British Conservatives in Paris Blog

Last week David Cameron praised social mobility without seemingly aiming to close the income gap between rich and poor. The Labour policy to create a fairer society has also not been successful with such inequality having widened somewhat during their term of government. Social mobility in Britain remains amongst the worst in Europe.
Alan Milburn »s report on social mobility described how the Country was becoming split between those with support networks and social skills and those without. Even the ordinary middle-classes were losing out to those in the upper middle level with  »connections » and suggesting also structural privilege with e.g. Law and Medicine still dominated by the upper levels.
It is within this context , therefore, that Gordan Brown »s weekend speech to the socialist Fabian Society posited Labour as the party for middle income Britain, sharing its middle-class values and aspirations and asserting that the Conservatives want to take away middle-class guarantees, with also no account of their future middle-class jobs.
The difficulties of moving between the different levels of what remains a highly stratified society in Britain used to be clearly understood e.g. with the Grammar Schools created to encourage the social mobility of the more academically clever children. There is still a need today for a pragmatic policy to improve social mobility without which the associated aspiration remains questionable. This could include for example a programme to encourage the top performing schools to share their know-how with the more disfunctional state ones, on how they develop their pupils » broader social skills and connections to maximise their prospects as they progress in the outside world.The right teaching environment can play a transforming role in developing aspiration and social mobility with advice and encouragement extending beyond the pure academic requirement. More investment in state-financed nurseries (perhaps as an alternative to marriage tax breaks) could also reduce exclusion and poverty at the  »broken society » level by allowing the mother to work and giving the children the chance of participating at the earliest education stage.

This entry was posted on lundi, janvier 18th, 2010 at 2010-01-18T15:40:41+02:000000004131201001 and is filed under Chairman''s blog, Social Mobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.