Social mobility - I rest my case!

Alan Milburn's well attended Tribal lecture was a strange affair. It started with a message which chimes loudly with school and college leaders for whom the improvement of social mobility is at the heart of their raison d’être. He tracked the changes from a period starting in the 50s where social hope underpinned a commitment by the state to move away from a culture of ‘birth not worth’ to a society decades later which is more ossified and reflects greater social resentment. He talked of the progress the last government made to raise the glass ceiling recognising that there is much to do and cited the fact that three out of four judges, half of civil servants and one in three parliamentarians were educated privately. He described the valuable work of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty commission which will rigorously and independently assess the impact of what any government is doing on the creation of a fairer society in which people from all backgrounds have equal chances of progression. So far so good until he started talking about schools.......

 For a while I was on board as he emphasised the importance of employability skills as a key and gave some strong messages to the coalition about the parlous state of careers guidance and the fact that we cannot afford not to invest in education. However, then came the proposed solutions:

Another regime of targets for schools, judging them on outcomes such as destinations of pupils.

National programmes to raise aspirations because “there aren't enough good schools”. The language of failing schools came to the fore.

And then, quite bizarrely, a proposal for parents to be ‘empowered’ to choose ‘good’ schools. Parents of children who attend ‘failing’ schools would be given a voucher to the value of one half times the per pupil funding which they could take to another school with their children.

As you can imagine a lively discussion ensued.

I continue to despair as schools are presented as the problem rather than the solution. Where are these leaders who do not want young people to succeed – who will only ‘shape up’ with yet more threats and accountability measures in a system which must be the most monitored in the world? We know the problems are so much more complex than that.

But most importantly we all know that proposals such as this would simply not work. Pupils with parents who know their way round the system would be channelled away from the schools in challenging areas to schools in leafy suburbs which would thrive on the additional funding. The remaining pupils in other schools would be condemned to education in a poorly funded environment undergoing a slow process of attrition. The gap would widen as they missed out on their only chances.

In the discussion an example was given of a school which had  apparently been ‘failing’  for many years. Why didn't the local authority close the school we asked? Because no politicians will close schools because it would lose votes.

Commitment to improving social mobility?  I rest my case.