Greg Wright: Child poverty is a criminal waste of human potential

WALK into any boardroom and you will encounter a common complaint.
Greg WrightGreg Wright
Greg Wright

“We’ve got great plans for our business,’’ the CEO will tell you. “But it’s a nightmare trying to find staff with the right skills and attitude.”

Recessions come and go, but the lack of skilled staff is a stubborn barrier to Yorkshire’s growth.

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But the answers – on a flip-chart at least – are very simple. You just need to improve links between business and education, and increase the size of the pool of talent in the local labour market.

The most effective way of tackling the skills deficit is to improve social mobility, and ensure that nobody’s aspirations are trimmed or destroyed because of problems in their early years.

Sadly, a study from the End Child Poverty campaign, which estimated that 320,000 youngsters in Yorkshire are living in deprivation, offered little hope. If we can’t free these children from poverty, we will continue to lag behind the turbo-powered South East. Child poverty is a criminal waste of human potential.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with James Haddleton, the former president of Leeds Law Society, who was determined to improve links between major law firms and children outside the city’s prosperous centre.

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James was stunned to discover that some children living less than three miles from the heart of Leeds had never set foot in the city centre, and were unaware of the vast range of potential careers open to them.

He was exasperated by the generally sluggish pace of social mobility in Britain, which was reflected in his own family’s story.

“It took 110 years between my great-great grandfather working as a glass blower and me being the first Haddleton to go to university,’’ he said.

This is an old problem. A study carried out by researchers from the London School of Economics for the social mobility charity the Sutton Trust a decade ago compared the life chances of British children with those in other advanced countries.

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The study found that social mobility – how someone’s adult life relates to their circumstances as a child – had actually declined in children born in Britain between 1958 and 1970.

It showed that the UK’s rate of social mobility was lower than the rate in Canada, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, and on a par with the United States.

This failure to improve the rates of social mobility means that many local firms will continue to be starved of the workers they need to grow.

This problem will intensify if it becomes harder to hire workers from overseas to fill the gaps in the labour market.

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But at least a partial solution lies in industry’s hands. A company can’t lift thousands of children out of poverty, but it can fire a child’s imagination and help them see their own future in a different light. Industry must not be afraid to make the first move.

Over the last five years, more than 55,000 young people have benefited from taking part in Make the Grade, which was established by the Leeds-based social enterprise the Ahead Partnership, with support from local firms.

Make the Grade offers young people real life, hands-on experience in the world of work. Business leaders provide potentially life-changing mentoring. Too many children find careers advice confusing, because it is often based on dated perspectives. Engineering, for example, no longer belongs to the world of rags and spanners. But children need to spend time inside a world-class manufacturing facility to find this out.

Initiatives like Make the Grade offer a template for success. But the widespread lack of social mobility remains the biggest challenge of our times. Brexit and the rollercoaster ride of the Trump presidency will never loom larger than this tragedy.