Social Mobility Policy Committee
Corrected oral evidence: Schools, local government and jobcentres
Thursday 5 June 2025
10.05 am
Watch the meeting
Members present: Baroness Manningham-Buller (The Chair); Lord Evans of Rainow; Baroness Garden of Frognal; Lord Hampton; Lord Harlech; Baroness Hussein-Ece; Lord Johnson of Marylebone; Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath; Lord Ravensdale; Lord Young of Cookham.
Evidence Session No. 10 Heard in Public Questions 125 – 132
Witnesses
I: Rebecca Boomer-Clark, Chief Executive Officer, Lift Schools; Danielle Lewis-Egonu, Chief Executive, Cygnus Academies Trust; Emma Meredith, Director of Skills Policy and Global Engagement, Association of Colleges.
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
- This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and webcast on www.parliamentlive.tv.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark, Danielle Lewis-Egonu and Emma Meredith.
Q125 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to this evidence session; the Social Mobility Committee is longing to hear your views on a number of subjects. Thank you very much for spending the time. I am not going to introduce the committee members by name because it will just take time; you see them around the table and online we have Lord Ravensdale and Lord Johnson.
We are going start with a question we nearly always ask our panels, which is really for the definition of social mobility. We have heard quite a wide spectrum of definitions and I wonder if you could all give us your definition and, if it is the same, you can just agree and go on from there to say how your organisations contribute to it. You are in the middle, Ms Boomer-Clark, so would you like to start?
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: Absolutely. We simply view social mobility as the challenge to unlock choice and opportunity for all young people. I am the chief exec of a network of schools. We run 57 schools the length and breadth of the country, literally from Hull to the Isle of Wight, from Torbay to Clacton. We define our challenge around social mobility as one of an entitlement; so how do you deliver an entitlement to an excellent education that unlocks that choice and opportunity for all young people, regardless of what part of the country they happen to grow up in or how wealthy their family are? Beyond that, it is really important that we respect young people and their families sufficiently to enable them to explore, articulate and identify with their own definition of success. That involves an entitlement which goes beyond simply access to academic excellence but really does open up a world of experiences that provide exposure, equivalent to that which their more affluent peers would just take for granted.
The Chair: Thank you, that’s very helpful and succinct. Ms Lewis-Egonu?
Danielle Lewis-Egonu: Good morning. Very similar, but we have moved on to look at reframing social mobility: for us it has often been perceived as climbing a ladder to try to escape deprivation or disadvantage and we saw it as supporting young people in having access to choice and opportunity but without having to lose a sense of self and to have to change who they are as a part of that. So we have been developing something called cultural agency, which is deep rooted in the understanding that social mobility is around choice and opportunity and access, but it starts from agency and being able to develop that from a very young age with the families; it being a celebration of where they have come from and that heritage and who they are and their understanding that that does not need to change as they develop themselves and have more access to opportunities that may be afforded to them.
That shift in acceptance, in belonging and mattering and the psychological framing of that as mattering, has enabled us to really support in our local context but also develop that trust, which is a huge element of developing those connections within your local community. Expanding on what Becks was talking about, the offering that is there is available and we are providing that as school institutions but the acceptance of that offering needs to come alongside that cultural agency of, “We’re not trying to eradicate who you are as an individual, what we’re trying to do is give more exposure”. That for us is the social mobility; it is the choice and the agency within that.
The Chair: Which fits with what you said about families defining success rather some external definition. Thank you. Ms Meredith?
Emma Meredith: We accept the Social Mobility Commission definition of social mobility, which is the link between a person’s income or occupation and that of their parents because that best fits the work of the college sector—which I am here today to represent—in terms of supporting people on their career journeys, their reskilling journeys, getting into education, getting a job, getting a better job. We represent the 217 colleges across England, delivering to 1.6 million people every year. Colleges are really anchor institutions in their communities with a lot of experience in the field of social mobility in the sense that we welcome students from right across the community; 30% of them are from the most deprived postcodes. We do a lot of engagement with actors in the system such as jobcentres and employers, to support adults and young people on their education journeys. That also includes providing wraparound support, for example, with SEND, mental health.
For us the short-range social mobility is very important, the step-by-step journey that students can take; that might just be simply supporting a student to stay on course, or progressing from one level to the next. It is not simply about social mobility in the sense of an end journey.
The Chair: There are things you all said that we will want to pick up later in the session, but I am first going to go to Lord Johnson—who is online—who has the next question to ask you.
Q126 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: Thank you very much, Chair. I would like to ask what barriers panellists face in promoting opportunities for those from lower—oh, did that come through okay?
The Chair: No, we lost the sound. I got the first half of it, Jo. Shall I read it out for you? This is Lord Johnson’s question. What, if any, barriers do you face in promoting opportunities for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and how can we reduce this? I think that is what Lord Johnson was going to ask. He will not normally expect me to be his mouthpiece, but I will be on this occasion. So over to you—who would like to start?
Danielle Lewis-Egonu: I will go first, thank you. From my perspective, it is the stubborn barriers, it is the perception and the invisible lines that individuals can often place around children. The underexpectation of their capabilities or their capacity to learn and grow is the initial one and that is a foundation that, sadly, we can still encounter and that we need to bring to the forefront at times.
On top of that, I feel that things should be more systemic around early years provision. I am early years-trained and I will always wave the flag for early years foundation stage because it is deep rooted in my own pedagogy as a teacher before I became CEO of Cygnus Academy Trust. The disparity in provision and high-quality early years provision where early intervention takes place, where we talked about the place based activities for families, is often a postcode lottery. Evidence-based research continuously comes back to the importance of high-quality early years intervention and education. There may be a misconception that that is directly for just the child, but once children are coming into this educational system people are already engaging with those families and it is another opportunity to engage families into a different context and then again start to build those relationships and that trust, which falls through into our cultural agency model around offering opportunity and to develop those aspirations or the awareness of opportunities that are available to them.
So for me, early years provision is fundamental but on top of that, being able to have that wraparound support for that family as well, which comes when families first engage in the education system and sometimes even before that, is important.
Emma Meredith: I would agree with Danielle about the system barriers. From a college perspective, some systemic barriers can be, for example, the transition data for students moving between school and college so that we can really make sure that we can provide tailored support when students come into college. There are access barriers as well, which I am sure may be shared between our sectors actually, around transport, getting into college, devices, digital access and careers advice as well: how can we really defragment the careers advice throughout the system to make sure that there is a good flow of careers advice for young people moving through school to college?
Also 16 to 18 year-olds in English colleges actually have fewer teaching hours per week than the OECD average—we have 15, the OECD average is 25—so there is an argument that perhaps we could do with more teaching hours in the system to be able to support particularly younger people.
There are also funding limitations as well for the college sector. We are seeing a demographic bulge in the number of 16 to 18 year-olds flowing through the system, coming through from school to college, and that will continue into the early 2030s. It can make it difficult for colleges to actually plan how many students they can take on and to ensure that they are going to be funded for taking on those 16 to 18 year-olds, particularly some who may be NEET or have additional needs. There is a funding rate drop of 17.5% when students hit 18. As an example, let us say a 16 to 19 year-old student is taking a level 3 qualification—it could be vocational, A-levels, T-levels—and they need perhaps a third year to complete that qualification, the funding rate drops when they hit 18 if they take three years through the system. In a way, it is kind of penalising young people who may have fallen behind, who then need a bit more time to get through the system.
There are some additional costs, particularly when we look at NEETs. We have all mentioned wraparound support, extra needs and support that might be needed, and that comes with a cost. There are equally issues of retention for NEETs who might not be able to stay on the course, and if a college is running a class that is not at full capacity, it is perhaps less cost efficient. So there are these kinds of financial factors. On top of that, colleges are delivering to adults in addition to young people: 9 million adults in the UK lack basic skills, that is in the Get Britain Working White Paper, but the sector has seen over £1 billion in cuts to adult skills funding since 2010. So there is an element of considering limitations for the 16 to 18 year-old group that we serve, but also the adults as well.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: If I sort of pan out first, it is always a combination of people and place factors, and that those factors compound and intersect. If you are looking purely at educational variation and that being one of the key barriers, then people factors, compositional factors, the demography—the number of low-income families, ethnicity, SEND—probably has the biggest impact on educational attainment. But then you need to sit that alongside local factors such as the local labour market, infrastructure links and transport, and then that needs to sit alongside just pure geography; we know the challenges that face coastal schools. And understanding for individual communities, not even just parts of the country but understanding exactly which combination of those factors is having the biggest influence on an individual child, is fundamental to knowing what the solution is to unlock their barriers.
I will give you three examples of barriers or challenges that we face in school: starting with the early years, we have recently started screening all our children as they come out of early years—this is before they go into key stage 1—for their aptitude and communication: “Can I actually just communicate and talk to you?” One of our schools, Anglesey, is a big primary school in Burton-on-Trent, with three-form entry which is pretty significant. At the end of reception, 74% of children could not communicate effectively and in line with their developmental stage. 74% of them. Of that 74%, one-third of them needed specialist one-to-one support to rapidly accelerate their capabilities. Just imagine being the reception teacher in that class: you already have a vast array of developmental needs and, fundamentally, these children are unable to communicate with their peers or articulate how they are feeling with their teachers. So that is something that we have to get right.
When we look at the prevalence of SEND issues, we should be actually focusing on the things that we know how to fix; we know how to help young people develop their communication skills, we just need to have the focus and the funding to do that.
I will touch on funding as well. It is a total lottery in terms of the amount of money that is allocated to your education where you grow up. We have many secondary schools. Let us just name two of them: Kingswood Sschool in Hull and Clacton Coastal Academy, which unsurprisingly is in Clacton. Both are quite similar actually if you were going to consider those sort of local labour factors and you are going to consider the geography of coastal challenges, but if I am a secondary kid growing up in Hull, I get £585 a year more for my education, before we have done anything else, than if I am a secondary kid growing up in Clacton. That is just not fair and it is something that we really do need to address because it severely limits the ability of a school to provide the additional extras.
The final thing that I will touch upon is attendance. Last year—arguably we should have done this much sooner—we started closely tracking the indicators which can be predictors of NEET and, when we looked at our year 11 pupils who left school in 2024, the attendance of the children that went on to education, employment and training was 89.5%; not where it should be, but that is what it was. The attendance of the children who went on to be NEET was 48.6%. That means that they lost 74 days of schooling; 15 weeks of their final year in formal schooling was lost. We have to find a way to properly understand this attendance issue in schools and it is unhelpful for us to constantly frame it as an attendance crisis per se. We have an engagement crisis; we have a more discerning group of young people who are telling us by voting with their feet that what we are offering many of them day in and day out in school does not match their needs. It is not relevant to where they are or what their future aspirations are, and it is something we really have to address, probably with some quite radical solutions.
The Chair: Thank you. Lord Johnson, that was your question not mine so do you have anything to add?
Lord Johnson of Marylebone: No, that is very helpful. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you. Baroness Hussein-Ece.
Q127 Baroness Hussein-Ece: My question is about regional variations. We have heard that social mobility can vary across the different regions of the United Kingdom—you have touched on it already—but could you outline the nature of the most significant challenges your organisation faces in the different regions, and what do you think could be done to address these? Then a follow-up question is: what role do you think local partnerships play?
Danielle Lewis-Egonu: I can go first on that one. For my schools—we are across south-east and London—again, the variation in the opportunities, the access that our families and our children have, is quite stark. For our London schools it is around transport and going in and having those enriching experiences. Trips for our London schools are completely free, but when we move into our Kent schools there is a huge disparity in their opportunity to be able to travel to different locations. That includes just getting to school: we have bus services that have been cancelled, some schools are in very rural communities but there are no bus services, and we as an organisation have put in place a minibus to pick up children to take them to school. So even just getting into school for some families is extremely difficult and then you add on the cost as well for them and their children to travel in every day.
As well as the disparities between us—we are not as broadly ranged—being across the south-east and London you can again see the per pupil funding has a significant impact on us as a primary school MAT. We do not have a secondary provision within our multi-academy trust, so as a primary MAT it is very challenging with the disparity in funding but the needs being very similar. We have high levels of SEND needs coming in, and when we talk about social mobility and deprivation factors in underserved communities, there is a huge element of intersectionality that is a factor in all our provisions and the strategic planning that we have to put into place. So it is a complex issue which is challenging and it is very difficult to explain in a simplistic way; however, the disparities within a five-minute distance can be extremely large depending on the borderlines of boroughs; it can be in London itself but it can be regional as well. We have linked with many multi-academy trusts across the country and it is very consistent in the barriers being significantly around travel, but also access and the cost of that to opportunities and activities for families as a whole.
Emma Meredith: I agree with the points colleagues have made about the disparities in geography. As a sector body, we have members from Newcastle to Cornwall, so in rural, coastal, city, post-industrial settings, and each will have their own place-based challenges. For me, it emphasises the importance of flexibility at a local level to be able to make decisions that perhaps suit the settings, suit the skills needs and suit indicators of deprivation as well.
The second part of the question is about local partnerships and, for us in the further education sector, they are hugely important because we have further devolution on the cards with the adult skills budget, for example, and colleges are already working very closely in their local settings with key actors in the system, Jobcentres, for example, and working with local employers to ensure there are apprenticeship opportunities, and enough work placements for the students on vocational programmes. We need to try to ensure that there is parity of opportunity across England, that there is not that postcode lottery that Danielle referred to.
Also for the further education sector, we are involved in delivering on local skills improvement plans with partners in the system at a local level, which look at local skills needs and how they can be met. So I cannot emphasise enough the importance of those local skills partnerships and local opportunities in terms of delivering good outcomes.
Lord Evans of Rainow: I would just like to come in on the point made by Ms Lewis-Egonu, and I think it was Ms Boomer-Clark, on the funding of individual pupils. Ms Boomer-Clark mentioned the Hull pupils compared to Clacton, and Ms Lewis-Egonu mentioned, interestingly enough, in terms of the amount pupils get per head, that your academy groupings within Greater London were higher than those in Kent, literally a few miles down the road. This is very, very salient. When I was a Member of Parliament in Cheshire, I used to argue that if you are poor and come from a deprived background in Cheshire, you are significantly underfunded compared to if you were in London.
So you have just highlighted that even within the south-east, and you talked about a postcode lottery; we know where the postcodes are, so the place, the people and the houses. What the committee is looking for is to see what we can recommend to improve that. How can we improve it so we do not have pupils in deprived backgrounds in rural areas? Kent was in your example and I am talking about Cheshire; what can we do so the poorest throughout the country benefit rather than the city centres and the main metropolitan areas?
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: We have several schools in Essex and I shall take an example of one called Tendring. There is some quite interesting spatial disparity analysis that was done recently, and in many respects Tendring actually has very similar place-based factors, local contextual factors and demographic factors to Islington when you cut it. Yet when you look at the outcomes for young people who live in Tendring, they are dramatically behind. So you even have parts of the country where if you objectively just look at the data that is available, you have similar kids, arguably living lives with a similar level of provision, but when you actually get underneath the surface and say, “So what is it about being in Tendring?”, it is about the hidden pressures that that particular part of the country faces.
It has a really high number of children in care and that is really, really challenged by its location and the prevalence of county lines, so you have a CSE challenge that presents a huge amount of difficulty for those people providing services and education to young people. I talked about the Jaywick estate in Clacton: it was never designed for people to live there for much more than 10, 15 years. There are a number of young people growing up in housing which is just unsuitable.
So when you are thinking about the levers, it is really hard to come up with generic solutions; you have to get into a local area where you have very few employers or seasonal employment, and really understand actually how you make sure that the local provision for skills development is meeting not just the current needs of local employers but the future needs, and how you actually provide opportunity for those young people to get out of their immediate area and see that there is a lot more that they could do with their lives if they just were prepared to travel a little. So it is really hard for a committee to actually make recommendations which are going to be applicable generically. We need to have an approach to policy-making which is joined up, that recognises that actually yes, from an education perspective we can solve some issues, but we need to work with health and housing in order to be able to really make sure that for each individual we get to the specific barrier for each individual that is preventing them from accessing their full potential.
The Chair: Thank you. We will go on to the question on NEETs; we recognise you have answered a bit of that already, but there are a few other things that Lord Evans would like to ask and there will be another related question about home education.
Q128 Lord Evans of Rainow: How does your organisation seek to engage with those who are not in education, employment and training? What particular challenges do they present and what could be done to better engage with that group?
Emma Meredith: I think you will be aware that one in eight young people is designated as NEET, and colleges are delivering education and training for up to a third of 16 to 18 year-olds study in college. We have already supplied the committee with some case studies with individual examples of activities from Hartlepool to Blackpool to Milton Keynes that are taking place to deliver programmes for young people in the NEET category. We would be pleased to provide more examples if that would be helpful, particularly through a publication we issued in December last year called Mission Accepted, which looks at how colleges are meeting the Government’s five missions, and that includes examples of employability and youth programmes.
In terms of the challenges, we have already outlined quite a few—for example, retention, keeping young people who are NEET on programme, and looking at the cost of provision, including the wraparound support costs that may be needed for that particular group. There is also an opportunity to really look at the Government’s new initiative, the Youth Guarantee, which is taking place in eight trailblazer regions across England and how those eight pilot projects can provide good data and evidence about NEET interventions. From the sector’s perspective, we very much hope that colleges are going to be involved in all the sector plans; they already do a lot of work in the NEET space and we want them to be doing activity that is more than just signposting. But I would suggest the committee has a look and keeps an eye on that Youth Guarantee pilot and what that might deliver in terms of outcomes and the interventions to support overarching policy.
Lord Evans of Rainow: Thank you. We went on a committee visit to Blackpool and were very impressed in what we saw there at the further education college. Some witnesses informed the committee that we would hear about the increase in the number of children being home educated. What relevance, if any, does that have on social mobility? We also heard from other representatives who said that certain parents were using that as a reason to be able to claim benefits as they were the home teachers; so we were very concerned to hear that the benefit system was rewarding parents for living at home, not in employment, claiming benefits and supposedly teaching their children. Have you any experience of that circumstance?
Emma Meredith: There are a wide range of reasons why children can be home educated, including anxiety, SEND and exclusions from school, which can all impact on social mobility. We have some research that we would be pleased to send the committee separately, and we did a piece of work funded through the Nuffield Foundation on 14 to 16 year-olds’ education, which includes some examples of college initiatives aimed at home schooled children. Perhaps I could send that on separately because that might provide some more context.
The Chair: That would be very welcome. Panel, if at the end of this session you can think of other things that it might be helpful to share with us, we have an almost, but not quite, infinite capacity for reading. Do the other two panel members want to add anything to Lord Evans’s question?
Danielle Lewis-Egonu: Yes, I would like to jump in around home education and go back to the intersectional aspect, which I would like to draw to the committee’s attention in terms of the children, or the families, that elect to home educate. There is also the compounding factor of the SEND crisis. Maybe that is not the right word to use, but the challenge is around many children or families who have SEND or special educational needs becoming disconnected or disengaged with institutions that they have previously attended. They come from disadvantaged backgrounds or underserved communities, but there is quite often a special educational need aspect as well.
When we look at our local authorities that are in safety valves, a lot of those are as a result of overspending on high-needs funding, and that exasperates the issue. Again, there is a multi-layered element in unpicking that disconnection to re-engage and as to why more children or more families are choosing to home educate. I am sure Becks will talk about the engagement aspect, but, for me, it is about why initially those families have chosen to home educate. It might have subsequent reasons beyond that, but I feel it is an injustice not to talk about the issues around SEND and the challenges that schools and families are facing in accessing the provision, support and funding that they need. That may be another aspect that is exasperating the issue.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: If I pick up on the invitation to talk about engagement, for us, it is most important that we are proactive and track the indicators of NEET before it becomes a challenge. We have started to do that at key stage 3, so when children just come into secondary school. Immediately when we start to see the combination of indicators that flag concerns, we provide one-to-one specialist careers support. It is not just about careers; it is also about identifying interests, exploring possible future sectors, making sure that we tailor specific opportunities for exposure and experiences across a range of areas. We are trying to catch those young people before school becomes completely irrelevant to where they are right now.
We recently introduced a survey across all our young people, which was born out of some research in Chicago that has 20 years of history behind it, that looks at belonging and engagement with school. It is really stark. Some 84% of our year 6 children, so the last stage of primary school, reported a positive sense of belonging and engagement with school. Then it just falls off the edge of a cliff. So you get to year 8 and year 9, just before you get into your GCSE years, and it is down to 59% and 58%. You take the same children, from the same families, in the same communities, who are at 84% levels of engagement aged 11, and what happens to them in those three years? We have a real challenge to do something quite radical with that key stage 3 period because it is not working, not just for a lot of children, but for a significant proportion of young people.
And it never recovers. When we looked at levels of engagement and belonging for year 11, when it gets serious—"I suddenly realise and understand why I need to be at school”—it only ever recovers to 65%. We have a lot of data across schools and colleges, but
The Chair: You have suggested radical solutions; do you have one?
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: If you look at the national curriculum review and the interim finding, it looks quite familiar to all of us who are at school in terms of the range of subjects, the enrichment, arts, culture and sports activities that we are going to offer, and yet our young people are saying that the status quo is not fit for purpose. Our children are much more digitally enabled than the people who are teaching them right now. They recognise with much greater awareness what the world they are moving into is probably going to look like. They are really engaged politically, and yet you often have a nervousness to engage young people with the issues of the day. I have yet to meet a young person who is not interested in sustainability and climate change, and yet they study geography.
I have lots of questions that I want to ask young people about what would make school relevant, hence our focus on the survey approach. What really generates your interest? There is a huge amount of talent, interest and curiosity in young people, which is not being matched by the offer that they are facing in schools. I would say to the committee—this is potentially dangerous—if you spent a day shadowing a child in your average school, I challenge you to be engaged and interested by 11.30 am in many cases.
The Chair: Okay; we are all going to do that next week, everybody. Thank you very much. Lady Ramsey has the next question, then Lord Hampton, and we will come back to Lord Harlech at the end.
Q129 Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: I should declare my interest in that I am a trustee and a board member of the Lift Schools multi-academy trust, and so I sometimes have the sort of privilege that Ms Boomer-Clark is discussing about visiting these schools and meeting and talking to young people.
My question is: what impact does central government have on the work that you are respectively doing to improve opportunities for children, young people and adults, for colleges, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds? How, if at all, could the work of central government support you in this? I am taking it as read that funding is an issue, so it would be good to hear other things as well as whatever you wish to say about funding.
Emma Meredith: The work of central government for colleges as public sector organisations is fundamental, certainly for funding but also in terms of how policy reform is enacted and how that applies to colleges and their duties and accountabilities. There is a big opportunity to join up some government work at the moment. Becks alluded to this. Skills underpins the Government’s five missions and some reforms that we are seeing at the moment—for example, Get Britain Working, with its 80% employment target, and the establishment of Skills England, which will look at skills needs nationally. We have the industrial strategy as well, with its focus on eight key growth-driving sectors in addition to healthcare and construction. So there are a lot of reforms and initiatives coming from central government, but we need to see that they will join up effectively and that the national priorities will come down from a regional level and go back up to national to enable colleges to provide opportunities, training and skills that will help improve the socioeconomic status of young people and adults.
There is a lot of movement around skills which is very positive, but we need to see how that translates into actually getting people into college and education, out of education and on to jobs.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: I have had the privilege of being involved in expert roundtables that inform the opportunity mission. It is refreshing and encouraging to see the approach that we are taking to join up both the challenges and the solutions. The opportunity mission properly and rightly is considering the journey of a child, the life cycle from early years all the way through to employment and thinking about all the different parts of Government that need to be connected in order to accurately identify the best interventions for that individual and their family. So I am really encouraged. I completely agree, though, that we have a challenge with so many different agendas to have coherence that flows from national government objectives and priorities into meaningful regional ones which also have teeth and collective accountability.
We are quite good at convening interested and influential parties and experts around a problem, but we are not as good at saying, “Okay, so what are you going to achieve collectively? What level of resourcing do you need?” There are lots of different groups and regional groups. If you are a school leader, it is quite difficult to navigate all the available resources, so there is something about seeing the whole system to enable those who are on the ground with these young people day in, day out, to navigate it in a way that is more efficient.
There is a final piece that I have never had the opportunity to plug; back in 2008, I was a head teacher in south Bristol. The Sutton Trust recently published the latest opportunity index, and it was really upsetting for me to see that south Bristol is still 538th out of 543 constituencies in terms of the level of opportunity for young people. Despite the enormous amount of resource and issues that have been known for generations, it is not shifting. When I was first a head, the full-service extended schools policy was still in place, which brought all these specialist resources around the school—it was a chaotic, broken, failing school at the time—but the one shining light when I got there was the fact that there was a dedicated resource that connected young people and their families, so they could access specialist services and resources at a place they were going to come to most days, if not every day.
Too often we look at schools as a sort of panacea. Because children and families engage with you, that needs to be the vehicle through which we drive the interventions that are going to support these young people and families. But fundamentally, if you distract us from the work that only we can do—that is educating young people so that they gain the qualifications and experiences that unlock choice and opportunity—no one else is going to do that work. We need to be unafraid to look back to the policies and initiatives of the past that had a really positive impact.
The Chair: If you can subsequently pinpoint any of those for us that we have not considered, that would be helpful.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: Yes, absolutely.
Danielle Lewis-Egonu: I definitely echo that in terms of historic policies that we have had throughout education and around local partnerships. The common thread through each of the statements we are making is the connectedness and interplay of all these agencies that are working together and understand the locality. Central government sets the tone of what the rest of us will then start to deliver within those localities, and that clear messaging will be distributed down for us all. But there has been a lot of good practice and many good examples with statistical data that has been 10, 15 years now and is starting to be released again into the system.
Sure Start was a fantastic initiative that provided localised support for families and schools with multi-agency working. We have the remnants of that, and we see the whispers of it on a regular basis. We know it works, but it has not come back into fruition. At Cygnus Academies Trust, as a result of knowing what worked really well for these communities, we set up the Ambition Foundation because, while central government sets the tone, we also want to be proactive and do that now for our local communities while everything else moves around us. We find that those partnerships are available, but it is the resource that we ourselves put in to make that happen which leads it to work and have a substantial impact on the life chances of children, young people and their families. Those outcomes have been evidenced over and over again for decades. We keep going around, and hopefully, we are back round on that cycle, but it is very clear that localised partnerships are a key facilitator for improving outcomes and opportunities for young people and their families because of the local context.
The Chair: Thank you. You are giving us a lot to think about, and it has helped us. Lord Hampton has an extra question.
Q130 Lord Hampton: This was a question that came out from something that Ms Lewis-Egonu and I talked about in a meeting at another time. I am fascinated by, first, your definition of social mobility, which was supporting choice and opportunity without losing the sense of self. Then, in your action steps towards progress, you talk about challenging the narrative, amplifying diverse success stories, highlighting progress in all forms, not just elite career achievements, and advocate for a more inclusive definition of social mobility, recognising the value of cultural and social capital. Could you just expand on that? Anyone else can jump in afterwards.
Danielle Lewis-Egonu: Yes, of course. The representation around reframing social mobility is it not just being a ladder to climb and escape from something but rather to go deeper into who you are as an individual, and that being celebrated while still being able to develop yourself, together with that agency and opportunity to do things, to be out there and develop yourself while also being able to evolve. I have had social mobility. I was born into extreme deprivation in the precariat class. For those of you that have read Mike Savage’s book, you understand the connotations of that. Through mattering and belonging and connection and time, and understanding self, it is a huge jump to be able to navigate the logistics of society if it is not deep-rooted in a real understanding and acceptance of who you are.
There have often been two unwritten choices around social mobility in that you either change completely who you are and pretend to be, in a sense, somebody different, or you evolve with who you are and you are proud of yourself and where you come from. Sometimes the connotations around social mobility are about changing yourself completely, whereas there is a pride in where I have grown up. I was in the care system as well. I feel very proud that I have navigated the different levels and layers of society, and I have not had to change who I am to be where I am today.
But in order to support young people in understanding that themselves, we have to take time, make that connection and have those localised communities around them to give examples of choice and opportunity that are available—sometimes very far away, sometimes close—but also to help them navigate the logistics of sometimes being isolated. If you are developing yourself, it can be quite isolating. So having that buffer, that localised support around individuals for me is very important, and that is what I mean in terms of reframing social mobility as an opportunity for people. Social mobility is a choice, but we have to afford young people and families the access to engage with opportunities around them. It is not easy, and if there is disparity everywhere it is even harder for anybody to access opportunity and choice.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: If you go back to the opportunity index, the top 10 constituencies were all in London, and I still think there is a underdeveloped understanding among the decision-making class as to what the reality is of growing up in vast swathes of this country—for example, how it feels to be a young person on the Isle of Wight. What needs to be universal for all young people, regardless of whether you have grown up in Tamworth, the Isle of Wight, Clacton, Middlesbrough, Hull, Birmingham? What needs to be bespoke that enables you to have the sense of self and the confidence in your own identity to explore your potential? There is still an underdeveloped appreciation for just how different it is to be growing up in probably the vast majority of different parts of this country from the people who are making key political decisions.
Emma Meredith: I agree with what has been said. It goes back to the short-range mobility that I talked about at the start this morning in terms of not just thinking about the ladder that Danielle mentioned, or linear progression, but also about motivation for young people, keeping them on course, finding out what interests them, which Rebecca mentioned. As an aside, thinking about enrichment opportunities in the system that will help young people and adults develop life and employability skills, an example would be the Turing scheme, which is the UK’s post-Brexit replacement for the Erasmus programme. That has a strong emphasis on participation of young people from deprived backgrounds. Some 59% of those that take part in FE are from deprived backgrounds, and that has provided funding for young people to be able to experience mobility outwith the United Kingdom to go and develop work experience and life skills by a placement in another country. These other opportunities are very important because some are simply not affordable without these kinds of schemes that we can use to support young people.
The Chair: Thank you. That brings us to our final question to the panel, which Lord Harlech is going to ask.
Q131 Lord Harlech: Panel, thank you for your evidence this morning. You have already hinted at or made recommendations across different departments. You talked about tracking attendance, funding and joining up policy. What would be your two practical recommendations that we as a committee can make to Government to try to bring some of this together as a catalyst?
Emma Meredith: First, from the college sector—we have all touched on this in a way—is to consider the impact on social mobility of education funding choices. At the start, I talked about adult skills funding cuts, for example, that will come in next year. It is unlikely they will be reversed, but if we look at the eight plus two industrial strategy sectors that the Government are focusing on, are there opportunities for adults through sector plans? Is there an opportunity to invest funding in adults through those routes?
Equally, I mentioned at the start 16 to 18 year-olds’ funding limitations to enable colleges to plan and take this growing cohort of students, because if they do not take them they risk becoming NEET. That is another consideration. Finally, we have been looking at whether there should be a post-16 premium, a little like the pupil premium, so that there is additional funding for disadvantaged students in that 16 to 19 year-old cohort, to help them stay on through college. That is my first recommendation around funding choices.
The second recommendation is to use the evidence from this fundamentally important inquiry to highlight the importance of system join-up, which we have already talked about. Social mobility is a collective responsibility. We have talked about that with the co-ordination in the system, thinking about careers advice and how that can work, tracking from early years through schools into college and on to university. There is an opportunity with the merger of Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service to think about how that advice is placed and delivered. They are my two recommendations.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: I am not going to repeat the point about funding; we have laboured that. I completely agree with the point around system join-up at all layers—national, regional and local—and that sense of getting upstream. Part of that is about data, but some is about where you flow resourcing. Any initiative that is universally funded risks widening the disadvantage gap, so it is important to be mindful about that which is universal and that which needs to be targeted.
The other thing that we have not spoken about—to take us in a slightly different direction—is the importance of health. To be in good health is more than the absence of ill health. If you are going to select an area that schools and colleges can play an important part in, we know the link between poor health and life expectancy, let alone future adult earnings. Greater join-up is required, particularly between education and health, especially at the point that we are thinking about significant system-wide reform certainly in the health space, and it would be a missed opportunity to not think about how we can link those two things together.
Danielle Lewis-Egonu: To echo what my colleagues have said, I would talk about long-term investment in place-based activities and pilots in communities of high-deprivation, such as Every Child Matters, Sure Start modelling that we have had historically. There should be a deep rooted, cradle-to-career approach, place-based and contextual, and to support and drive what really matters, particularly around early years—birth to five—as does engaging with communities and families. It is generational change when it takes place in that way.
My second thought is around the Ofsted framework, which is quite controversial and under consultation at the moment. However, I feel it is deep-rooted in understanding what schools need to do as educational institutions, delving into—particularly for our disadvantaged and most underserved communities—ensuring that the education children are receiving is of extremely high quality so there is nowhere that people can hide; so that children in school can thrive and receive the best-quality education. There is controversy around it at the moment and I am sure it appears to some people that there are multiple areas compared to where we have been historically. I know that is still under discussion and consultation, but for me, it is a toolkit to support schools and exemplify practitioners who do exceptional work across our country. It will enable us to have a spotlight on fantastic practice, particularly in these most disadvantaged groups. I would be keen for us as a sector to highlight schools and individuals who are doing exceptional work, particularly in the most hard-to-reach communities. This framework would give us the opportunity to spotlight those.
The Chair: Thank you. We have about half a minute left, and Lady Ramsey wants to fill it.
Q132 Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: Thank you. Ms Boomer-Clark, but also Ms Lewis-Egonu, touched on engagement with children and what happens to them when they are in school to make it better and more likely for them to attend school. You talked about what 11 year-olds say about engagement and what they say in the subsequent years at secondary school: the cliff edge. We will be having a ministerial session.
You also referred to Professor Becky Francis’s curriculum review. I do not know whether all my colleagues are familiar with that, but it is a very important thing that the DfE is doing at the moment. You mentioned the interim report, which, as you said, looks as though it will maintain the status quo. Are there particular things that we should be asking Ministers that you think would help in all this, particularly around engagement in and attendance at school, which seems so crucial to all this work?
The Chair: Can I encourage you to give us very short answers? As you did not have warning of that question, if you want to come back to us in writing, that is also fine.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark: I will revert in writing.
Emma Meredith: We would be pleased to do the same.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. From the point of view of the committee, that has been a very helpful session. We will suspend the hearing for a short time before we move on to our local government and jobcentres session.