the third piece of the new reform jigsaw I believe the next Government will need to assemble - how to empower parents vis-à-vis providers. Too often in reforming public services there is a disjunction between the future we want – services built around the needs of individual citizens – and the solutions we prescribe.  They are largely top down and structural when they need to be bottom up and personal.  Of course, in today’s world, no organisation can operate successfully without clear standards, decent IT, proper reward systems and incentives to improve.  It is clearly a step in the right direction that in both education and health the old State monopolies have been replaced by greater organisational independence and new competitive incentives to improve services.  But with the notable exception of the choice programme in the NHS these reforms have empowered institutions not individuals.  Diversity and devolution on their own do not empower the citizen.  Only giving individuals real power will make that happen. 

There is a pressing progressive reason for doing so when it comes to education. Selection by academic ability may have largely gone from our schools system but selection by social position still lingers.  There might not be an overt market-place in education but there is a covert one.  There is a big financial premium on house prices in areas served by the best performing state schools.  Better off parents can afford to move house to get their children into a good school.  They can afford extra tuition or even private education.  In other words the more wealth you have the more choice over a good education you can buy.  Affluence still buys attainment. 

I don’t decry those parents.  They are merely doing what all parents want to do – which is to get their child into a really good school.  The problem is, as last week’s figures on school places demonstrated, despite all the progress that has been made there still are not enough of them.

Because they lack the market power of better-off parents, invariably it is poorer parents who find themselves at the back of the queue in getting access to the best state schools.  That cannot be right and I believe it has to change.  There is more than one way of doing so.  Some are already in train.  I do not argue for the focus on school leadership, a personalised curriculum or higher standards to be lost.  What I am proposing is an addition not an alternative to the reform agenda so that poorer parents can get as fair a chance as better off parents to access good schools for their children.  This reform involves giving poorer parents precisely the same market power that better off parents are able to exercise.
 
I believe that individual parents with children in those schools where performance has been officially assessed as consistently poor – often in the poorest parts of the country - should be given a new right to choose an alternative state school.  They would be given an Education Credit weighted to be worth perhaps 150% of the cost of educating the child in their current school.  They could use the Credit to persuade the better performing school to admit their child.  The admitting school would have a positive financial incentive to do so.  Indeed, for children holding an Education Credit the alternative school would be free to go above its planned admission numbers although of course it could decide to cap its expansion at what it considered an appropriate level. 

The losing school would also have a sharp financial incentive to improve since it would not only lose a pupil but also the cash it cost to educate them.  Some will find this unacceptably harsh.  And of course the Education Credit would need to be piloted before being progressively extended to more groups of parents.  But I believe that despite the Government’s progress in narrowing the educational gap further radical action of this sort is needed to tackle educational disadvantage in our country.  It is simply not right - and we should no longer tolerate the fact - that too many children, invariably those from less well-off backgrounds, are still let down by the schools system.  Correcting that injustice means shifting the balance of power to put more choice in the hands of parents who the system currently disempowers. If education really is to be the motor of social mobility those parents and their children need a new opportunity to fulfil their aspirations. 

Such a change recognises in a way that previous reforms have not done that there is a power gap in society that, as progressives, we should want to close. Reforms, of course, have to be designed to address disadvantage and support people to make informed choices. But, providing they are, the people who stand to gain most from such an approach are the very people who have least power, usually the poorest. So what have sometimes been seen in the past as competing objectives – public service reforms and social justice programmes – should in future be brought together.

There are many things that drive social mobility.  Tonight I haven’t spoken about the primary role played by parents and families.  Or the important of community expectations and social networks.  Or the way that better careers advice or reformed university admissions procedures can create more opportunities.  I have focussed instead on schools.  I have done so because I believe what happens there in the next decade will determine whether the promise that exists to make Britain a fair and open society can be realised.

I believe that it can  I hope that my Panel’s report kick-starts a radical programme of change – in schools, colleges, universities, employers and professions, and local and national government. I hope that it puts fair access and social mobility at the top of all of their agendas.  

One thing, for me at least, is certain – modern Britain can’t work if it harbours a closed shop mentality.  Our economy won’t prosper unless we harness the talent of all those who are able and aspire to make a contribution.  And our society won’t flourish unless people feel that effort and endeavour are rewarded.  From all that I saw during our work – the inspiring projects the professions have started, the progress the government has made, the determination that exists in our education system to build on it,  above all else the young people I met – I have real hope for the future.  Unleashing the aspirations that exist in our society is an idea whose time has come. I hope our Report acts as a catalyst for a fundamental process of change.  I hope you will be part of it.