April 26th 2011
Upwardly mobile?
How far will fairness go in tackling social mobility? It’ll pull up short in the absence of targets and tie-ins, argues Clare Goff
The government has committed itself to social mobility as the principal goal of its social policy.
Its social mobility strategy document, Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers, published this month, is framed around the idea of lifecycles. A lifecycle framework will monitor mobility at key points in life, from early years through school years, ‘transition years’ from 16-19 and adulthood, with indicators for each stage.
The government’s underlying principle to social mobility is fairness, which it defines as ‘everyone having the chance to do well, irrespective of their beginnings’.
This meritocratic approach is a theme that runs through much of the current government’s policy, from the comprehensive spending review to its welfare reform plans.
The social mobility strategy brings together the government’s social policy interventions and provide a narrative for its approach. Reforms to the welfare system, the introduction of a Pupil Premium and an end to unpaid internships are packaged up as a programme of lifelong support and action to help end Britain’s damaging lack of social mobility, which it says ‘leaves the country’s potential unfulfilled’.
At a time when money is in short supply, a key emphasis in this and its child poverty strategy – published in the same week – is that poverty and mobility are about ‘far more than just income’.
Taking its cue from Frank Field’s Review of Poverty and Life Chances, which concluded that previous policy had focused too heavily on income transfers, the new approach is heavily geared towards interventions that have causal links with future success, such as extra support for families and access to inspirational speakers for schools.
Such ‘soft’ interventions may go some way towards leveling the playing field. They may even make life more ‘fair’ for some.
But the most significant element to both the social mobility and child poverty strategies is what they lack. Targets have been abandoned in favour of ‘high level indicators’. No goals are set for either social mobility or child poverty. Indeed, the new child poverty strategy promotes plans to review local government’s duties around child poverty.
There is little attempt to link social mobility and child poverty interventions with broader economic challenges. Interventions around worklessness, around lack of opportunity and in-work poverty, for example, are few and far between.
Both strategies highlight the role of personal responsibility, offering rewards for those families that ‘do the right thing’.
But while creating a level playing field may help those individuals already on the ‘ladder of life’ to progress upwards, it will do little to help those areas struggling to get on the first rung. A focus on meritocracy and fairness fails to recognise or take into account the structural reasons why people fail to succeed in society.
For deprivation and poverty are caused not only by a lack of fairness or opportunity, but by deep structural issues related to place.
There is little in either of these strategies to help those communities that failed to make gains during the boom years and that record the highest levels of child poverty and poor social mobility.
Any attempt to tackle these issues needs to be linked to plans for local economic growth, for tackling worklessness and building skills. To what extent is poverty being addressed by the new local enterprise partnerships? Is the Regional Growth Fund prioritising those areas with the lowest levels of social mobility?
While centralised nudges to open up doors and break down barriers can help, social mobility and child poverty will not budge without joined-up local interventions that tackle entrenched deprivation.
Local areas will struggle in the coming years of austerity to make a break-through on poverty and worklessness. Social mobility and child poverty targets could start to slip. Local communities need to be at the forefront of devising new interventions and of connecting up the various policy offerings to build joined-up thinking around poverty and place.