William Wallace: Education vital for mending a broken society

It documented the widening gap in educational attainment between London and the English regions, with the worst “cold spots” for social mobility now in former industrial towns and coastal communities.

It is striking that the map of low attainment, and of high levels of young people not in employment, education or training, matches so closely with those areas which voted heavily for Brexit. These areas feel left behind, because they are. Whole communities feel that the benefits of globalisation have passed them by, because they have, says the report.

We have become a more socially divided country, not so much along ethnic grounds as between the more successful and better educated cities and suburbs and the unskilled white working class. Worse, sections of our media and some of our politicians have written these British citizens off as a feckless underclass sponging off benefits and reluctant to work.

Furthermore, part of our country’s dependence on immigration from the rest of Europe has come from employers’ preference for recruiting already trained and motivated workers from abroad as against the harder task of training and motivating poorly educated local people.​

Broader and better-quality education will not be enough on its own to bring those depressed and deprived communities back into harmony with the rest of Britain. We need, as the Social Mobility Commission also remarks, “a more redistributive approach to spreading education, employment and housing prospects across our country”.

We need a reinvigoration of local government and local democracy. We need investment in transport links outside the South-East. We need local industrial regeneration, and we need locally available finance to support the growth of local enterprises, which our banks have been so poor at fostering. It goes without saying that Brexit will do nothing to better their chances and is likely to make their situation worse.

However, education, and training are essential to social as well as economic recovery, and early years education is the most important priority for children from poor and often vulnerable families.

I am proud that the Liberal Democrats in coalition successfully introduced the Pupil Premium. I regret that the Conservatives managed to cut back on the Sure Start programme, and I am concerned that cuts in local authority grants have led to some places that most need to provide early educational support leaving many vulnerable children without it.

I say to the Labour Party that increasing public spending on the 50 per cent who do not go to university, all the way through from nurseries to apprenticeships and continuing and further education, should be a higher priority than cutting fees for university students. I dissented from my party’s official line on tuition fees for this reason more than 10 years ago, and I hold to the same view today. Any progressive politician should put improving the life chances of the least advantaged first, before answering the pleas of the more confident and more successful.

There are many other measures we should be pressing to encourage children from those communities to learn, to gain life skills and employment skills, and so to grow up feeling that they are included in our national community. Teacher turnover in such areas is too high; we need not only to grant them more respect but to offer them higher pay and perhaps bonuses for extended service. Teach First has shown how to bring bright graduates with enthusiasm into schools; we should extend that, perhaps by writing off student loans at a progressive rate for those who teach in priority areas.

Schools do not operate all year round. Disadvantaged pupils fall back every summer. Liberal Democrat councillors in north Bradford have been running a summer school for children between primary and secondary school with, so far, excellent results. We need both non-governmental groups and local authorities to provide more opportunities for disadvantaged children out of school hours.

I was saddened to discover that the visit to the Lake District which the north Bradford summer school included was for some children the first time in their life that they had been outside Bradford.

Many of the institutions within our civil society have much to contribute to repairing the weaknesses of our country’s education, but the prime responsibility lies with our public institutions, our state and our Treasury to invest in the quality of education needed to rebuild a flourishing and inclusive national community.

William Wallace is a Lib Dem peer. Lord Wallace of Saltaire was speaking in a House of Lords debate on education and society led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, This is an edited version.