Improving social mobility
Alan Milburn says that society will be fairer if parents get better support and further education is properly valued. The Chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission outlined his thinking at the Tory conference.
A fairness Budget
Social mobility should be as big a story on Budget Day as the Chancellor’s words, according to Alan Milburn. The former Health Secretary now chairs the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission which monitors UK Government policy in this area. Milburn was speaking at the Centre for Social Justice’s fringe event at the Conservative Party conference, attended by agendaNi. The commission wants the independent Office for Budget Responsibility to produce a full analysis of the Budget’s impact on social mobility.
“And I would like that statement published at the very moment where George Osborne stands at the despatch box in the House of Commons and delivers his Budget statement,” he added. “I think that will help George. I think it will definitely help the country and I think it will help us to deliver what parties across the political spectrum now say that they intend to deliver, which is a society with far less poverty and far more mobility.”
The commission also has responsibility for describing progress against the Scottish and Welsh child poverty strategies. It currently has no specific role in holding the Northern Ireland Executive to account but the remit can be extended if the Assembly grants its consent. Its website is www.gov.uk/smcpc
Back parents
The UK, Milburn related, has the highest proportion of women who “work part-time and would like to work full-time” but cannot because of their caring responsibilities. He thinks that government policy places more emphasis on supporting childcare providers than “supporting parents to do their job.”
Milburn elaborated: “For the last 20 or 30 years, public policy whether at right or at left has focused on institutional childcare – important of course – but it hasn’t focused on the critical role that individual parents play. The biggest influence on a kid: it’s not the school, it’s not the SureStart [support service], it’s certainly not the local authority, it’s the parent.”
This is “really difficult territory” for politicians, who were afraid of creating the “nanny state” and being accused of interfering in family life. It is clear, though, that some parents are better than others at reading with their children: an important early building block for education. Government, he contends, has a role in encouraging parents to do that.
Close the gap
His second proposal is that policy-makers should give as much attention to closing the attainment gap between rich children and poor children as they do to raising standards in schools.
In the English context, Labour and the Coalition Government have strongly focused on raising the bar of school standards.
Children receiving free school meals in London now perform 50 per cent better at GCSE level than their counterparts in the rest of England.
Labour introduced London Challenge in 2003 to drive up the performance of inner city schools and an independent assessment is available at www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/london-challenge
Milburn welcomed this progress but added: “The truth is the gulf between kids on free school meals and those who are not is still massive.”
Value further education
Governments, Milburn contends, have had the wrong focus for the last 50 years i.e. since the expansion of higher education in the 1960s. He has been to “endless meetings” about the future of universities: “I’ve barely been to a single meeting about the future for further education and vocational training.”
Compared to university students, further education students receive far less funding per head and their employment outcomes are less predictable.
A young person applying for a university place anywhere in the UK only has to fill out one application (the UCAS form) but there is no single point of access for further education.
To turn this trend around, he wants more investment into career services, further education colleges to be rewarded “not according to what they do but what they achieve” and a simplified pathway for young people applying for further education.
Make work pay
Work is a “necessary condition” for overcoming poverty but not a cure for it. Sixty per cent of UK children living in poverty “are in a family where someone is in work.” Five million people, mostly women, earn less than a living wage, estimated at £7.65 per hour. The current national minimum wage is £6.31 per hour.
“These are the people who do the right thing,” he remarks. “Stand up on your own two feet, don’t rely on the state, go out to work, work hard. They are the forgotten people of Britain and they should be the focus of our efforts.”
Tax credits have been used to bridge the gulf between earnings and prices but the cost of those had risen to £30 billion by 2010.
“In an age of austerity, it is no longer possible for the taxpayer to duly shoulder that burden,” Milburn explained. “We’re going to have to ask a difficult thing. We’re going to have to ask employers to step up to the plate alongside taxpayers.” Significantly for Northern Ireland, his call for employers to pay the living wage covers the public sector and the private sector alike.
