Credit where it's due

Putting more choice in the hands of disempowered parents would transform the life chances of children in poor schools

By Alan Milburn

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.

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. Last July our final report, Unleashing Aspiration, 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.

Eighty-eight 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 that hold the key. I would argue that education reform not only needs to find a second wind, but that it needs to take a different form.

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. In the modern world education has become a necessity, both for the citizen and for the country. The more you learn the more you earn.

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.

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 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.

In the past decade there has been a substantial effort on the part of government to raise educational attainment across the board. 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. GCSE results for children who receive free school meals have improved at a faster rate than those who do not. Similarly, some ethnic minority groups – such as black Afro-Caribbean boys – have closed the attainment gap. Primary schools in the poorest areas have improved almost twice as fast as those in the most affluent.

Despite this progress, the attainment gap by social position is still substantial. The chances of a child who is eligible for free school meals getting good school qualifications by the age of 16 are less than one-third of those for his or her better-off classmates. Attainment at 16 is key to future life chances. But only about one third of children from the lower socio-economic groups get five GCSEs at A-C levels, compared with about two-thirds from the highest socio-economic groups. For those eligible for free school meals that figure falls to 22 per cent.

It reflects something else too, an uncomfortable truth. There is a strong correlation between poor areas and poor schools. More than half of secondary schools in the most deprived 10 per cent of England do not achieve the Government’s benchmark for a non-failing school. In the 10 per cent least deprived areas, just 3 per cent of schools 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 many 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.

If we are genuinely to make schools motors of social mobility there will need to be a new focus for further reform. I have three priorities in mind.
• moving the focus from targets to outcomes;
• moving power from the centre to the local;
• moving control from providers to parents.

Schools should 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 is a recipe for lower standards not higher, and for a widening, not a narrowing, in the educational attainment gap.

My panel called on the Government to consider how schools could be better incentivised – including financially – to improve pupils’ overall outcomes. As 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 payment by results.

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.

A means of doing this 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.

Just as in the NHS, where it is the Government’s ambition to make independent NHS Foundation Trusts universal, 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, parent owned or community controlled, 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 for making autonomy the norm not the exception in our school system.

That brings me to the third piece of the new reform jigsaw: 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. Selection by academic ability may have largely gone from our schools system but selection by social position still lingers. 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. Affluence still buys attainment.

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 has to change. 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. This reform involves giving poorer parents precisely the same market power that better-off parents are able to exercise.

Individual parents with children in those schools where performance has been officially assessed as consistently poor 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 per cent of the cost of educating the child in their current school. Their chosen school would have a positive financial incentive to admit their child.

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 costs to educate them. Some will find this unacceptably harsh. And, of course, the 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.

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.

There are many things that drive social mobility: parents and families, community expectations and social networks. I have focused on schools 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.

This article is an edited version of National Education Trust’s Annual Lecture, Making schools the motor of social mobility: http://www.alanmilburn.co.uk/making-schools-the-motor-of-social-mobility

To find out more about this article, visit: http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/strategy/work_areas/accessprofessions.aspx

27 March 2010

Alan Milburn. MP for Darlington and chair of the Panel on Fair Access,