ResPublica’s Patricia Kaszynska calls for a new 'collective' perspective to the problem of intergenerational disadvantage
The
Cabinet Office published today a Progress Report on Fair Access to Professional Careers which investigates the opportunities available to
individuals from different backgrounds to enter professional careers. The
conclusion of this research authored by Alan Milburn, the Government's
independent reviewer on social mobility, is that ‘without further and faster
action on the part of the professions, government and others, Britain risks
squandering the social mobility dividend that the growth in professional
employment offers our country’. In other words, in spite of the increase in the
number of professional jobs available, careers in politics, medicine, the law
and journalism remain ‘solidly and socially elitist’.
While it is true that access to professions
such as law, journalism and medicine must be widened, and therefore more action
should be taken to loosen the grip of the privately educated on the labour
market (for instance, of the country's top journalists, 54% were privately
educated with one third graduating from Oxbridge) - it is important to recognise
that the life prospects of many children are already determined by the time
they turn 3. Indeed, according to a recent interim report published yesterday
by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility, future 'destiny'
is stamped onto children at a very early age and for 50% of them, determined by
parental circumstances (in Denmark this figure stands at 15%). Hence, while a
critical approach to the recruitment into professional careers is needed,
if social mobility is to become more than a ‘pipe dream’, it has to be a part
of a more consolidated, holistic and ground breaking effort.
With social mobility in the UK remaining
at the level it was for those born in 1970, and the inequality gap
haemorrhaging the aspirations of those at the bottom, a radical rethinking of
public policy is needed. In fact, one could go even further and suggest that in
order to address the problems of intergenerational deprivation and
institutional disadvantage that compounds the lack of opportunities for too many
children and young people in the UK, a shift of perspective is needed. Whereas
many of the past policy solutions designed to tackle these problems were
focused on individuals, new set of measures has to operate on the level of
groups and communities as well as individuals.
For instance, the Pupil Premium
has been heralded as the central policy tool to address the problem of
underachievement for underprivileged students. While it presents a valuable
policy intervention to help students from poor backgrounds to get into better
schools, it simply does not go far enough in addressing the root causes of
disadvantage. Indeed, the effect of the Pupil Premium, as well as many
other policies targeted at improving social mobility, set
out to move a small number of individuals up the social ladder, but leave
their communities behind. Rather than individuals, 'the little
platoon we belong to in society' should become the level targetted by
policy makers to answer the challenge of social mobility. In order to
tackle the problem of intergenerational disadvantage we need a new
set of policy measures and a new 'Burkean' approach.