Effective measures to address social mobility and inequality are politically unpopular

A great deal is spoken about equality and, as a result, we have two concepts that are seen as core to the resolution of inequalities: social mobility and income redistribution. In the case of the latter, we've tended to look at redistribution in terms of social class but now there is a fashionable concern that that we should be looking at intergenerational inequalities:

But while there are strong grounds for optimism in some areas, pessimism dominates overall. Pessimists about young adults’ chances of improving on their parents’ lives outnumber optimists by two-to-one. That marks a dramatic, and very rapid, turnaround in outlook. As recently as 2003, optimists outnumbered pessimists by nearly four-to-one. The gloom that has settled across our society since then is common across advanced economies, though Britain is more pessimistic than most.

The Resolution Foundation's work is pretty comprehensive, so it's disappointing when their resolution to the problem identified (today's young people having a better life than their parents) is to give them £10,000 - collected by taxing the existing older population. For me this illustrates the problem we have with developing political solutions to core social problems like equality - the winners in the game of inequality these days want solutions that do not mean them giving up their advantage. You might be able to sell them the Resolution Foundation's bung (although the track record of political responses to inheritance taxes aren't good - as Ed Milliband and Theresa May have found out to their cost) but it really does little or nothing to address the central concern that young people won't be rich enough to buy a stake in our society.

The same applies to social mobility. This is pretty much the subject of Robert Putnam's Our Kids where he explores the barriers to social advancement faced by American young people - driven less by race or location and more by a reborn social class divide (Putnam uses parental education as a proxy so you could argue it's a test of education effect rather than class effect). It's hard to cram a whole book into a sentence or two but, it seems to me that Putnam's findings - for all that we can't get a perfect transfer to UK circumstances - are a better reflection of the social realities facing our next generation than those from the Resolution Foundation.

The problem for the Resolution Foundation is less that working class kids are falling further and further behind middle class kids because of collapsing social capital (essentially Putnam's argument) and more that middle class kids can't afford to buy the assets - typically houses - that their parents were able to buy. For sure the report talks of pay stagnation and job insecurity but its primary thrust is that the resolution of the inequality (ie young people are less able to buy assets than their parents' or grandparents' generation) comes via higher taxes on wealth and specifically real estate wealth.

Not only do I think that the Resolution Foundation's answer is overcomplicated, state-driven and divisive, I'm also pretty sure it won't work. Young people may, at the end of it be a little better off but giving them £10,000 on their 25th birthday isn't going to get most of them onto the housing ladder. Moreover, the Resolution Foundation's proposals for dramatic hikes in property taxes will benefit squeezed local council budgets far more than they will the housing options of young people. And local councils - at least if what they say is a guide - are more interested in building council houses for rent than they are in helping young people buy houses. The result of the report's policies will be some cheery councillors not happier young people - this is not progress.

The problem we have is that the most obvious policy response to the problems of intergenerational inequality and social mobility are not politically easy to deliver. These might include:

Scrapping the strategic planning system including the 'green belt' - nearly everyone says there are too few houses, allowing people to build more homes seems an obvious solution. What would a world without planning look like?

Replacing locational bases for school place allocation with a lottery - most children are in urban areas but, even here, school allocation makes a huge difference. We know that when children from lower social class (as measured by parental education level) are educated alongside their middle class neighbours they achieve better. Our locational system of allocation results in social sortition and less social mobility

Making divorce more difficult and promoting a culture where the order is "get married, have children" not "have kids and maybe sometime later get married, perhaps if he's still around" - yes folks, the children of single parents and children born outside marriage do less well at school. This is the case even when we control for other variables (and, yes, not every child of a single parent fails, just on average such children are more likely to perform less well)

Tax incentives or subsidy for single income households - the effect of a household where one parent doesn't work is also positive. Just as we should encourage marriage, we should encourage stay at home mums or dads - pay them the money we're already allocating to childcare maybe?

Not sending so many young men to prison - Putman reports again and again that the struggling young people he interviews have a father in prison. Again the evidence tells us this forced form of family breakdown results in poorer achievement, lower income, increased child delinquency. It's also a disaster for the young men we lock up - instead of 90,000 in prison we should aim to (at least) half that number

You see the problem? Put forward a manifesto saying scrap the green belt, end parental choice in school places, make divorce harder, subsidise stay-at-home mums and stop locking up so many young men. Go on. It'll be fun. Except for your candidates. It's much simpler to say "my government will pay x to y" or "we'll make it easier to dump you hubby because he snores" or even "we'll tax an unspecified bunch of rich people and companies so we can give you a tasty little cash bribe". This doesn't solve the problem but is more likely to get you elected.

.....

Free markets are better for fairness and equality than the state

Yet again we have evidence of how systems dominated by non-free, constrained or licenced systems (or else directly controlled by the state) are less fair and equal than free systems:



Business - that's the free market - is by far the best sector for social mobility. Rather than as with the law (what a surprise) where the man at the top being ten times more likely to be privately-educated, he's only four times more likely in the private sector.

This is because, unlike state-controlled systems like law, medicine, the army and the civil service, the private sector doesn't have the luxury of relying on Daddy and thereby ignoring 90% of the population. If you're good, your chances of getting to the top in private business are far higher. As a result private business is more innovative, more diverse and more creative than the public sector. This is because without that innovation and creativity businesses fail. And without diversity you miss out loads of people who'll bring to the skills, talents and originality you need to succeed.

Every time we look at the world, we see that free systems - markets, trade, speech, assembly, choice - deliver a more equal society. A society that can't be gamed so much by the wealthy, well-connected and fortunately-born. As I've observed before, it beats me why the left has such a down on freedom when it delivers the goods on fairness and equality better than their preferred state-directed utopia.

....

So was there no-one from Bradford available to Chair a social mobility board in Bradford?

It's great news that the Government has send Bradford £11m to set up an "Opportunity Area" promoting social mobility. Here's a chunk from the press release:

The Opportunity Area programme will be delivered by a partnership between the Department for Education and Bradford Council.

The new plan has been developed by a partnership board with representatives from Bradford schools, the council, charities and the private sector.

Bradford is one of 12 Opportunity Areas across the country which are each receiving a £6m share of £72 million to improve opportunities for young people.

The district will also benefit from investment of up to £5 million over two years through the Essential Life Skills programme, to help disadvantaged young people develop life skills such as resilience, emotional wellbeing and employability.

As part of the Opportunity Area programme a Research School has been opened in Bradford, being run by Dixons Academies, which will work to share evidence-based research of what works in the classroom to help raise standards across the district.

Research schools are being supported by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Institute for Effective Education to act as local centres of excellence in Opportunity Areas.

I ought to be chuffed that a Conservative Government is, yet again, supporting the improvement of education in Bradford. All this on the back of successful free schools, academies and a renewed focus on educational outcomes. But there's a bit in all this that makes me really very angry:

Anne-Marie Canning, the Chair of Bradford Opportunity Area Partnership Board,

Who is this person, I wondered. The name wasn't familiar to me but then I don't know everyone involved or connected to education in my city. So I googled:



Great credentials but she's doing a very senior job at a large university in London. I wonder, and don't take this as criticism of her specifically, whether she's going to be able to give the sort of attention to the project that someone who lives and works within Bradford (or at least somewhere nearby) could give? I also wonder why, given recent experiences, a Conservative government is appointing people to chair boards who have this sort of experience in their CV:



Yes folks. Not only is our new chair not from Bradford and working in London but she used to be a Labour Councillor.

In the end it probably doesn't matter greatly but it still sends out a message - loudly and clearly - from the Government in London that only people in London count and that important roles like overseeing the investment of £11m to improve educational opportunities for young people in Bradford cannot be trusted to someone who actually has some sort of connection to the city. And maybe part of the reason why boards and institutions are so ready to snap at the Conservative hand feeding them is because we keep appointing left wing academics, Labour councillors and their assorted fellow travellers to run them.

Was there no-one from Bradford available to do this job? Frankly I don't believe it, it's just a London presumption that nobody in Bradford would be good enough to do the job because, well, it's Bradford isn't it. You know Up North where the thick people live.

.....

Attacking the privately-educated for their success is the worst sort of envy politics

There's been a renewed - renewed as in the record has jumped and we're hearing the same bit of the tune again - attention to the success of private education in the UK. At its most polemical is Ellie Mae O'Hagan's proposal to limit by quota the number of privately educated people "in our establishment":

If 7% of the population goes to private school, then it seems only fair that 7% of Britain’s elite jobs should go to privately educated individuals. This would include chief executives, barristers, journalists, judges, medical professionals and MPs. The rest of these jobs should be divided between comprehensive and grammar school alumni in a ratio that reflects the numbers educated in each.

Now, leaving aside for one second the glaring moral catastrophe that this proposal represents, we have the idea that somehow the privately-educated achieve their success for reasons other than merit - Daddy's money and contacts, the right accent, the connections gleaned from going to school with the scions of the elite. That the young men and women leaving private schools in Britain might succeed because they are clever and have benefited from a fantastic education at brilliant schools is simply not considered. Yet I suspect, far more than cash or contacts, this is the main reason for the success of these young people.

The Social Mobility Commission set up by the UK's Conservative Government published a report that sets out the question well:

Our results indicate a persistent advantage from having attended a private school. This raises questions about whether the advantage that private school graduates have is because they are better socially or academically prepared, have better networks or make different occupational choices. Whilst we do control for formal differences in academic achievement, we cannot model whether privately educated students are better prepared for job interviews and for the world of work directly.

The authors, Lindsey Macmillan and Anna Vignoles from the Centre for Analysis of Youth Transitions (CAYT) poke around at this question - is it who you know, who you are, who your Dad is or is there something else?

Focusing just on the 6 months immediately after graduation, a graduate’s socio-economic status is not associated with their chances of entering the highest status occupations, except via the positive effect that it has on a person’s academic achievement, degree subject, degree class and university choice. In other words, there is no evidence that socio-economic status is playing an independent role in helping graduates secure access to the highest status occupations straight after graduation. That said, those who attended private school do have a better chance of entering these occupations, even compared to individuals from state schools with similar characteristics and similar levels of education achievement.

The researchers controlled for using networks and contacts finding that, while these connections were used to get into good careers (and why not), even when they aren't public school educated young people still seem to do better. It's about the young people not the young people's mum or dad or the street they live in. That and the school.

This is rather the point. Instead of looking at private schools and asking what they're doing right, what we see - from right and left in Britain's political spectrum - is a classic piece of envy-driven politics. Because the young men and women who go to independent schools succeed in life we must do something to change things, to level the game by chopping off the legs of the private schools. Forget that parental income and influence, elite contacts and commitment to their children's success apply regardless of the school - let's abolish, tax, restrict or otherwise punish those schools for the sin of being very good at their job.

So instead of caterwauling about the iniquity of how some young people are fortunate to benefit from the great education on offer from Britain's independent schools let's ask how we get more of that great education for children whose parents haven't the cash to buy places at those schools. And I'm not talking here about the grand boarding institutions like Eton, Winchester and Westminster but those fantastic day schools like Leeds, Bradford and Manchester Grammar Schools. And there are ways to do this - starting with the Assisted Places scheme so spitefully scrapped by Tony Blair:

Under Margaret Thatcher’s government, they were plucked from poverty and taken out of state schools to attend top private schools instead, courtesy of the state.

The children of the Assisted Places Scheme are now in their 40s. And according to research published today, about half of them are likely to be earning at least £90,000 a year and sending their own children to private schools – but none of them will be dirtying their hands with any kind of manual work.

There you have it. Ordinary - even working-class - children given the chance of a bash at that great day school education. And it works. So let's have more of it? Or better still let's try some other ideas - voluntary schools vouchers where parents can take the cash the government would spend on their child's education, top it up if necessary and buy an education. How about something akin to the old direct grant system - essentially a private school means test (it gave me the option of putting Dulwich College on my choices at eleven). A bit like this:

...a “much better” model was the Open Access scheme trialled by the Trust at Belvedere school in Liverpool, where every place was available on merit and the Trust paid for those whose parents could not afford it. The school had 30 per cent on free places, 40 per cent paying partial fees and the rest paying the full amount.

Back in the 1950s private schools shifted their attention and effort from giving a pretty standard schooling to the scions of the elite - young men and women more or less ensured top positions by virtue of being the establishment - to developing an intensive and rigorous academic education to their students.

Using data from the National Child Development Study and the British Cohort Study, we examine how pupils born respectively in 1958 and 1970 were faring in the labour market by the time they had reached their early 30s. We show that the private/state earnings log wage differential rose significantly from 0.07 to 0.20 points (and thus the premium rose by 15 percentage points) between the two cohorts, after controlling for family background characteristics and for tests of cognitive and non-cognitive skills that they possessed at an early age. We also find that the private/state gap in the chances of gaining a higher degree rose from 0.08 to 0.18 between the cohorts. Our estimates imply that half the rise in the earnings differential can be attributed to the improved qualifications being achieved in private schools. These results are reinforced by similar findings based on successive cohorts in the British Household Panel Study.

Why was this? Why did the private sector up its game on academic educational achievement? Look at that was happening in the 1950s - a generation of grammar school educated young people from all sorts of backgrounds were pushing at the door. We had a series of state-educated prime ministers - Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major - and the professions of law and medicine stopped being the preserve of the posh. If private schools hadn't upped their game they'd have been out of business.

So let's do the same again - I'm a neutral on the grammar school debate but if we can capture the spirit of those times and set young people on an aspirational academic course again we'll be doing every part of the education business a favour. I know this is possible because schools like Dixons, Michaela and West London Free School are doing just this by looking at the ethos and approach of the day schools and saying "we can do that in the state sector". Mix in some vouchers, assisted places and direct grant arrangements and we might get the step change in educational outcomes that we need and which our young people deserve.

But attacking young men and women with a private education - excluding, discriminating and barring - is a recipe for a worse system, for the poor and failing parts of our education provision to have just another excuse for not delivering the goods. In the end it doesn't really matter where someone went to school - business, arts and sports are judged on achievement, ability and contribution not how much cash someone's mum and dad had. That politics, law and journalism aren't should be their concern not an excuse to attack the private school educated people who succeed in those professions..

....

Housing and inequality

****

It's a truism to say that housing costs are one cause of inequality in developed societies and that some places - London, San Francisco, Auckland, Sydney and New York for example - have reached the point where housing unaffordability is undermining growth and development. It's also resulting in exploitative landlord practices, higher levels of homelessness, overoccupation and 'sofa surfing'.

We also know the reasons for this unaffordability - restrictive planning and land use policies. Every study tells us that this is the case yet politicians in all these places claim that can wave some sort of magic wand and build loads of extra housing without changing zoning policies or other restrictions on land availability and development.

One result of this restrictive policy environment is that poorer people are moving to less well of places - against the historic (and beneficial) direction of travel away from poorer places:

It used to be that poor people moved to rich places. A janitor in New York, for example, used to earn more than a janitor in Alabama even after adjusting for housing costs. As a result, janitors moved from Alabama to New York, in the process raising their standard of living and reducing income inequality. Today, however, after taking into account housing costs, janitors in New York earn less than janitors in Alabama. As a result, poor people no longer move to rich places. Indeed, there is now a slight trend for poor people to move to poor places because even though wages are lower in poor places, housing prices are lower yet.

The result of this - plus the evidence that internal migration to richer places has slowed - is that geographical inequalities are heightened, social mobility is reduced and economic growth is slowed.

....

Social immobility...

****

Fascinating this:

Seven to ten generations are required before the descendants of high and low status families achieve average status. Thus in modern Sweden the descendants of the eighteenth-century nobility are still heavily overrepresented -- 300 years later -- among higher social status groups: doctors, attorneys, the wealthy, members of the Swedish Royal Academies. In the United Kingdom, the descendants of families who sent a son to Oxford or Cambridge around 1800 are still four times as likely to attend these universities as the average person. Social mobility rates have also been relatively impervious to government policy. They are no higher in societies like Sweden, with generous interventions in favor of the children of disadvantaged families, than in the more laissez-faire United States. For that matter, they are no higher in modern Sweden than in eighteenth-century Sweden, or medieval England.

It reminds me of a friend, a scion of an old and wealthy family, whose self-description was "downwardly mobile".

....

A thought on social mobility - and my Uncle Ray...

****

My late uncle Ray was a judge - not a grand high court version of that beast but a more humble sort sitting in County Courts. But then I'm a Tory politician, you'd expect me to have at least one uncle sitting as a judge!

My uncle didn't go to university. Indeed he left school at fourteen and got a job in a solicitor's office doing odds and bits of jobs around the place. By dint of application and night school (not to mention working every hour god sent) Ray got to be a solicitor, then a partner and then a judge.

So Ray, from an ordinary working-class background in South London, ended up in the most bewigged of middle-class professions. All without spending time in and around the dreaming spires, redbrick halls or tatty '60s blocks of a university. And there are plenty of others of Ray's generation who took the same route - school, office job, night school or correspondence college and hard work.

So it rather galls me (someone who swanned from school to university without much thought) when people speak of university access as if it were the only means to resolve issues of social mobility. And I am struck by Alan Milburn's observation about the professions:

"The question posed by this report is whether the growth in professional employment is creating a social mobility dividend for our country - the short answer is not yet. In fact, the lack of progress on opening up the professions to a wider pool of talent risks squandering that enormous opportunity for social progress."

In times past plenty of lawyers, accountants and bankers learnt their skills while doing the job. It was a recognised and celebrated route to the top. For sure, the grand still paraded from Harrow to Oxford to a posh chambers in London but that was not the only route.

It is not just a matter of getting into university but persuading those professions - law, accountancy, nursing and so forth - that a vocational route is as valid for them as it is for quantity surveyors, marketing directors and bakers.

....

Banning interns won't increase social mobility

Much frothing and spluttering among the political classes about Nick Clegg's social mobility strategy - or rather about the matter of so-called "interns".

Nick Clegg's scathing attack on inequality of opportunity was branded ‘total hypocrisy’ last night.

As he unveiled a drive to improve social mobility, it emerged his millionaire father had secured him the internship that launched his career and a titled family friend helped get him his first proper job.

The LibDem leader was also forced to make a humiliating apology for employing unpaid interns in his own office, while criticising the practice in public.

There was further embarrassment for Mr Clegg as it emerged that the LibDems may not even have paid expenses to some young people.

The party hurriedly brought in new guidelines yesterday to ‘put our own house in order’.

As they say round here – “oops”!

However, I am struck by the possibility that rules restricting internships will impact on genuine volunteering. It seems to me that there’s a case for stopping internships being used as a smooth route for the children of the wealthy to secure employment in professions like law where there are limited opportunities (and too much supply). But would this prevent, for example, a community law centre offering unpaid volunteering to young aspiring lawyers?

My concern is that HR managers in the voluntary sector (and let’s not forget that political parties are, in principle, part of the voluntary sector) will interpret any new rules in such a way as to prevent young people using volunteering as a way to secure experience – to make a meagre CV look a little more sparkly. And charitable organisations already face huge pressures that are eased by the use of internships. Here’s one household name’s offer:

This summer we'll be offering internships lasting three months in a wide range of areas, including community fundraising, events, marketing, communications and healthcare. Whatever team you join, you'll make a big difference to Macmillan and to the lives of people affected by cancer.

We'll be recruiting for summer interns between mid-April and mid-May - pop back from 11 April for more information. Unfortunately we are unable to accept CVs, covering letters or applications for summer internships, until 11 April.

Are we saying that charities should be stopped from making such offers in case those taking them up gain some sort of advantage as a result? At the same time as we speak of ‘Big Society’ and the encouragement of volunteering?

As is often the case with these debates, the choice of a relatively insignificant barrier to social mobility as a high profile target completely misses the point. If we see the lack of upward social mobility as a problem (and not everyone does), then we must address the source of that problem – the continuing failure of our education system and especially the ever-widening gap between the privately and publicly educated. Gabbing on about interns, babbling about ‘income equality’ or beating up merit-driven university entrance won’t address our problems.

From 1964 to 1997 – thirty-three years – our nation was led by the products of grammar schools, people from pretty ordinary backgrounds. After 40 years of comprehensive education, the nation’s leaders – in politics, business, arts and literature – are the products of private schools and a privileged background.  And unless we give children a better start, all the fixing of internships, “fair access strategies” and other elements of Mr Clegg’s social mobility plans will achieve nothing – except the inevitable unintended consequence.

....

Breaking the chains of community.

****

There has been a terrible hoo-hah about the suggestion from Iain Duncan Smith that we might consider making it a little easier for people to relocate so as to get work. The criticisms fall into three camps: those from the Labour Party that involve making up what IDS said and comparing it to something they pretend Norman Tebbit said; those from well-meaning activists who claim that the proposals would “force” ordinary folk away from the bosom of their community thereby destroying everything good about society; and finally those who say it won’t work because there aren’t any jobs to be had anyhow.

It seems to me – whichever of these criticisms is taken – that they all rest on the supremacy of one particular take on community. And on the protection, sustenance and development of that “community” - even when the community has, for lack of employment, become wholly dysfunctional. We should “fix” the community rather than encourage its break up and decline. It strikes me that this belief in a sort of community stasis is potentially very damaging and does not reflect the reality of human nature or the evolution of societies.

In parts of our Northern cities (and in other places such as the mining villages of the Welsh valleys and County Durham) we have whole places that exist because of the need to house and support people who worked in particular industries. Today, whatever we may think about the reasons for the demise of those industries, they are no more and the reasons for such places must be questioned. Yet we persist – as we have done for thirty years and more – with the pouring of resources into these “deprived communities” hoping vainly for some miracle cure.

With the decline of mass industrial employment we have to question the point or purpose of places such as Bradford’s Holme Wood estate or the Seacroft estate in Leeds. Today, rather than these being full of homes for proud industrial workers they are become places where society’s flotsam and jetsam washes up. Approaching 70% of all “social housing” is now filled with vulnerable people – the folk housing people call “general needs” (who we would call ordinary folk on ordinary wages) simply don’t get housed in these places. Instead former council housing fills with the workless, with single parent families, with drug addicts and with alcoholics. Places that once were proud working communities have become sinks of despair – with the worst schools, the poorest access to care and the highest rates of crime.

As IDS put it a while back while speculating about the proverbial Martian's view of British social housing:

Let’s imagine the proverbial Martian were to land here in the UK today. Knowing nothing of our housing policies, you might ask him to go out and establish the purpose of social housing from what he sees.

On his return I fancy this would be his summary:

"Social housing is clearly there to separate the most disadvantaged, dysfunctional and vulnerable people from the rest of society. It’s an objective you have achieved very efficiently."

With nearly half of all social housing now in the 20% most deprived neighbourhoods, you couldn’t fault the logic. As you all know better than me, the contraction in social housing of the last thirty years has residualised the tenure. Many areas of social housing are blighted by fractured families, worklessness, educational failure, addictions, serious personal debt, anti-social behaviour and crime.

Too many tenants find themselves on estates where welfare dependency is a way of life, cut off from the job opportunities, social networks and wealth the rest of us enjoy. Inadvertently and incrementally, a damaging social apartheid has emerged as social housing has changed.

So why do we want to keep such places going? Why not provide routes up and out from these places for those who have the motivation to get up and go look for work elsewhere – somewhere there might just be some? Why not provide a little incentive for people to escape from the stigma of the sink estate? And why do we seemingly insist – with our tales of “hollowed out communities” and reinforcing decline – on sustaining the unsustainable. On some kind of depressing ‘all for one and one for all’ principle – if y’all can’t have then no-one gets.

We are told all the time that “community” is good. That we shouldn’t challenge the idea of community or question its basis as the centre of social policy. And that the protection and development of community must sit at the centre of government actions in deprived places. Sometimes – just sometimes – community might not be the right answer.

Sometimes breaking the chains of community might just be a liberation for people.

....