Poor white kids are held back by a lack of ambition, not biased bosses
The best way to improve social mobility is to ignore a person’s schooling and assess their potential
Matt Hancock, the Cabinet Office minister, is rarely accused of humility. One of George Osborne’s coterie of clever young protégés, he got his safe Conservative seat in 2010 aged 31 and a place at the Cabinet table five years later. Yet even a man so blessed with self-confidence might be feeling slightly chastened after being publicly spanked by both the head of his old school and the provost of Eton. Young Matt got six of the best for his suggestion that employers should ask job applicants if they went to an independent school, as part of David Cameron’s drive to collect data on, and ultimately increase, social mobility.
The need to increase social mobility – someone’s capacity to end up in a higher (or lower) socio-economic group than their parents thanks to talent and effort rather than birth – is almost universally accepted in politics today. Orthodoxy suggests that mobility is falling and poor children are more likely to end up as poor adults than ever before. But, like any consensus, this should be challenged, especially by those (like me) inclined to believe it.
One common error is to compare the current situation with the (slightly mythologised) decades after the Second World War, when grammar schools propelled poor, clever kids into middle-class occupations. That did happen, but it was probably more about absolute than relative social mobility: wider economic change meant both national wealth and the middle class expanded rapidly. A rising tide lifted all boats.
It’s also far from clear that Britain’s social mobility is much worse than those of comparable economies. A Stanford University study last year demonstrated that in the US, a nation founded on the ideal of the selfmade man, the biggest determinant of someone’s income is how much money their parents made. Some experts also challenge the widely held notion that British mobility has fallen. Peter Saunders at Sussex University calculates that people born in 1970 were no less socially mobile than those born in the Fifties.
Those dates point to the biggest problem: time lags. By definition, you have to wait a lifetime to know which socio-economic class any given child ends up in. Many studies that underpin today’s debate use data about people born in 1970. Policies that will affect today’s pupils are based on the experiences of 46-yearolds. And this is where Mr Hancock’s focus on job applicants’ backgrounds risks going wrong. People in the workplace are the products of systems and policies in place years and even decades ago. Bluntly, there’s not much the Government can do to change the consequences of past policies, short of quotas and affirmative action.
Eton’s Lord Waldegrave fears that Mr Cameron’s “Life Chances” agenda is a prelude to just such “social engineering”: fixing the game of life against private school pupils. But this isn’t about fixing the game or seeking a different score. It’s just about making sure that there are more players on the field to compete.
Around 40 per cent of children now go to university, but scarcely 13 per cent of white working-class ones do so. This isn’t, primarily, because they attend poor schools or live in poverty. Non-white children of comparable poverty are much more likely to attend universities, often having achieved worse exam results than their white peers. The gulf is one of aspiration. Poor white children just don’t apply, choosing not to aim as high as children from other families.
Some Conservatives suggest we should just accept that: the state has no business trying to make up for the decisions and deficiencies of individuals. But a shopkeeper’s daughter from Grantham taught Tories that free markets are the best way to deliver the Conservative aims of wealth and freedom. Just as competition between suppliers drives down prices, competition between applicants drives up quality.
A situation where only one in 10 white working-class boys even applies to university is surely intolerable to anyone who believes in competition and enterprise. It means that when Old Etonians apply for places at top universities and the jobs that follow, they’re not operating in the most competitive market for talent.
The Government should avoid quotas like the plague – they’d be unfair on those who got jobs and those denied them as a result. Obviously improving state education matters but it’s already happening; results in good state schools, in London especially, can rival private ones. Traditional government policies – the tools that ministers like Mr Hancock normally reach for, new rules and laws – won’t change attitudes and ambitions.
What’s needed are examples and role models, encouragement and information – and nothing less than a change in culture: people in positions of power and influence in education and business shouting from the rooftops that the best colleges and the best jobs are just as valid a goal for poor kids as for rich ones.
Things are starting to change, as astute employers increasingly adopt an approach that’s the polar opposite of Mr Hancock’s. They focus on candidates, not their history, to make sure they’re not missing out on bright people whose education was less than smooth. Deloitte has stopped asking applicants where they went to university. PWC no longer considers A-levels. Jobs are offered on the basis of talent, not CVs. This isn’t political correctness, it’s self-interest from businesses that stand or fall on their ability to hire the best.
Will all this mean that more people from poor homes end up in top jobs, in the boardroom and at the Cabinet table? Probably, but that’s not the aim. The objective is just to ensure that they try to get there, that places at the best universities and the best jobs go to the best people after the fiercest contest of talents. Right now, too many young people aren’t even entering that contest, because they don’t believe that’s what people like them do.
Before his glittering political career, Mr Hancock went to a fee-paying school in Cheshire. No sensible policy on social mobility would penalise him for the education his parents worked to give him, but it would make him fight harder for the prizes he has won. Perhaps if he’d faced more competition for his place at Oxford, his seat in Parliament and the rest, he’d still have ended up where he is today. Fortunately for him, we’ll never know.