UK Edition
Yesterday's Queen’s Speech put increasing life chances at the heart of the government’s agenda.
Today in Britain, we are still too unequal. The advantages of those born to wealth still usually set them on course to further success. The less advantaged play catch-up from the start, with variable results. This injustice embeds inequality and wastes talent. We need to tackle privilege.
Education has the capacity to alter all of this: Learning changes lives because it changes life chances. We see the disparity of opportunity most starkly in our education system, where attainment remains chequered and divided across the country. There remain areas of chronic under-performance, such as some coastal and rural areas, where low standards are exacerbated by a lack of capacity to improve.
These disparities are holding us back internationally. A recently-published OECD study analysing 2012 data concluded that nearly 20 per cent of British school leavers were functionally illiterate or innumerate. England was ranked lowest in the developed world for literacy, and the second lowest for numeracy, worse than countries like Finland and Korea. All this, despite Britain spending more on family benefits and childcare - some 3.5 per cent of GDP- ahead of Australia, Canada and the USA.
We have come a long way, and I’m proud of the achievements of the last Conservative-led coalition. Rising living standards and improvements to peoples’ incomes, health, employment and education have made Britain a country where enterprise, endeavour and self-responsibility pay off, but where the state steps in during times of need. Since 2010, the number of children growing up in workless households is at a record low, down by 480,000. The Pupil Premium, worth £2.5 billion per year, is supporting our most vulnerable young people. 1.4 million children now attend a good or outstanding school, and record numbers of students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are starting a university degree. And thanks to a relentless focus on synthetic phonics, 120,000 more children are reading to a higher standard.
But there is still much more to do. Our country remains divided and in many ways the landscape of inequality is most vivid in our education system. Today, a child born in a poor area will die an average of 9 years earlier than their peers. There are more young black men in our prisons than there are studying at a top university. Problems that have been years in the making will take time to tackle.
That’s why I’m pleased that the Queen’s Speech identified the importance of supporting young people in care, improving social work, support for those with addiction and mental health problems and extending excellence in schools. Geography, income and ethnicity play a part. The announcement of a new way of measuring life chances is hugely significant, too. Whilst past attempts have focused chiefly on economic solutions to poverty, whilst the cultural and social dimensions have been neglected.
In appreciating where expectations lead, four social insights are important: Firstly, the pivotal significance of the first few years of life in determining the kind of adults we become; secondly, the value in not just acquiring knowledge, but in developing character and resilience; thirdly, social connections, experiences, informal mentors, the mixing of communities, cultural stimulus to which adolescents are exposed; and lastly, crippling problems such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and poor mental health limit lives and warrant much more consideration than they have had. Innovative solutions are needed.
Robert Putnam, the Harvard social scientist, identified in his recent book "Our Kids" that children born to the right families were pulling away from those at the bottom in relation to school sports, obesity, maternal employment, single parenthood, financial stress, church attendance, friendship networks, and even family dinners. For Putnam, their absence of the latter symbolises much of the problem: “family dinners act as an indicator of the subtle but powerful investments that parents make in their kids (or fail to make).” Social integration is also needed if we are to really solve this problem. As Putnam says: “our kids are increasingly growing up with kids like them who have parents like us, creating an incipient class apartheid”.
Britain must take stock of these problems, because the fate of those struggling at the bottom should not be set in stone the day they start school. I want to live in a Britain where it doesn’t matter from where you come, what your parents did or how wealthy your family is; where aspirations can be met through effort, perseverance and an attitude of service. Our values as a country demand that we take action to end social injustice. That is the high ambition set by this Queen’s Speech, and it is a fitting agenda for a progressive, one-nation government to tackle during the rest of this Parliament. The Prime Minister is right to pursue it, and progress over the next few years would be something of which he – and all Conservatives - could be immensely proud.
Suella Fernandes is Conservative MP for Fareham and member of the Education Select Committee
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