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SOCIAL mobility is back - the unsolved conundrum of opportunity and what impedes it. I ought to be pleased, as someone who has campaigned for it to be taken seriously by politicians for some time now.
Alas, there is something dispiriting about arguments that come round like lighthouse beams, briefly commanding the attention of the parties until they get bored , find the solutions too contentious or simply pay lip service and then move on.
Still, Labour's Alan Milburn is surely right to shine a light on hidden barriers to ambitious children from poorer backgrounds rising. It is harder for bright young people without connections to gain work experience and contacts than it was when I started my working life. Informal networks of advice and help are commodities ruthlessly traded across the professions: I will take your Violet for a week in my department on the understanding that one day, my little Freddie will get a stint in Violet's dad's legal chambers.
It isn't wrong but it ends up as an added unfairness towards the less well-connected.
Conservatives should rethink Chris Grayling's silly remark about "class war" (which can be applied pretty much to anything one finds inconvenient to one's interests or habits). As it happens, David Willetts, now their Higher Education spokesman, once vowed that he would open up work experience at Westminster and Whitehall in exactly the same spirit as Mr Milburn proposes and for the same reasons.
But this is just one aspect of what a much broader commission on social mobility should do and is not doing. What we have here is a cherry, not a cake. It's not remotely adequate in times of worsening prosperity, when parents' fears for their children's prospects multiply.
Neither party has risen to the challenge. Nearly two years ago, Mr Willetts caused havoc by saying what everyone else knew. There would be no return to grammar schools to widen the spread of opportunity - so we'd better think seriously about the alternatives.
Interviewing him at the time, together with the Lib-Dems' David Laws and Mr Milburn, it struck me that three bright and lateral thinkers from across the parties did not really disagree much.
All had concluded that the most effective approach was a more daring education reform which would promote greater freedoms in the way that schools operated and were funded, in order to raise their levels of achievement. They embraced a range of more controversial solutions like allowing extra money to be spent on poorer children's education and incentives for good teachers to work in under-privileged areas.
But Mr Milburn was the odd one out. His contribution came from the political wilderness, into which he had been hurled as a result of a long-standing clash with Gordon Brown on public-service reform and its limits.
So, has Mr Brown changed his mind - or is he simply undertaking a diplomatic move to bring back an old enemy who is dangerous outside the tent, while repudiating his more interesting views on the matter in hand?
To add to the mystery, Harriet Harman's White Paper on social mobility this week contains an astonishing commitment: "The Government will consider legislating to make clear that tackling socio-economic disadvantage and narrowing gaps in outcomes for people from different backgrounds is a core function of key public services."
Whoa Harriet. This is possibly a fantasy (the word "consider" is inserted into proposals to allow maximum room for retreat or manoeuvre). But let us suppose that the Government takes its own suggestions at face value. Ms Harman argues that opportunity is so difficult to achieve in Britain that we have greater levels of inequality than other countries. True, but reformers also have to go with the grain of their societies. Trying to turn Britain into Little Scandinavia is doomed to fail. We can copy and adapt the best ideas from elsewhere but trying to impose equality by decree is more likely to damage the public services and produce a backlash than correct inequalities.
The levers we can use are early intervention to help the development of young children in disadvantaged homes, welfare reform to change the low expectations of their parents, and, crucially, an education system which keeps improving its basic standards and supports the more able in reaching much higher.
What Ms Harman proposed instead is a blunderbuss. Publicly funded bodies would have to account for the class background of their staff. Who really wants this to be the "core function" of public services? Apart, that is, from lawyers who would make a killing out of the resulting human rights and employment law cases brought by those discriminated against in the name of enhancing equality.
The public wants its tax-funded services to be served professionally and responsibly by the best qualified staff. That is the reform agenda Mr Brown now says he embraces. It is squarely at odds with Ms Harman's goal, which could only be reliably delivered by a quota system, ensuring the "right" number of people from approved backgrounds are allowed to do certain jobs - a requirement I last encountered in East Germany.
No wonder scepticism in Cabinet is deafening - as it was last time Ms Harman tried her last Equalities Bill which was duly "considered" and watered down. "The problem with Gordon is that he can't say no to Harriet," says one minister. "But she is deputy leader: he has to give her something now and then."
I don't get the impression Mr Milburn is mad keen on the Harman proposals either: it is like watching two hostile horses being harnessed together for the village show.
The PM's allies assure me that he is not keen on a state-engineered equality crusade. "That's not his way of thinking," says one.
So what is? His views on how to solve the social mobility lag are a huge mystery, oddly for a man who appears genuinely moved by the divided society around him. Old Gordon tried the punitive approach to elite universities in the Laura Spence case. New Gordon appoints an Education Secretary who seems more dedicated to curbing pushy middle-class parents than revolutionising schools standards.
Mr Brown once told me that he considered himself a meritocrat who reveres excellence. But Ms Harman's decree would discriminate against high achievers from the "wrong" backgrounds . Or more likely drive them out of the public sector altogether.
We are left with an inconsistent and impractical muddle because Mr Brown is slicing and dicing his message to appeal to two fundamentally opposed schools of thought. As he does so, he evades one of the most important questions we face: how to make opportunity more than just a sporadic promise. That's the crying shame.
Reader views (18)
What incentive is there for people (any people) to succeed if they know that their children will be discriminated against in education and employment as a result? This certainly happened under old style Eastern European socialism.
- Ann, London, 15/01/2009 11:11
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Funny that the labour people pushing social mobility use their money from public funds to pay for their children to go to private schools. How about the Grammar school system? That and value people other than Lawyers and politicians! Plumbers electricians and builders are more valuable tham the parasitic professions.. Open up more Grammar schools - let people learn that life is competitive early on and to develop through their own efforts not money.
- John Whitby, Peterborough, Cambs, 15/01/2009 09:34
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The reality is that inequality has already set in by the age of 10. Grammar schools might snatch a few super-bright kids from poor backgrounds, but the main thing they would do - and did when they existed more widely - is cement in existing inequalities. From the way some people go on about them, you'd imagine the old grammar schools were stuffed full of working class kids rather than the reality - stuffed full of middle class kids with the few working class ones amongst them feeling lost and out of place.
Anyway, that concept was in the days when we needed 20% doing brain jobs and 80% doing muscle jobs, and of the 20% doing brain jobs less than half went to university. We now have an employment situation and pattern of going to university where most kids need the sort of education which was once restricted to grammar schools. The big issue is not hot-housing a small elite, we don't have a real problem there, it's raising the game for those in the middle. If someone could convince me that secondary moderns would do the job, I might accept the grammar school argument.
But anyway, I went to a comprehensive school, I got good A-levels, and went to a good university. So did and do thousands of other kids. One might suppose from the "bring back the grammar school" crowd that every comprehensive school is like the worst sort of failing school in a poor area that all clued-up parents avoid, that's rubbish.
- Matthew Huntbach, Eltham, 15/01/2009 09:13
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Grammar schools - why do all sides of the political spectrum appose them? Given that nearly 90% of Cabinet ministers went to private school it is hardly surprising that the majority of people in this country can not relate to their proposals..
- Sarah, Ealing London, 14/01/2009 19:20
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Born into poverty raised in a prefab just after the war where on freezing days we stayed in bed to keep warm forever hungry, the last boy in short trousers and at the age of 15 that was embarrassing as was my only footwear, black plimsolls for the winter and white for the summer.
I raised my self by application and a burning desire to succeed never for a moment thinking anyone would help me but they did my teacher my first employer who guided me to maximise my potential but only because I wanted to better myself achieving a university degree having left Secondary Modern with nothing.
Social mobility has to start within the person wanting to succeed not the "lets send them on Safari etc to motivate them"
This scheme smacks of State control gone mad by power as they have nothing better to do then try to control every aspect of our lives.
- John, London UK, 14/01/2009 18:43
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Over the last month, I've met two graduates who now work as locksmiths. Social mobility will come not from training more people to take degrees in environmental or media studies or art but by providing equality of esteem for further education courses and apprenticeships. In other words, when we as a society - and the Labour Party above all- come to respect the labour of plumbers and builders as much as that of graduate engineers and architects. Pie in the sky? No - look around you. The top of the tree celeb earners are chefs and footballers and no-degree pop singers. No? What we need as an economy is to learn to make things again and sell them to the rest of the world - and then there will be the jobs to go with new industries. Just stop the actvivists from killing these new industries - like atomic energy- stone dead.
- Cass, London, 14/01/2009 17:21
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Could someone please explain what was wrong with grammar schools? They provided a route for the less well off to get the equivalent of GCSEs, A Levels and a chance at a good university, and a good degree.
- Sarah Barker, Bristol, uk, 14/01/2009 17:01
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I only wish when I was a kid that I had Nanny Harriet to look after me and push me up the social ladder rather than have to do it myself as it was really really hard. Mobility is exactly that - mobile - people go up and down in the majority of cases all by themselves. Each the obvious nepotism falls down if the someone can't stand on their own two feet. If Britain is so bad how do we keep ending up PM's, Millionaires and all sorts coming from hard luck backgrounds? Harriet Harman has been studying the history of the old soviet union a little too closely
- Ed, London, 14/01/2009 16:48
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I left school and a Labour education system at 15 as thick as the proverbial planks. I joined the Army at 15 in the lowest rank possible. They then educated me properly and through hard work and ambitioon I left in the rank of Major. Harriet Harman has'nt got a clue about social mobility. the same opportunities still exist today for anyone who wishes to take them. It is the lazy feckless individuals who are happy to live on state benefits provided by my hard work who will never change no matter how much social engineering you try. Give up Harriet(the sooner the better).
- Malcolm, Bury st Edmunds UK, 14/01/2009 16:02
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Grammar schools for the children of Labour M.P's. Bring everyone else down to the lowest level possible.
- Ted, London, 14/01/2009 14:54
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Don't worry, it's merely the replay of the "Toffs" scam that Brown tried earlier at Crewe and Nuneaton. It didn't work then, it isn't working now.
- Jamal Akhbar, Edinburgh, 14/01/2009 14:29
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I was the only person from my school year to take A levels, let alone go to university. Since then I have built a very successful career on the basis of hard work and merit. Lack of social mobility is not due to a lack of opportunity - it's due to poor education and a lack of ambition.
- Ian, London, 14/01/2009 14:15
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I was a grammar school pupil, first person in my family to go to uni, 30yrs ago- and have earned less through my public sector career than my siblings who weren't/didn't. But selective exams at 11 yrs old are a dreadful idea- many 'technically inclined' people went to grammar school and many academically inclined went to secondary moderns. Most people don't know which way they are inclined/what career they want/till they are at least 16, most much older.
- Suzy, Essex, 14/01/2009 13:23
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Coming from a Essex working class background, running my own business for years and daughters both graduates with genuine professional jobs, I have always found this woman and her ilk totally loathsome. I get the feeling that it is mutual. We will do for ourselves thank you.
- Dave Morris, Sunderland, 14/01/2009 11:49
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It seriously is getting time to emigrate. If I had Harriet Harmon's background and money, maybe this kind of fantasy would be entertaining. I had to work hard for what I had, both to secure an education and employment. Its the way to get ahead. Strong families are part of that, as is having an aspirational culture. The latter will be difficult in the current climate, but Labour has, by its policies, cut the ground from underneath the middle class, family-centered unit at the heart of every successful society.
- Helene Davidson, London, 14/01/2009 11:35
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We need to return to grammar school education and re-instate the assisted place schemes. In this way the bright can get the education they deserve and the technically inclined can be catered for in the technical/comprehensive schools.
- R.F.Yorks, Yorks, UK, 14/01/2009 11:26
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I don't agree that it is not possible to bring back grammar schools. The only solution to the problem of lack of social mobility is the lack of opportunity. Labour, in its destruction of grammar schools (continued to their everlasting shame by the conservatives) and the assisted places scheme did more to remove opportunities for upward mobility than Harperson's hair-brained schemes would ever achieve.
- Keith Price, Luton, 14/01/2009 10:03
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Start with Grammer Schools. They found the brightest and pushed them along. If you were really interested in social mobility, you would start there.
- Dave Davies, Basingstoke, 14/01/2009 09:33
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