Social Mobility Policy Committee
Corrected oral evidence
Thursday 13 March 2025
10.05 am
Watch the meeting
Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 – 12
Witnesses
I: Alun Francis OBE, Chair, Social Mobility Commission; Resham Kotecha, Deputy Chair, Social Mobility Commission; Rob Wilson, Deputy Chair, Social Mobility Commission.
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
- This is an corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and webcast on www.parliamentlive.tv.
Alun Francis, Resham Kotecha and Rob Wilson.
Q1 The Chair: Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming for our first formal evidence session of the special investigation committee into social mobility. We are very grateful to have the Social Mobility Commission here today. I would like to introduce to you members of our committee: the Bishop of Lincoln, Lady Ramsey, Lord Hampton, Lord Ravensdale, Lord Evans, Lord Young, Lady Garden and Lord Watts. If you three would like to introduce yourselves, we can move on from there.
Alun Francis: I am the chair of the commission, and in my day job I am the chief executive of Blackpool and The Fylde College. Here are my two deputies.
Rob Wilson: I am co-deputy chair. My background is in business, setting up and founding small and medium-sized businesses and taking them to market. I also spent 12 years as an MP and Minister.
Resham Kotecha: Hello, I am co-deputy chair also. In my day job, I am global head of policy and organisation at the Open Data Institute, looking at AI and data policy and the impacts on society.
The Chair: Well, we are very grateful, and we need your help. Can I start by asking you to define the term social mobility and to tell us why it matters?
Alun Francis: It is a really good first question, because without some clarity around that question, any further work becomes really muddled and it is quite difficult to decide where the focus of your work might be. It is quite a complex debate and with some quite technical terms, so I will try to summarise them as neatly as I can. Sociologists and economists tend to have slightly different views on this, and they measure slightly different things, but there are some concepts that are core to both. It is important to distinguish between relative and absolute social mobility, and then intra and intergenerational social mobility. I will take the second part first. Intergenerational is comparing you against your parents, intragenerational is about your progress over your life—so from your starting point in your life to the end point, not the comparison over generations.
More complicated is relative and absolute. Relative social mobility is when you compare two people from different starting points, usually measured in terms of socioeconomic background—either income or occupation—and you measure their chances of achieving a particular outcome. Usually, that is a higher-level professional occupation. They usually use the categorisations around occupations that the Government now use. There are seven classes of occupation, and they can use five or three, and they would say, “If you come from a working-class background, what’s the chances of you getting a higher-level professional job, compared to somebody born into a higher-level professional family?” They would then make a comparison of the two, and they would work out the ratio or the chances of that happening. That is relative, when you are comparing one person to another.
Absolute social mobility is when you look at the actual numbers of people who are moving from one social class to another. What is really important there is that that is really driven by changes in the occupational structure in the economy. I will give a really concrete example; I might not have the exact percentages right off the top of my head, but they are broadly right. In the 1920s something like 60% of jobs were manual, working-class jobs, but nowadays we are talking about 25% to 30%. The change in the occupational structure means there are many more jobs now that require you to work not so much with your hands but with data analysis; there is more knowledge-led employment.
The growth of the professional occupations, and the expansion of those, mean there have been more opportunities to move up. If we were speaking in absolute terms, then around about 70% of people end up in a different social class from the one they were born in. If you measure it in absolute terms, that feels like it is quite high. It is actually a minority of people who stay in the same class. I don’t forget that. Some are going up and some are going down, so it is not all in one direction.
Lord Hampton: Sorry, could you give me that figure again?
Alun Francis: Around about 70% of people end up in a different social class from the one they were born in. That is measured in absolute terms, so it does not take into account the numbers born into each group and their relative chances. Now, those two concepts are really important, because when you hear people talking about social mobility being poor or deteriorating, they are usually talking about relative social mobility. Sociologists have literature on it, economists have literature on it, and then there are some international comparisons.
Sociologists would measure it by occupation, and they get really into the detail of how you categorise different occupations because that is quite important in the way you define the problem. But I think it is fair to say that the overall consensus of the leading people in the field is that relative social mobility measured by occupation has not declined. It has not necessarily got any better, and that does not mean there is no room for improvement, but to say that it has got worse is not necessarily true. I think there are some really leading figures in the field who would support that view.
On income, which is what the economists use, the figures are slightly more complicated. We concluded in our State of the Nation report that the jury is slightly out on whether that has got better or worse. One of the problems—we can talk about this in a bit more detail later on—is we do not have really great data for measuring social mobility by income. If you compare us with America, where it links income tax records to individuals, it has a much more direct way of measuring income compared to people. We have to do quite complicated economic models to try to build out what the pattern is around income over a period of time. The best that we have is a bit inconclusive. It certainly does not suggest there has been a decline, relatively speaking.
We also argue that relative social mobility tends to end up focused on a very narrow group of people, because the aim is to try to increase the numbers from one social class to equalise, if you like, the outcomes between different social groups. An awful lot of what we see in social mobility work in this country is focused on trying to address that problem—widening participation in university, concerned to get more people into elite universities and into elite professions, particularly finance, law, and so on. We are not saying that that work is not valid, but we are saying it is quite narrow.
That is attached to a second issue, which is: when we look at absolute mobility, there is a slowing down. There has been a slowing down in terms of wages since around 2010—details, again, are in our reports—and there is also a slowing down in the rate at which we are creating more higher-level jobs. Now, that does not mean we are not creating them quickly—we are—but we are not creating them as quickly as maybe the end of the last century, which was the golden age of upward mobility.
The more we create those new opportunities, the more people move up, and more people move up than move down when their opportunities have changed. When that rate slows down a little, you then get more competition for those jobs. That is where there appears to be anxiety about downward mobility for those who are in professional jobs. They are very worried their children’s outcomes will be worse than theirs. It is then increasingly difficult for those seeking to move up because the competition becomes more acute.
Now, that is within a context where, overall, there are still some very positive stories. We are still creating more professional jobs, and we are getting more people from deprived social backgrounds to university; we have seen some real significant improvements over the last two decades in that, including over the last decade. The figures are something like 10 years ago you had a 3.5 or 3.7 times better chance of going to university if you came from a more privileged professional background than somebody from a working-class family, and that has reduced to 2.2. There are some significant changes in that, but there are also some bottlenecks, and those are the things that we have tried to focus on.
I hope that helps in terms of definition. The only other thing I should have mentioned when I mentioned relative social mobility is that it is actually quite difficult to decide what it should be. You might say, “Well, obviously every social group should have the same outcomes”. The difficulty with that is making sure you are defining the social groups really clearly, and that is not always as easy to do as people think. The second thing you could say is that it should be better because we are not as good as other countries, but the consensus view appears to be that we are somewhere in the middle. We are not at the top, and we are not at the bottom.
Our focus in the commission over the last 18 months or so has been that there are issues around relative mobility—particularly if we can introduce ethnicity, gender and other things in there, there are still things that need to be improved, and we are not saying it is a closed book—but actually we think there are bigger issues around absolute mobility, for the reasons I have described. We also think that relative mobility focuses too much on those at the top, and it ignores some really serious issues opportunity and equality of opportunity for those at the bottom. That is when we start to talk about what we describe as the truly disadvantaged. I hope that helps you just to define where we are and how we have dealt with some problems of definition.
Q2 The Chair: That is immensely helpful, because the committee obviously is trying to decide on what it is going to focus, because we cannot sensibly cover everything, and we do not want to duplicate what other people have already done substantial work on. I just have a supplementary question; you talked in your introduction about people going down as well. Could you comment on the trade-offs for social mobility and how you see that?
Alun Francis: It is a really good question, because one of our concerns is that overly focusing on relative social mobility, without looking at what we have called ‘the supply of opportunities’, ends up being a zero-sum game. Somebody gains, but somebody loses. You are committing quite significant amounts of resource sometimes to helping some people do better, but we are actually quite silent on who loses out of that process. We do not talk about it.
For example, in widening participation in universities, you will find that increasingly universities will use contextualised admissions to take into account someone’s background and maybe let them in with lower grades. That feels fair in some respects; it feels like actually you are making allowances that somebody might not have had the opportunities somebody else has had. But what we are silent about is, well, who is not taking that place then? Actually, we may find it is not the most privileged who lose out; you may find it is the next nearest or next most disadvantaged person. We are just not clear about it.
The zero-sum game worries us because we do not have a clear line of sight. There is no transparency over who the winners and losers are in that, which is why in our Innovation Generation report we talk about how the really important thing to improve relative mobility is to keep growing and supply of better opportunities, particularly geographically, where there are some quite big disparities. We can talk about those in more detail.
Resham Kotecha: I would like to add something about the zero-sum game. One of the important things we talk a lot about and we have done a lot of work on at the commission that we are proud of, is looking at parenting and the importance of the early years. It is very easy to talk about the value to the baby or child of the first 1,000 days, and how they are immensely important and a significant predictor of the rest of their lives, in terms of educational attainment, mental health, and ability to achieve goals. But when we talk about ways in which to supplement that or to support that early years education, we also need to consider who has to do the provision of that. In many cases, it is the mother as the primary carer. Recommendations by the sector will be to stay at home longer and do more with the child. Obviously, many parents and mothers are privileged to be able to do so, but equally, what about the mother’s opportunities? What about her ability to succeed in life?
We know from the statistics that women lose out financially, not just in the year they are on maternity leave, but also in the ongoing years. Their incomes are affected for the next 20 years—they have a far lower growth rate in terms of income. Women are already underpaid and undermatched in terms of jobs. Girls and women are now outperforming boys and men at every level of education. They are getting higher rates of education, better grades—on average half a grade higher than boys at GCSE level, and one and a half grades on average at A-level. They go on to get degrees at a higher rate, but then they undermatch in jobs for a number of reasons.
By prioritising the child—of course, we would all agree it is valuable and important to support children, especially vulnerable ones—we also need to recognise it is not a zero-sum game in terms of the mother’s opportunities. Childcare, which we can talk about later, is one of the big issues that supports both the child’s development but also both parents’ ability to return to work in a full-time role, should they wish.
Lord Watts: You have complicated it. It is complicated, but it seems to me that the more you look at this, the more difficult it is to say where the starting line should be. In my experience, if you do something for those people at the very bottom of opportunity, it usually works up the system. It has a more dramatic effect than just on those people. Am I wrong, or is there some truth in that?
Alun Francis: We would be in quite broad agreement with you. One of our concerns has been that perhaps the focus has to shift to what we have been calling the truly disadvantaged, who get lost sometimes. When you are comparing outcomes for different groups, whether based on ethnicity, gender or socioeconomic background, there is an implicit assumption that, within the groups, as long as the outcomes are equalised, the inequalities within the groups are fine, but that actually ignores some quite serious problems that we’ve got.
Again, it has a geographical aspect to it—with some people whose opportunities are really limited. They are not people who we are thinking will end up working in one of the Big Four, or getting a first-class degree from a high-flying university, but their social mobility is really important because they are stuck, and intergenerationally stuck.
When we look, for example, at issues like NEETs, when we break that down and get into the detail of the definitions, they are what we have called—I do not like the term, really—the ‘lower working class’; the most unskilled, with the set of other circumstances that come with that. They are much more likely to be NEETs, they are much less likely to go to university, they are much more likely to be intergenerationally poor, they are much more likely to come out of school with low literacy and numeracy and not participate in the school system, and so on. There is a very broad agreement with the work that we have been doing and what you have just said.
Rob Wilson: Can I just add, going back to the definitions, many organisations paint a very negative picture of social mobility. As Alun said, the true picture is that there is a tightening: there are some areas where it is getting better, there are some areas where it is getting worse; education is getting better, housing is getting worse. It is crucial that we do not go towards this counsel of despair that is often there when you read about it, because that is not the situation. It is important we do not do that for reasons of public confidence. We know from our own research that public confidence is declining. The danger is that if you keep telling young people, in particular, that there is no chance—that there is no hope for them—they will start believing it, and they will not get on in life. We all have a duty to tell the truth about where social mobility stands at any point in time.
The Chair: That is a very helpful reminder to us. I can speak for the committee in saying that we want to come up with recommendations that are positive and implementable and do not cost too much, which we hope the Government might take on.
Q3 Lord Ravensdale: We touched on the response to the last question around data and the importance of data, and you mentioned it in the context of income. I would like to expand a bit on that and look at data more broadly. Could you tell me how social mobility can be measured more specifically, what data is available, and crucially, what gaps there are in the data?
Alun Francis: I will introduce then, hand it to you, Resh; Resham is our specialist on this. The first point I would make—then I will invite Resham to come in with some more detail on your question—is that the data is really very important in shaping what can sometimes be quite crude views of social mobility. For example, if you look at the way we define occupations—this goes back to the question you asked a few minutes ago—some occupations that are regarded as working-class occupations pay much better than some professional jobs. I lead a further education college, so you might say I have a vested interest in that. Some things we teach—for example, the people coming through as electricians, or our engineers—are going to earn much more than the nursery nurses and primary school teachers. I am not denigrating either job, I am just pointing out that social mobility is about values as well, it is not just about technical definitions.
This is about recognising that when you try to tie this to the floor, you can always find anomalies and problems with the data, and you just have to accept that. In the end, whatever occupational structure you have, there are some values attached; it is a hierarchy, and some people are going to not share those values when they make their choices about their liv es. Both occupation and income have some of those problems with them, but there are also some other issues around data, which we wrote a report about last year trying to encourage the Government to improve some data collection. Resh, you are the one who knows the detail much better than me.
Resham Kotecha: Thank you for the opportunity to talk. It is easy to talk about data, and there is lots of it, but your question about the quality of it and how we can use it is really valid and important here, because things can change very quickly. We need data so that we can react in as close to real time as possible, but also so that we can really plan for the future and design policies that are really likely to be impactful and effective. As an example of fast-changing data, in 2021, just a few years ago, the rate of NEETs had reached its lowest level in over a decade. That is great progress and really positive for young people. Post-global pandemic and a few other shocks to the system, we are now at the highest level of NEETs that we have had since 2011.
The challenge here is that, from an economic point of view, history says that the impact when a young person is unemployed is far greater than when an older person is unemployed. The evidence shows that if a young person is unemployed or NEET for too long, it is likely to have mental, physical and economic impacts on them for the rest of their lives. Being able to have this data and react quickly and effectively is hugely important.
We have issues with collecting data in this country. The Labour Force Survey, the LFS, has been in the news recently. In one question they had only five respondents, and it shifted the resulting analysis by 30 percentage points, so it is totally unreliable on that question. We have got a real challenge that post pandemic the ONS is now having to reach out to twice as many people as before in order to get respondents. There will be a consultation on how to evaluate how to move forward with the LFS but, if we do not have reliable data, we cannot assess both what policy needs are and what policy needs have worked in the past. That is one challenge, the gaps in the data.
The Treasury, DWP and the DfE, for example, all have very rich datasets, but they do not speak to each other. We need them to be interoperable. If you think about having an adaptor when you go to a different country, in essence we need adaptors for these datasets, so that each dataset can speak to each other. If as a Government, as a country, we got used to treating data like public infrastructure, we would put the resources and investment into creating interoperable datasets that were high value, high quality, well assured, and something that we could rely on.
We know that we have the LEO, the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset. That has administrative data on educational outcomes, and it links to labour outcomes later in life. What it does not do currently is tell us how parental income and household income as you grow up relate to your educational outcomes. We have the Pupil Parent Matched Data dataset. That gives information on the parental or the household income. If we were to link the two sets, we would actually be able to understand what your household income does in terms of your life chances when it comes to education and then the labour market.
Alun referenced the US study. There is a brilliant piece of work that links tax records of parents to the children’s educational and life outcomes. We all suspect that having higher household income helps with your educational outcomes and helps further in life, but if we could actually assess the people—in answer to your question—who truly needed help, we would be able to be more effective with that.
As Alun referenced, there are lots of recommendations in our report that the Government could take on. The LFS, for the moment, is asking about the occupation of the main earner in your household when you were 14. It does not ask about income when you were 14, because it assumes that most people would not know what the income of their parent was when they were a 14-year-old child. By doing so, and by being able to collect that data and share it better, we would be in a position where we could actually react. When it comes to NEETs, that is particularly important.
At the SMC we also have a data explorer tool that is really fantastic; it breaks down data by 41 areas within the UK, so it shows intersectional and regional differences. If we could emulate that at a more granular level to close some gaps, we could really have place-based solutions, because what a rural area needs might be very different from what a northern former mining town might need. The more we can assess the data, the better, because what gets measured gets managed.
Lord Ravensdale: I just have a very brief supplementary question. The point you raised there about household datasets is really crucial. We have a lot of individual data, but not so much about households. I wonder if you could just say a bit more about how we could develop that dataset based on households and link to individuals.
Resham Kotecha: Obviously, and do, jump in if you have things to add. Generally, we have the datasets. If we could link the PAYE data that was collected from HMRC and connect that, just the way they have done in the US, and we are happy to send you the work that they have done in the US. It is not that these datasets do not exist. It is just that there needs to be a will from Government. This is not a political point; all Governments in the future should commit to datasets being interoperable and to be linked. If we could link that tax record for the household with the child’s school records, we would be able to see a lot more.
For example, we talked about the truly disadvantaged, and we are currently collecting data on free school meals. But over Covid and during the transfer with universal credit, instead of adjusting and adapting per year, what was done was children who were on free school meals were classified as being on free school meals for the transition period, which was a number of years. This meant that instead of really understanding which children were truly disadvantaged, not just for one year but for multiple years, we lost the clarity of that data. Instead, we now do not know whether a child was truly disadvantaged for a year or for five years. That has huge implications for their educational outcomes. Again, it is thinking about the data that we already collect: are we really collecting it in a clean and high-quality way?
Lord Evans of Rainow: Just on the data that you mentioned, there are a couple of things that made my ears prick up. Age 14 is key stage 4, which is when you take your options at school, which is a very, very important part of a child’s life. As you say, they are only 14, but those choices that they make even then have an implication for them moving forward to key stage 5, and so on and so forth. Is it possible to get the data from DfE, DWP, and local authorities to potentially identify and help those people who need to make the right choices at age 14?
Resham Kotecha: Alun is definitely our education person but, as you say, where you have really pivotal points in life, we have to recognise the impact. We know that young people whose parents went to university or are in higher professions are more likely by multiples to enter the same. If we have education in schools about career choices around what their decision at 14 means for the rest of their life, then the more likely it is that people can actually make a choice that is informed, rather than going in the direction that is easiest, or that feels the least intimidating. We know there is significant undermatching both with underprivileged children and with ethnic minorities. People might have had the opportunity to do higher-level courses, qualifications or education levels but do not because of either a lack of confidence, lack of financial means, lack of resources, or lack of parental connections.
Alun Francis: I will try to keep the answer really short, but one of the things about the key transition points is that we need to avoid creating bottlenecks. What I mean by that is a position where there is one size fits all and everybody is pushed down that funnel, whether it is at 14 and you are choosing your options, or 16 and you are choosing your next steps. Are you going to go to university or are you doing an apprenticeship? Are you going to study as an adult or at 18, 19 years old?
The key for us is to create a wider variety of options so that we do not have one-size-fits-all solutions, in the sense of a bottleneck where it is all high stakes and, where if it does not work out for you at that point, things will turn out pretty bad. The key, absolutely, to education has to be to have that wide range of options. People learn at different rates, they develop at different rates; they change their geography, the place they grew up, their family. That all has an impact on their choices. There is not an easy answer that can tell us we are going to make a perfect choice for everybody, but at the moment it feels like the choices are quite constrained and narrow, and we need to broaden those out.
Q4 The Bishop of Lincoln: We have heard already the importance of place-based data. Could you describe the importance of geography and place-based approaches to improving access to educational and employment opportunities and therefore social mobility to follow?
Alun Francis: If I start, then I am going to hand over to Rob to talk about the economic and educational aspects in a bit more detail, and then to Resham to talk a bit more about what we have done with some data around geography.
The Bishop of Lincoln: Do you also have some examples of local initiatives that have made a real impact?
Alun Francis: In all our most recent reports—our annual report to Parliament, which is the State of the Nation report, and our policy documents—we have picked up geography as being really important. If we compare similar people in different parts of the country, their opportunities and outcomes are quite different, even though they are apparently from similar backgrounds. We know, for example, that what we call the Dick Whittington story—when you start at the bottom, and you end up at the top; it is long upward mobility—is much more likely to happen to you if you live in London than anywhere else in the country. It does not mean everybody in London has a wonderful life, but it just means that the structure of opportunity and whatever sits behind that is different.
We also know there are quite big differences across the country, for example, in terms of the number of graduates per head of the population. There is a mixture of things happening there: people moving around the country, but also those who have taken the option and left and not come back, and all those kinds of things are part of that. But we can see those significant differences. We can also see some areas where that is starting to shift. In terms of that point I made earlier about the rising number of professional occupations, Manchester and Edinburgh stand out as two places where that has changed over the last 20 years or so compared to the rest of the country. So there are green shoots, if you like, in that context.
What we are very concerned about are these regional disparities, because we think they start economically but they also have real educational implications. I will hand over to Rob on this, but we know, for example, that if you look at the areas with the worst educational outcomes, it is the same places over and over and over again. There are about 30-odd places that have been education action zones, opportunity areas. They have had lots of initiatives from different Governments over quite a long period of time to try to improve outcomes, and nothing has stuck; they are still at the bottom. We need to understand that better. It can never be used as an excuse for poor outcomes, but there is something about those communities and those areas that we need to understand better to do better. I will invite Rob to talk about that in more detail.
Secondly, when we look at things like apprenticeships, the geographical spread of apprenticeships is really interesting. We like to think that it is an alternative to university for everybody. Well, it is and it is not, because it depends on where you live as to whether those opportunities are available to you. Degree apprenticeships or higher-level apprenticeships are not evenly spread, because they are about the economy, and that is why the economy is so important. I will hand over to Rob and then Resh too.
Rob Wilson: What Alun is describing is that there have been numerous attempts over the years to improve local economies, the latest of which is probably the ‘Levelling p’ initiative. There are about 30 areas of really profound disadvantage, where interventions just, time after time, clearly have not worked as effectively as we had hoped. Now we know from our State of the Nation research, which we do every year and report to Parliament, that those areas are very much focused on post-industrial coastal seaside towns and some rural areas like Cornwall, for example. They are the ones that experience the most persistent disadvantage and therefore have the biggest challenges. It is also true to say that growth and skilled job creation continues, without exception, to be largely focused on London and the south-east. Productivity is much higher in London and the south-east, and the supply of graduate skills is much stronger there.
There are huge variations across the country in levels of investment, in the opportunities that that brings, and the productivity within those regions, as I say. We believe there is a very tight link between social mobility, economic growth and innovation, which can improve productivity and investment in business and infrastructure in the regions of the UK. An expanding economy naturally creates more opportunities, but those opportunities are much better where there is a focus on innovation, new industries and technology. They tend to invest in and offer better training and better skills, higher pay and greater opportunity for social mobility.
We also need to have a good look at how better to support entrepreneurs and innovators in this country, particularly in the regions. We also need high-quality research in those poorer regions, and we need to take a real look at how removing barriers to competitiveness can deliver better results for those areas as well. If we just look at skills gaps and opportunities, some of the country’s key sectors at the forefront of economic growth and innovation at the moment have existing and sometimes widening skills gaps, which could be accessed and taken up by those in lower socioeconomic backgrounds. What it needs is effective targeting of support, especially vocational training and post-school transition. Those particular industrial areas are things like renewable energy, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing and, of course, AI.
If you look at some differences in things like venture capital investment outside London and the south-east, there is a huge distortion taking place. The majority, ie 51% of businesses backed at venture stage by venture capital, are all based in London. Every other region in the UK receives just single-digit proportions of businesses receiving that sort of financial backing. If you look at equity and deals, it is the same story. It is hugely dominated by London. London retains 63% of the equity investment value. Foreign investment also has a huge bias towards London; most of the jobs and the investment comes from foreign investment.
London productivity is the only place above the UK average: it is 26.2% higher than the national average and 35% higher than Greater Manchester. Greater Manchester is doing better than most areas, but there is still an enormous gap and you could go through the other regions of the UK. Whether you are talking about such as Wales and the East Midlands, which are actually two of the lowest regions in terms of productivity compared to the national average. Wales is I think about 17.5% below and East Midlands 15%. These are all very important factors that we need to understand and take into account when we are thinking about the economy and place-based action.
Q5 The Bishop of Lincoln: I wanted to ask about areas of local initiatives that seem to have had real impact. I know that the opportunity area, say, in East Cambridgeshire, has made real progress. It is a rather different picture, say, in the north-east. I wanted to see where there have been breakthroughs that you are able to talk to us about.
The Chair: We hope there have been some, because we are reminded that we must try to be upbeat about some of this.
Alun Francis: I will pick out two or three what we might call promising approaches. On the economic front, you can see the shift over the last 20 or 30 years. In some regional centres, like Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh, you can see a change. They have not grown big enough yet. That is the key challenge for them—to keep them growing, so that they lift the surrounding areas. There is quite a lot of research that supports that view. One of our reports on regional disparities really talks about the extent to which, in our country, the gap between those areas and London is much bigger than the gap between leading capital cities or leading economic centres in other countries. You always get a gap; that is not the issue. It is the size of the gap in our country.
Birmingham is another example, where you can see improvements, but we have to accelerate that; we have to do more of it. Regarding some things that Rob has talked about, he has a group of business people and experts meeting to discuss this and make some recommendations around it. It is about drawing out those things that have worked.
It is also important to say that we have good examples of policies in other areas where we can see that they work, but there are challenges to apply them more systematically across the country. We know in early years that good interventions with families can improve outcomes for children. The evidence is international—it is not just UK. There is evidence around the impact of Sure Start that is a bit mixed. One of our problems in this country is we never evaluate anything properly, so evaluation always becomes really complicated. There is a bit of ambiguous research on Sure Start and its impact on educational outcomes; health outcomes are actually much better. But we know that early years interventions work. The question there is - how do we systematically make this happen? We know that you can change around school performance. We know that there are examples of schools that do really well with an intake that is actually not typical. The question is how do you roll those out across the country?
The success story in education is London: 30 years ago, London was poor in educational outcomes, and now it is the best. It is understanding what has happened. Now, there are lots of debates about that, but the fact is you can improve schools. What we are not good at is then learning how we roll that out elsewhere. The same is true of post 16. I think we started to see some really interesting developments around growing apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships, and creating alternative routes to university. Some are not alternatives to universities, they are actually delivered by universities, but they are a different kind of higher education. Manchester Metropolitan University is one of the leading deliverers of degree apprenticeships, which shows that institutions can adapt and change, but that gives a different route to a high-skilled occupation for many people.
I will stop there, but we have lots of promising approaches. The issue is how we turn those into policies that roll out for everyone.
Rob Wilson: On the schools front, one of the bright spots in social mobility has been in education, with schools in England rising up the PISA league tables. Many of the changes that have taken place in things like teaching phonics and numeracy have seen real, tangible benefits, as have the freedoms that have been given to free schools and academies. What is of great interest to us at the Social Mobility Commission is that some of the biggest improvements in a rising tide have taken place in really quite disadvantaged areas, both here and in the US, particularly among inner-city populations with high degrees of ethnicity. We have been interested in what we can learn from those types of schools and what they are doing; what the best-performing free schools and charter schools in the US have been doing.
We have found that while there are undoubtedly cultural factors at work in some of this, we believe that there are some freedoms and particularly teaching methods, that probably have had quite a considerable impact. Both here and in the US there seem to be five key aspects to the teaching that may help the success of these schools. First, it is having a high expectation of students, both in terms of performance and in terms of their behaviour. Secondly, it is very frequent feedback from teacher to student. Thirdly, it is data-driven instruction, which is testing for understanding and feedback loops. Fourthly, it is regular high-quality tutoring and increased class time, which includes getting children to school, because there are lots of schools that have a huge task in even achieving that. Now, how these are deployed by schools will vary, but high standards and aspirations for all children are absolutely a key foundation to success.
The Bishop of Lincoln: I will just add one more to that, which is that the children are adequately fed. The number of schools that run breakfast clubs in order to ensure that children are actually ready to learn because they are not hungry is also an important factor. I would like to ask one last thing, because I am based in the East Midlands. Are there some hotspots in the East Midlands that we ought to know about, where there has been real success as well as the challenges?
Alun Francis: Yes, I think so. There are two things that we might mention. I will invite Resh to talk about this too. First, in our latest report, we have introduced a tool on our website called a data explorer, which allows you to look by area at the key social mobility indicators. We would like to add to those over time, but you can start looking at your area and get a good sense of the comparators elsewhere. Secondly, we are doing a series of roadshows this year with the other commissioners in our team going out and doing what we have called regional insights, where we go and talk to local stakeholders about some issues around social mobility, of the kind that we have been talking about here. It is partly about identifying things that are working, and it is about identifying some common themes around that.
Resham Kotecha: The data explorer is an interactive tool, and it demonstrates the intersectional and regional differences. It is on our website, we can send you the link, but it is available for anyone to use. It helps, in our view, with place-based initiatives. It integrates 40 indicators all in one place, and it breaks the UK down into 41 regions. We would like to be able to get more granular than that, but again, in a lot of cases we are reliant on data collected by different government departments and other datasets. The more data we have, the more we would be able to break it down, because of course, any region that you talk about, you could just move a few postcodes away and you would have a very different set of examples.
The point you asked about evaluation, though, is hugely important because as Alun and Rob referenced, we have been very good at piloting new things. In the other house, it is very normal to come in as a new Government and want to change something and put your stamp on something. What it means is we end up with a lot of pilots that are not designed from the beginning in order to be evaluated. We go, “Let’s try this thing,” and then afterwards we go, “Oh, hang on a minute, we should probably evaluate what worked and what didn’t”. With Sure Start, as Alun mentioned, we collected, as a country, and we looked at the impact of Sure Start, but we looked at the impact of Sure Start on, for example, people who lived within a certain radius. We were not collecting data beforehand on who was coming, what their background was, and whether they would have been reading to their child anyway. “Did they have the capacity to do X, Y and Z?” We did not collect that in advance.
Similarly, successive Governments have looked at programmes to shift out government departments and civil servants to other regions of the UK. You look at that and think it is promising to create employment elsewhere, but we need to be evaluating: are the people who are getting these jobs people who would have come to London to do them, and they have now just stayed? That in itself is positive; we want to create employment, and if they are staying in their home towns or home cities, they are creating benefit for the local economy. But are we creating new chances for new people, or are we creating chances for people who would have had them in London?
Finally, we need to be evaluated and to be evaluating the broader set of circumstances that mean people make choices, because we call them choices, but often they are not. When we look at university, for example, just over half of young people attended a university that was less than 55 miles from their home. When you ask why, well, it is because that is about commuting distance. What we know is that people in the least advantaged social groups are more likely to commute from home, and therefore have to choose a university not because of the academic or educational opportunities that it is offering, but simply because it is within home. If we just “collect data on whether you are going to university or not, that does not give us the picture of whether you are going to the university that is best for you or gives you the best future outcomes .
Finally, in terms of evaluation and data, companies now are starting to collect data on social class, for example. They are looking at “Do you have people from a traditionally working-class background?”. Alun’s points about definitions are really important here, because in some studies we have done and others have done, people often conflate their family stories with their own. You get people who have grown up in professional households, but because their parents came from very poor backgrounds or very disadvantaged backgrounds, they classify themselves as a lower class than they are. The reporting in that sense is not always accurate.
Even if we measure who is getting into a company, we are not measuring how they are getting on. We know that in essence, people hit a glass ceiling if they come from different ethnic backgrounds, if they have disabilities, if they have different accents, if they have underprivileged backgrounds, or if they come from a care background. If we are not measuring your chances of succeeding once you are in a business, in the Civil Service, or in the private sector, then actually all we are doing is getting a very shallow picture, and we are not able to see whether you really have the opportunity to succeed .
The Chair: That is quite a lot to take in. Our next question is on education, which you have already given us some very helpful information on.
Q6 Lord Hampton: I am slightly struggling with whether my question was answered, so I am going to slightly turn it around. You have talked about contextual offers for going to universities, but for the 16 to 18-year-olds, what is the aim of education? Is it a Russell group university? Is it an apprenticeship? What should the aim of 18-year-olds in secondary schools be?
Alun Francis: That is a superb question, and I am not sure you would get the same answer if you asked different people. The ultimate aim of education is to prepare people for life and work, but that can be done in different ways. How we might do that in an FE college, when you are coming at 16, and you might have very good GCSEs, but you may not, and you have chosen to study what we call a technical occupation, we would do that slightly differently from, for example, somebody who is going to do A-levels, and then go and do a more academic degree and enter a profession at a later point. Ultimately, both pathways are about the preparation for life and work; there is just a differentiation about how they do that. It should always be both.
There is sometimes an assumption that the traditional liberal education is a preparation for life in a way that perhaps a vocational or technical occupation is not. I would argue against that. It depends on how it is taught, but more broadly, the training for work brings together behaviours, values, attitudes, understanding of the law, understanding of your role as a citizen, thinking about customers, as well as your technical skills. Those technical skills are built exactly the same way as academic skills are. They are built by accumulating knowledge from the past and building those into an applicable, usable frame of expertise. Actually, as a preparation for a human being entering into the workplace, both have their merits, but they are done slightly differently. Am I answering your question?
Lord Hampton: Yes, that is great.
Resham Kotecha: Can I just add to that question? As Alun says, people will answer your question differently, but the reality is that children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds start school four and a half months behind their most advantaged peers. By the time they leave education at 18, they are almost 18 months behind. When we talk about the aim of education for the least advantaged or the most disadvantaged children, by 16 to 18 they are so far behind in education that when we talk about what we are preparing them for, often it is not very much at all.
The challenge right now is that at the end of last year, one in seven boys and men 16 to 24 was NEET. We actually need to think about this, because 14% is a significant number of people we are currently not providing for in the way we should, if we want them to go on to have successful, happy, healthy lives, whatever they determine that to be. In terms of education, it is making sure everyone has an equal opportunity to go to university or do an apprenticeship, but also recognising that right now we have a significant group of young people who do not have the skills and education needed to get jobs that will provide for them in life.
Rob Wilson: Can I just add that one of the single biggest determinants in life, in terms of outcomes, continues to remain unaddressed in the public square of debate, and that is the family environment into which children are born and raised. It is a very sensitive and difficult subject, but it is one that we certainly feel needs further consideration, although talking with sensitivity about it is obviously very important.
It is very much worth considering where the evidence sits and whether there should be, for example, better flexibility around early years childcare support and payments. Parents should have more flexibility to use existing support to decide the best approach for them and their family. Currently, you all know that childcare financial support is quite restricted and aimed directly at getting parents back into work. It is focused directly on the economic benefit of people returning to work quickly, less on family choice or wider social benefit, and certainly not on the best possible outcome for the child. We know, as Resh said, that poorer children start developmentally well behind other children, so that is also an important consideration.
The evidence on benefits of early years provision, particularly childcare from zero to two years, for the youngest children, is actually quite unclear, with some research suggesting that for most there is no net gain and possibly even some detriment. However, there is also evidence that specifically—this is important—very disadvantaged children make a net gain in their progress, yet they are the families that cannot get access to that sort of provision, partly because of the childcare deserts in the areas where they live. You find childcare is very much clustered in middle-class and wealthier areas.
Lord Hampton: Can I just ask a quick additional one? Aspiration for children: have there been surveys on what they actually want?
Alun Francis: That is a really good question. We actually have a piece of work currently being undertaken comparing one area of high social mobility with one area of low social mobility. What we want to look at—among a range of other things there—are perceptions, because it is also about values. This is a really interesting and difficult area, because it is very easy for us to come along and say, “Well, actually it’s all about low aspirations, and if everybody aspired to be X, Y, Z, wouldn’t that be a much better outcome?” But the reality is that probably is not going to happen, and actually some aspirations that we might not at first sight think of as great aspirations are pretty good ones: the aspiration to become the best social care assistant that you can be, or the aspiration to be a nurse, which actually is quite well paid compared to lots of other things but it is not working in the City.
These are all important parts of the social mobility story, and that is why we keep anchoring back to saying, “This is also about values”. It is not just about saying that there is a model of social mobility that everybody ought to conform to. When we look at perceptions, it is interesting that people value things like health and having a happy life as much as their job, or their income, or the size of their house, which are the more conventional measures of social mobility, status and success.
It is a really good question that you have asked, because the flip side of that is there are areas where aspirations are very low. Everything I have said has to recognise that that is also the case. I do not think there is always an easy answer to those issues. If we go back to the family issues, Rob is absolutely right to raise the family as the biggest influence on anybody’s outcomes by far. The thing that we find the most difficult to talk about is what we can do to support families to get better outcomes. There are some really big challenges in that, but I am also of the view that even if we had a perfect world, some people would come out at 16 with not great outcomes, because they may not be born into a family that is able to give them that.
To go back to your original question, what is really important is the choices that people have. The aim of education should never be just about one or two high-stakes moments and if you fail those gatekeeper moments, that is it, it is all over. It should be lower stakes, more choices, otherwise, we are bottlenecking people by saying that is the only route for them, when actually there should be a wider variety of routes. We need more chances to get back into education as an adult. I have written this week about adult apprenticeships. We are removing English and maths requirements for those who take an apprenticeship as an adult; that is 19-plus. It The reason I think it is a mistake is that adults have children, and we know that if your literacy and numeracy are low then there is a strong correlation with that - for your own children, it is a very limiting thing. We need adult opportunity and apprenticeships at different ages so people can improve their outcomes.
It goes back to that definition thing at the beginning. It is not just about the intergenerational, compared with your parents; it is about whether you can improve your outcomes in your lifetime. That means that if your life is taking a downward turn, surely we want to create opportunities so that you can always improve; you can always bounce back; there is always a second, third, or fourth chance. That is the bit I mean about not bottlenecking opportunities—creating more open opportunities for adults and children—because not everybody’s outcomes are going to be perfect. I am not saying we do not or should not work hard with families and children to get things right first time, but the reality is that will never happen for everybody, and therefore we have got to have a pluralistic view.
Q7 Baroness Garden of Frognal: Well, just picking up on the maths for apprenticeships, what we had against that was that it was GCSE maths. Our argument always was that it should be functional maths—something that is more relevant to people’s lives—because to be honest, very few of us have used algebra and geometry since we left school. If anybody had taught me how to do my tax return, I would have been jolly grateful. Anyway, that really was not the question I was going to ask. We have already touched on this: this is young people not in education, training or employment, and we call them NEETs, which is a term that seems to devalue them somehow. Can you provide an overview of the number of people in that group, and are there any particular characteristics of the group of young people who are NEET?
Alun Francis: I will invite Rob and Resh to come in as we progress, but yes. We have got almost 1 million NEETs currently, if we measure them as 16 to 24-year-olds. That distinction is quite important. That is around about 13.5% of young people aged 16 to 24 and around about 16% of 18 to 24 year-olds. These are large numbers. What is also important to say is that from around about 2010 up until 2019, the NEETs numbers were falling—they were declining. What has pushed them up is a set of factors post Covid, whether Covid is the factor or that is just the timing, but in the last five years or so we have seen a significant rise. In terms of characteristics, we know that a significant number are not regarded as actively looking for work. Let me just distinguish: the 16 to 18 year-olds are treated separately in policy terms to the 18 to 24s.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: Well, they are supposed to be in education at 16 to 18, are they not?
Alun Francis: Well, they are, yes; they are supposed to be. The 18 to 24 s belong in policy terms to the DWP, in terms of finding them a placement or an occupation. The 16 to 18s do not actually belong to anybody, so there is a responsibility to track them that sits with local authorities, and colleges have a moral responsibility to work with them when they come and apply to us. Some of us have active NEET strategies, which we see as a part of our role in our local communities, but nobody owns them, in the sense of having individual caseloads who can understand what the issues are and so forth. That is a gap in terms of provision.
What we can say, though, is that in that group of 1 million, a significant number—I will check my figures here—are not regarded as actively seeking work, because they may be young parents, or they may have physical or mental health issues. That number has grown and risen. We are very, very concerned about that because we know that whatever the reason for being NEET, the longer you are not doing something, the greater the risk to your lifelong outcomes in terms of work, mental health, and physical health; everything else follows from that. The fact that the numbers are large, and then the fact that within those numbers we have got such significant issues around health, we absolutely need to get to the bottom of those. We see that as one of the most urgent social mobility priorities.
Resham Kotecha: We also know that we have differences when it comes to ethnicity and sex for NEETs. We know that young people from a Chinese or Indian background have far lower levels of NEET. It is 4.5% for the Chinese community and 7.3% for the Indian community, whereas white young people are at 11.7%, and young black people are at 11.5%, so there is that element to it. Men are more likely to be NEET at the moment than women. As Alun referenced, those who are reported as NEET are twice as likely to have a health condition compared with the average UK population for their age group. That has also significantly changed when it comes to mental health: almost one in five NEETs reports having a mental health condition now, whereas in 2021—less than five years ago—that was only one in 13.
We currently do not collect, as a country, enough data to understand this. We do not often have it on a granular level at local authority regions, so it is very difficult to understand in different parts of the country why people are NEET. If we do not know why they are NEET, it is also very difficult to understand whether it is health, mental, physical, opportunity, or a failure of education. We cannot really tackle the issue in the same way. We would be very keen to understand some local survey data to be able to assess that.
We also know we have not really talked about, a group that Alun referenced, is care leavers and caregivers. So, 39% of those who have left care between 19 and 21 years old are NEETs. That is a huge number of people from very disadvantaged backgrounds. We also know that young adult carers have a 30% higher risk of being NEETs than their non-caring peers.
Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: I have a related supplementary question on data. Alun, you mentioned the number of young people aged 16 to 24 who may be young parents, and that might be a reason why they are not registering as actively seeking work. On the NEETs by gender from 2002 to 2021, there is a different story for men and women, although that is variable. I am wondering: is there a link between teenage pregnancy and young pregnancy and the fact that that reduced significantly in the 2000s? Have you done some data on pregnancy? Obviously, Lambeth and Southwark, where I did a lot of work, had the highest rates of teenage pregnancy—regarded as under 18 at the time—in Europe.
We are now much more in line with other European nations, and a huge amount of work nationally was done on it. It has been variable, but I do not know what the latest figures are, and I wonder if they are impacting on women being in the workplace and whether it is a societal change, or something that has been done actively by anybody to change the position of women on NEETs.
Alun Francis: We can do a note for you on that. We will go and have a look at the detail. What I could say off the top of my head is I do not think the teenage pregnancy figures have gone back up. Actually, that is a good example of a policy that has worked. There are other issues around age of childbearing, whether people have partners or not at the time they have their children, and so on, which appear to have an influence on outcomes for families. We can talk about that in more detail if you would like to, but I do not think it is teenage pregnancies as such.
What I do know - and sorry, I have the number now for the number of economically inactive: we have nearly 1 million NEETs, and nearly 600,000 are economically inactive. Within that group, it is much more likely to be things like mental health and other health conditions. It includes those who are teenage parents, but I do not think the numbers have increased significantly. Of course, for 18 to 24s, you can be 20, 21, or 22, and you are not a teenage parent any more, I suppose. There will be young parents in that group. We can find out what the numbers are as best we can.
One of the issues is that we need to get a much better grasp of who is in that group. For example, where I work in Blackpool, we have seen a significant increase in the number of home-educated children over the last few years. It is not just a Blackpool phenomenon, but those young people when they get to 16 are more likely to be NEETs. It is always a very differentiated group. There will be some very high achievers in there, who are dealing with whatever issues they are dealing with, and others who have never engaged with the school system very well. The best we can do is do a note for you and particularly draw out that issue about teenage pregnancy.
Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: I would be interested in both the 16 to 18 group and the 18 to 24 group broken down separately. I would be interested in relation, in particular, to the story of NEETs over 15 years. Looking at your graph on paragraph 7—I am assuming the answer is no, but it is a question worth asking—was it the societal change of fewer women having babies younger, or was it not anything anybody did to improve the gender gap nationally? Was that an actual policy? If you look halfway through your paragraph 7.
The Chair: Sorry, it is our paragraph 7; you have not seen this paper. We are expecting you to be prescient.
Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: I am so sorry, Chair. On NEETs by gender, between 2002 and 2021, it would be good to have some more specific information on any of it, but particularly those questions I have asked around 16 to 18 and 18 to 24 and pregnancies. That would reveal whether it is actual deliberate policies that we have done, in education or anything else, that have equalised the situation between men and women NEETs, or whether it is this big societal change that we have talked about.
The Chair: I am afraid we are sending you away with far too much homework, for which I only half apologise.
Resham Kotecha: Do not worry, we like homework.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your offer to help us get the answers to these questions.
Resham Kotecha: I would just like to comment on your gender point, because I sit on the board of the Fawcett Society as well. One of the challenges in looking at women is, again, breaking down the societal differences. We have seen that for the more well-paid, more professional women, the age of them having children for the first time has significantly increased. For the first time ever in the UK, the average age of first-time mum is now over 30[1] That is partly to do with career opportunities, but a significant part of that is the childcare costs. We now have the highest childcare costs as a share of household income in the whole OECD and the highest childcare costs across Europe.
When it comes to the women and families from lower-income households, we need to talk a lot about the disincentives we might inadvertently be creating in our welfare and benefits system. We need to make sure we continually assess—both from data collection points but also from surveys—whether we are really creating a system where it always pays to go back to work and it always rewards you as a parent, especially a mother. In a lot of cases, we have women having babies young or having babies older but not being able to go back to work, because they are trapped by the fact that their childcare costs would be greater than their work. At that point, it becomes very difficult to re-enter education, depending on what it is you are doing. So we essentially trap women, and if they fall in that 16 to 24 age of being a young mum and NEET because they cannot afford childcare or they live in a childcare desert, in essence, we are essentially creating a trap with the system.
The Chair: The problem of this evidence session is that everything you are telling us is so interesting and important, but we are only half way through our questions—this is to the committee as well—and we cannot keep you here all day. We have overrun in the past, when you were giving us a preliminary briefing before. I hope you can stay a bit longer because we really have some important questions to come. I just encourage everybody to try to keep them as crisp as possible, otherwise we will not begin to finish until mid-afternoon, however fascinating that might be for us.
Lord Evans of Rainow: I would just like to add to Resham’s point there about later children. My colleague just mentioned that one of the reasons is the lack of housing. If you do not have a house of your own, it is a reason to delay starting a family. Housing is a big issue.
Resham Kotecha: Yes, 100%.
Q8 Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: You have talked about NEETs being the least socially mobile people in the country. Why do you think it is only now that such attention is being paid to this group?
Alun Francis: Partly, it is the dramatic rise in the numbers. There has been a concern about NEETs for around about 20 years—the term has been used in policy for about that long—but from 2010 the number was declining. I think it is the fact that the numbers have risen so sharply, and it appears to be tied in with all the things currently concerning everybody: the welfare system, sickness, and mental health. These are all overlapping issues that we do not fully understand, but certainly that group is linked in with that whole wider debate about what has happened.
From our point of view, we are concerned that – this is the analogy that we would draw to illustrate the point: if you were a young person growing up in disadvantaged circumstances, but were academically able, then there would be an awful lot of support for you to do well. You might argue there is not enough, but there would be quite a lot. Every university has widening participation programmes, they are linked to schools, they run summer schemes, they take people to visit elite universities. A lot of professional services companies have really good outreach programmes where they are very focused on helping people with work placements and so on. You would get not just support, but things that helped you see yourself in a different place; the kinds of things that can be quite transformational. To go on a work placement to London from the north-east, supported by a charity that helps you do that, and you can see what people do, and you can realise actually that could be you; that is quite a life-changing thing.
If you are NEET, there are none of those kinds of things. For 16 to 18s, there’s nobody that really owns the problem or has the resources to deal with the problem. For 18 to 24s, you have got work coaches with the DWP, but they are not going to look at you and say, “What’s the best outcome for developing your talent and your potential?” They are going to find the best short-term solution. The concern for us—this goes back to the point about English and maths—is we have to find better ways of developing the potential of those who are coming out of the education system with not a lot of qualifications. Not having qualifications often means you do not have skills, and if you do not have literacy and numeracy, then you are hugely disadvantaged. There are other things that people can learn as well.
Our concern with this group is the potential waste of potential that follows from being out of the system without that kind of support. I wrote an article a short time ago, contrasting the number of charities there are for the academically able with the number of charities doing this work. Now, there are some amazing people doing some amazing work, some youth work projects and so on, but the system as a whole has to surely get hold of these young people and try to get them to see themselves in a different situation. That raises all the questions you asked about aspirations, qualifications and giving them a much brighter future.
Q9 Lord Evans of Rainow: You used the word “system” there, and I would like to know more about what you mean by the system. My question is: are the barriers to social mobility for NEETs different from those for other groups, and if so, how might those be targeted?
Alun Francis: It is very difficult to answer your question without dropping into anecdotes, because we do not have a coherent understanding of what is quite a complex and varied group. Probably if we looked geographically, we would find some further variations and so forth. The biggest obstacle, and the reason that they are a high priority, is that at that age—this is the point Resh made earlier—being out of education or the labour market is very damaging. The impact of that lasts for a very long time. That gives it an urgency above all else. Of course, in that group, given the numbers, we are talking about people who will be having families; they will have their own children. So the issue is never just finished with those individuals, it is an intergenerational thing too.
What would I say anecdotally, if I were to describe the issues that are underpinning that? There are significant issues around mental health that we do not fully understand. The debates are all very valid. How much of this is the product of social media and mobile phones? Well, probably quite a lot. How much of it is anxiety and associated issues coming out of Covid? Well, that is probably another factor. How much is that we over diagnose some things and do not help people build resilience? Well, that is probably another factor. I cannot be clear, and we cannot be clear, exactly what belongs where, but these are all part of the story.
There are also things like low literacy and low numeracy, which are really serious problems that we need to find better solutions for. It goes back to the point made earlier about English and maths. Although we do insist, in terms of the system, that if you do not have your GCSEs in English and maths at 16, you retake them, there are questions about whether they are the right qualifications for everybody. I would stand by the view that English and maths must remain part of the curriculum for adults and young people who do not have them, because they open the door to so many other things. I am open as to whether the qualification is the right thing. Those are some issues packed together that make that group a priority.
Lord Evans of Rainow: Just further to that, regarding developments in technology, in your previous evidence I made a note here of the critical ages of 16, 18 and 21 years, which you mentioned previously, and I have added age 14 for the reasons that we discussed before. When it comes to working with the datasets of DWP, the Department for Education, and as has been mentioned, the local authorities, which have a statutory duty to help these people, do you think that new technology such as artificial intelligence could actually bring all those datasets and government departments together that could focus on these people aged 14, 16, and so on and so forth?
Resham Kotecha: You have me very excited with this question, thank you. I am smiling here. The answer is yes, but it very much depends on the data that undersits the AI. All AI systems rely on data. They are only as good as the quality of the data that we put in, and if you put rubbish in you will get rubbish out. It is very, very important that when we are doing these things, we make sure the data going in is quality assured. It is also really important that we have people with lived experiences in the room, because if you have only a certain type of people—a certain class of people, a certain type of privilege—they will shape that data with their own biases as to why. If you have never had a mental health condition, you might underweigh the impact of mental health, for example, on being NEET, or you might not recognise the challenge of being a care leaver and trying to be educated, or being homeless and trying to be educated.
AI offers us huge potential in terms of being able to assess and analyse significant datasets. But what we should be doing—alongside treating data like public infrastructure, making sure all the departments collect good data and share it—is making sure we keep it open where possible, so that it can be assessed and evaluated by researchers and civil society. For example, the Raj Chetty example with Harvard University involved 40 million children and their parents ’worth of tax records and educational outcomes. That is a significant number. It was all anonymised, but it meant that really vast datasets were smushed together to give the best insights possible. We could do that here.
The other thing that AI can do, if we use it in the right way, is really open up education to people who are struggling. It is like having a personal tutor. If you are struggling with maths, if you are struggling with literacy, you can actually use AI to support you with that education, if you have the device to access it, if you have the internet reliable enough to do it. Again, we are coming back to the place-based issues—the digital divide. Do you have the literacy? Are we teaching the skills in schools?
We also need to be thinking about who is determining what truth is. Ask an AI system to teach you about what happened in the US on 6 January: is that an uprising? Is that protest? Is that peaceful? Is that lawful or not? All these things are determined by the people controlling the system. We have to think very carefully about our use of AI and emerging technologies when it comes to social mobility. Are we educating our young people to understand how to assess and interact with technology? If we are not, we are opening ourselves up to a huge challenge. When we look at social media and the algorithms, we see, for example, a lot of challenging messaging like Andrew Tate and the impact that has on gender equality. Now with the spread of that toxicity, a significant portion of young people think gender equality has gone too far. If we think about AI only turbocharging that, we need to be very careful that the messaging we are putting out there is safe for young people, particularly vulnerable disadvantaged ones.
Lord Evans of Rainow: I was thinking of AI to enable us to focus on the individuals, rather than using it as an education tool. Regarding your point before about charities, and the focus on people from deprived backgrounds who have an academic potential and how they are helped to get to the universities, would it help the committee if we focused on an equivalent for those NEETs who are not appropriate for university and have come from the same backgrounds? We could get them focused on something vocational and they could start their own business. You mentioned electricians, but I could mention plumbers and brickies and those fantastic individuals who can earn potentially a lot of very good income. We would put the same amount of resources into the academic group from underprivileged backgrounds as those from NEET backgrounds.
Alun Francis: My own view is we need to be going down that route. Just one important point I will make is that some NEETs are much further away from those occupations that you have just described than we might imagine. Electricians are good at maths; they come in usually with their GCSEs already. A lot of vocational courses require a mixture of academic and practical skills. It is important to remember that. But I do think you are right, because some of this goes back to your point about aspiration and ambition, and it is about giving people a chance to see a different world. Some people live in communities where they meet nobody who is not like them, they go to schools where everybody is pretty similar, they do not necessarily have adults around who have jobs or have those kinds of jobs that are aspirational in more of that sense.
We are seeing some examples. An example I would give to you is the use of the Turing scheme in further education. This replaced the old Erasmus scheme, which was part of the European Union. The Turing scheme is open to universities and colleges, and many colleges have been using the Turing scheme to give their students really quite amazing international experience of their vocational discipline: trips to Germany, trips to America, trips to France to see their occupation or similar training in another country. They really lift ambition and aspiration. The reason we need more of it is we have examples that are on a smaller scale, perhaps, than the whole widening participation agenda, but we have examples where that work is done, and it is very impactful. If we could get more of it, it would be very helpful.
Rob Wilson: Alun set out a number of questions we need to ask ourselves, but there is one further question, and that is about incentives. People follow incentives, and the benefits system has certain incentives built into it, and young people are no different from other people in that respect. It is a very valid question to ask whether there are ‘perverse incentives’ within the benefits system that are encouraging this. Some people argue that at the moment, working full-time on a living wage, you are better off taking benefits. Now, I do not know the veracity of that claim, but it is a claim that is gaining ground, and the Government certainly need to look at issues like that.
There is an increase, which is directly related to this, that is concentrated in local authorities that already have a high number of people in receipt of health-related benefits. The increase is happening in areas that already have high health-related conditions associated with them. It is also a general trend that it is younger people. There has been a 150% rise in younger people now claiming, which is extraordinary. There are a number of questions we have to ask ourselves, but one of them certainly has to be about the incentives and the way the system is built, going back to Lord Evans’s question.
Q10 Lord Young of Cookham: The point that Mr Wilson has just raised about benefits is one that we need to look at, but perhaps on a different occasion. I was reading your paper, Innovation Generation, last night, and you have a chapter on economic inactivity and supporting those not in education, employment or training. You look at a range of government initiatives, such as Get Britain Working, merging jobcentres with the careers service, and more recently, the Youth Guarantee. At the end, you say something very interesting: “At present, responsibilities are divided between the DfE, which owns the education and training policy, the Department for Work and Pensions, which supports people who are out of work, and” local authorities, “which have a statutory duty to encourage, enable and assist young people to participate in education or training”. Then you conclude, “This division risks more young people falling through the cracks of statutory provision”.
It is a function of the way we run this country that there are borders, and health and social care are probably the best known. You then suggest that, “We need a framework for local partnerships, including education, employers”, and the rest. Have you worked up a model of what that might look like, what the geographical area might be, who would be in charge—somebody needs to be in charge—and whether it might have its own pooled budget, in order to really hit the problem? Is this something you have worked up, or if you have not worked it up, might you be able to, to add to your homework?
Alun Francis: This is where my day job and my public appointment come together, really. The short answer is we are on our way to working up such a model. I work in Blackpool, and the college covers Blackpool and the Fylde coast, so it is a broader part of Lancashire. I am going to caveat this by saying that, in Blackpool, there are an awful lot of really excellent things happening around regeneration, and there are some very, very willing and supportive employers. It is not a town that is a tale of misery. It is a town that has some issues that explain why it has some individuals with the least opportunity living there. It is not always because people grow up in Blackpool with the least opportunity. It is because coastal towns have become a magnet for people leaving other areas, and that has compounded some challenges that go with it. I could talk for a long time about what drives some of that.
What we’ve looked at in Blackpool is that we have a significant problem. We have about 3,000 NEETs, and we are not a massive place, so that is quite a large number. We have had to try to understand who is in which group, which agencies are working with which individuals, and whether we have a system for assessing their needs: what we call tiers. Tiers of need ask whether you are quite easy to place into a college place or a workplace, or whether you have quite complicated needs underneath. We need a way of judging that, and we need a way of bringing the public agencies and the voluntary sector together around a common approach.
Now, we are on our way to doing that, we have quite a number of charities working with young people, we have the DWP, the college, and the local authority working together. Some of what we have described are the dysfunctions that are in the Innovation Generation report, because nobody owns the whole problem. The tracking belongs to the local authority for 16 to 18s, but it does not have a responsibility for placement. The Youth Guarantee is a good thing in that sense, because it starts to say, “Actually, we, together with them, have a responsibility to deliver on that”. At the moment, whether colleges take on NEETs with enthusiasm or not will depend on the leadership of the college. Some are very enthusiastic: I think we are. Others will say, “Well, they’re quite difficult, they’re hard work, and you have to have specially trained staff, and you have to think differently about the way you would work with them to others”. I think that is part of the job; others would take a different view. The Youth Guarantee starts to create that framework where you have to take some responsibility.
The reason we have referenced partnerships is that in different places you might find different configurations of partners that could lead that kind of project. As the local college, we should play a big part in Blackpool, but in another area it could be a different agency. We do think it is going to require some investment at some point. What we want to do though is try to minimise that, because—you made the point earlier—what we cannot do is come up with expensive solutions to every problem. We have to find ways of being more innovative than that. We probably will at some point say that we need some resource to make this work well. At the moment, we are half way through the process of trying to design a system that addresses those problems.
The Chair: Mr Francis, if your model gets firmer as you develop it, later on in our inquiry we would really like to see what you have learnt—as a possible prototype; I do not know.
Rob Wilson: Can I just add something, because it is implicit in both the question and the answer? One of the greatest challenges to improving social mobility and improving places that have these huge economic challenges, is the lack of long-term, consistent policy by government—local and national—working together as well. There is a strong inclination to chop and change, both between Governments, but also sometimes even within Governments, as we have seen more recently. It is generally coupled with a failure of central government to co-ordinate its priorities across departments. There is this departmental silo effect, and where you need concerted action across departments, it is just not happening because they do not talk to each other enough.
We would advocate for a long-term solution that involves co-ordination, working on a cross-party basis so that you can move from one Government to another, focusing on what works to deliver lasting change.
We think that is a much better way of trying. It may be pie in the sky, but it would definitely mean you had a long-term strategy that the country could get behind.
The Chair: We have no problem with recommendations that other people might think were pie in the sky.
Q11 Lord Watts: Can you give us specific examples of education programmes that have been developed to encourage people from NEET back into education? Before you do that, can I just ask you one question? You touched on mobility being much easier in London. Many of us think that that is because our society is very centralised. If you look at research and development, it is centralised in the triangle. If you look at what is happening in Manchester, you can see that Manchester is regenerating. There have been a lot of new people coming in there, and I suspect that is changing the figures for graduates, et cetera.
But you have places like Chorlton next to places like Moss Side, and those regeneration programmes are having no impact at all on those people in Moss Side, and often the most deprived communities are not in the major cities: I am thinking of Knowsley, I am thinking about Sunderland. There are places with pockets that do not seem to be touched at all by anything that regeneration does.
Alun Francis: We have some very good examples where education programmes over time have changed outcomes for people: the number of people from working-class backgrounds who go to university now is much bigger than it has ever been before, the number of schools that now get decent GCSE grades is better, Rob mentioned earlier that we do better in the international league tables. I could go on with lots of others, but you get the gist. There are some good-news stories here, and it is important that we remember that because I am sure there would have been people sitting around in the 1970s saying, “Oh, you’ll never get 40-odd percent of young people to go to university,” and we are. That is extending opportunity for people, and you can see that it is similar with apprenticeships and so forth.
What we are not good at is changing the outcomes for those we are calling the ‘truly disadvantaged’. What we try to describe in the Innovation Generation report is a set of issues that compound that problem. Rob is absolutely right: we do not set out long-term strategies, we chop and change everything. In my profession, we have had something like 27 Skills Ministers in 12 years. Everybody changes some small bit of the qualifications to something new, and they are constantly chopping and changing. That is true of lots of other areas of public policy too. This issue about consistency is important.
The issue that Resh mentioned about evaluation is very important. There are certain areas, like early years, where there is quite a big body of evidence about what works. We are not always good about collecting it in other areas and sharing that and learning from it, so it is a cumulative approach. The other thing is that we are often too ill-focused on those very disadvantaged because of the way we use the data, for example. We tend to lose those, so everybody leans towards the low-hanging fruit. So whatever project we are on—it might be pupil premium, it might be something else—where there is room for a bit of confusion, you will tend to find people will naturally work with the easier-to-get-through. There are arguments for that as well as against it, but our feeling is there is a group who are repeatedly put in the too-difficult-to-deal-with box.
Now, in terms of things that work, for some, it is not an encouraging story. There are some who come out of the education system, they do persistently badly, they end up in prison, and they end up having families that have the same cycle, and all kinds of things like that. However, there are always positive stories too. Every college can tell you about people who have gone back to do a degree who never thought they were ever going to do that, and many universities can tell the same stories.
This is why our approach has been to keep that multiplicity of opportunity at different life stages, because there is not a blueprint that could solve everybody’s problems, but we do see as part of our job is to identify those areas where there is a bottleneck and then say, “How can we open the opportunities up?” At the moment that is NEET; in two or three years’ time we hope it might be something different, but there is always a redemptive power in education. We can point to examples that work; now what we have to do is get better at working out how we roll those out systematically. That is something that we have been quite critical of.
Q12 The Chair: I am going to try to wind this up now. In the evidence you have given us, there are certainly things the committee is going to want to explore further. Your particular plea for co-ordination could form one of our recommendations, but it is not for me to determine at this stage what they are. In the final few moments that we have—you had advance notice of this—could you give us a few of the things that you would like to see us choosing to recommend? I do not know whether Mr Wilson is going to say co-ordination is one of them, but if it is, I would take it as read.
Alun Francis: We would all say this thing about a long-term plan. That is part of our Innovation Generation report. There are no quick fixes. We need to be clear about the problems we want to fix, and we have tried to define the social mobility problem in our Innovation Generation report differently from the way it has been done by the commission in the past. That is where our focus has been more on absolute social mobility, creating more opportunity across the country, and then education and so forth coming in behind that.
The Chair: I think Resham is going to also tell us that we need to have better data that is co-ordinated. I think I have that one.
Alun Francis: If we were to put things in an order, they would go something like this: we need the long-term approach, but there are some things that are short-term that need fixing more quickly. We would look towards NEETs, and the range of health, welfare, and education issues that are tied up with that need unpacking, and they need unpacking quite quickly, because that is a ticking problem. Then behind that, the medium-term problems are around the things we talked about: early years, school education, and post-16 choices, where there is a great deal to be learned from expanding things that we know work, but we also need to creat e more opportunities and choices at different stages, which again, we have described in the Innovation Generation document and we talked about today.
The really big, longer-term things that absolutely have to be fixed if we want get to the root of these are that we need to get to the bottom of the issues about regional disparities in the economy and the issues around families, which we have touched on but have not gone into the detail around. Those two are also connected: the geography of where families are most distressed and where the outcomes of children are the worst also relate to the issue about regional disparities in terms of the economy.
If we were to put them in a framework, we would say that NEETs are something that need immediate attention. Schools, early years and post-16 choices are medium-term things where we can see some outcomes over three to five years. The really big one, and the thing that we feel we have brought to the Social Mobility Commission, is the shift away from narrowly focusing on education as the silver bullet, to saying that education must be supported by really strong policies around growth and innovation. Otherwise, you are going to continue to have the regional disparities that are creating a world where there are huge opportunities in some places, and other places are in serious trouble.
The Chair: That is tremendously helpful, and we could actually go on asking you questions for quite a long time further. If when you get away from here you think, “Oh, I wish we’d covered this or I wish we’d covered that,” please do not hesitate to get in touch. It is quite likely that we will also think, “I wish we’d covered this,” and we will come back to you. Thank you very much for the amount of work that has gone into today .
Alun Francis: Thank you. Honestly, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for asking us, and if we can help you any more, please just ask.