David Willetts

David Willetts gave the 7th Annual Geoffrey Hubbard Lecture to the National Extension College at the British Library. In this speech, David discusses the legacy of Michael Young, and also explains how the emergence of women into higher education, although a good thing, has had some unintended consequences. “The idea of a public intellectual is in vogue. Last year Prospect magazine listed our top 100 “public intellectuals.” Stephan Collini’s recent book, just like Prospect’s recent list, has created a fluttering in the dovecotes about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down. High on anyone’s list of great post-war public intellectuals would be Michael Young. He had a deep understanding and interest in social and economic change. But he wasn’t a detached observer, he had a powerful moral vision too about how society could be better. As the author of Labour’s 1945 manifesto his was in many ways an egalitarian vision, though it was not narrow or mean-spirited; instead it was what we would now call a commitment of widening participation in society.Michael Young spent most of his life trying to pursue his vision in a way that Conservatives can understand and value. He did not try to pass laws to make us good. He tried to create institutions that would embody that vision. Whereas in theory he may have believed in the power of the state, in practice he worked through civil society. That is one reason why his influence lives on so strongly.High on the list of great institutions which he created is the National Extension CollegeThe idea of MeritocracyMichael Young didn’t just create institutions, he also created concepts and words, Notably he coined the term meritocracy in his famous book ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy,’ published in 1958. It is a fascinating, odd, and deeply ambiguous book. Although some people in America have read it as a paean of praise for meritocracy, it is really a deeply ironic critique of the whole idea. He argues that to lose out in a society because of bad luck is painful enough, but to lose out because you are assessed as being without merit is far worse. In fact it is a vision of a kind of dystopia which must have been influenced by other examples of the genre earlier in the century such as Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Orwell’s ‘1984.’ The debate over opportunity and social mobility is as lively today as it was then so his heretical challenge to the conventional wisdom is as striking as ever.Young’s central argument is that in a meritocracy worldly success and indeed moral worth are all judged by the single benchmark of merit, defined as IQ plus effort. IQ is just a matter of being a member of the lucky sperm club, though effort does add a moral dimension. One of Michael Young’s last writings before he died was an attack on Tony Blair for his worship of success. He thought the New Labour faith in creating opportunities for everybody to move up and move on showed a moral blindness to people who just couldn’t make it in a modern mobile economy. It is the theme of Richard Sennett’s recent book ‘Respect.’ The argument coming from the Left is that we are failing to show respect to people who have had a tough deal from life and are not going to be conventional successes.Oddly enough this is a strand in Conservatism too, though it is all too easily submerged within a caricature picture of us worshiping personal success and regarding it as always coming with its own automatic justification. Hayek, in his great book ‘The Constitution of Liberty’ sets out a position which is both more compassionate and also shows a much deeper understanding of a market economy. He argues that in a free market economy prices work to signal demand and match it with supply. The overall system of ordered liberty may have a moral justification but that does not mean that the individual outcomes represent moral worth or personal merit:

“Most people will object not to the bare fact of inequality but to the fact that differences in reward do not correspond to any recognisable differences in the merits of those who receive them. The answer commonly given to this is that a free society on the whole achieves this kind of justice. This, however, is an indefensible contention if by justice it is meant proportionality of reward to moral merit. Any attempt to found the case of freedom on this argument is very damaging to it, since it concedes that material rewards ought to be made to correspond to recognisable merit, and then opposes the conclusion that most people draw from this by an assertion which is untrue. The proper answer is that in a free system it is neither desirable nor practicable that material rewards should be made generally to correspond to what men recognise as merit, and that it is an essential characteristic of a free society that an individual’s position should not necessarily depend on the views that his fellows hold on the merit he has acquired.” [Constitution of Liberty, chapter 6, Equality, Value, and Merit, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1960, pp 93-94].

He carries on:

“A society in which it was generally presumed that a high income was proof of merit and a low income of the lack of it, in which it was universally believed that position and remuneration corresponded to merit, in which there was no other road to success than the approval of one’s conduct by the majority of one’s fellows, would probably be much more unbearable to the unsuccessful ones to the one in which it was frankly recognised that there was no necessary connection between merit and success.It would probably contribute more to human happiness if, instead of trying to make remuneration correspond to merit, we made clearer how uncertain is the connection between value and merit. We are probably all much too ready to ascribe personal merit where there is, in fact, only superior value.” [Ibid, pp 98-99].

Indeed, Hayek cautiously welcomes Young’s book in a footnote to this passage.By civil society we mean not just a diversity of institutions, we mean a diversity of measures of moral worth. That then opens up deep questions about the shared principles on which we are to be governed. The American commentator, Nicholas Lemann, has observed that the debate on meritocracy is “all prefix and no suffix.” There are important questions here about the legitimacy and respect that needs to be earned by the people governing us. Michael Young has been absorbed by the sociologists. But perhaps because of his rather old-fashioned faith in the civil service and government, less attention has been paid to some of the questions about the legitimacy of government which the book opens up. I am no exception to that rule. Instead, I want to focus on the links between Michael Young’s work and our current preoccupation with social mobility.The Family as an obstacle to social mobilitySocial mobility is now conventionally measured by transition matrices in which “perfect” mobility is taken to mean that your eventual income or social class are completely uncorrelated with your parents. This immediately raises key questions about the legitimate role and power of the family. We celebrate the success of those who move up and move out from poor families and deprived backgrounds but we shouldn’t forget those left behind, nor the reasons why. Inherited poverty, which we all wish to eradicate, is very closely linked to something we deeply value - the family. One recent study, for example, by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Essex, showed that if you were brought up in a deprived area your earnings are 10% higher if you have a sibling than if you are an only child. The explanation for this striking difference was fascinating. The researchers argued that the obligation to help care for parents is greater if one is an only child. Hence an only child is more likely to stay in the area where he or she has been brought up and perhaps sacrifice some of the time and effort needed to earn more. If, however, you shared these responsibilities with other siblings then you have greater opportunities to work and train more and indeed to move away.People often ask why it is so hard to abolish child poverty in practice although it is obviously an admirable aspiration in theory. The answer is that it requires a level of intervention in the family which would be unacceptable in a modern liberal society. That is why we can’t suddenly create a meritocratic society. In his book Michael Young recognises this, comparing a meritocratic society to the Mohicans “who took away the best young men and women from a conquered tribe and reared them as members of their own families.” Even if a modern bureaucratic state could do the job as well as the Mohicans, which I rather doubt, we would still find it deeply objectionable. Indeed, John Goldthorpe has argued that if you want an example of a society that efficiently matches ability with occupation, using the state to do so, then the model is probably the post-war Soviet Union. This is not exactly a shining example for us to follow in 21st century Britain.Meritocracy and social mobility are both therefore very problematic once we think carefully about what achieving them would really involve. But they do both capture a crucial feature of modern capitalism - it doesn’t like waste. It may not reward merit but it certainly hates unused talent. That key feature of capitalism is ironically most famously captured in that beautiful melancholy poem: Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard:’

“Full many a gem of purest ray serene,The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear,Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,And waste its sweetness on the desert air.Some village - Hampden, that with dauntless breastThe little tyrant of his fields withstood,Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.”

Michael Young conveys the same thought. He can’t really have been mocking the idea of meritocracy where he describes the existing un-meritocratic system as follows:

“Education was very far from proportioned to merit. Some children of an ability which would have qualified them as assistant secretaries were forced to leave school at 15 and become postmen. Assistant Secretaries delivering letters! - it is almost incredible. Other children with poor ability and rich connections, pressed through Eton and Balliol, eventually found themselves in mature years high officers in the Foreign Service. Postmen delivering demarches - what a tragic farce.” [Meritocracy, p10].

Education above all is the key for opening up opportunities and ensuring talents are not wasted. Let’s now turn to what is actually happening to social mobility in Britain today, and why.Social Mobility is declining - the evidenceIt is now generally accepted that social mobility in Britain is actually declining. This is particularly shocking because we are so used to thinking of social trends inexorably pushing us to become a more open and mobile society - “classless,” with “opportunities for all,” as we politicians like to say. What is going on?The main evidence comes from two longitudinal studies of people born in 1958 and born in 1970. Researchers use the two databases to compare outcomes. The outcomes of the 1970 cohort are more influenced by parents than for the 1958 cohort. Someone born in the poorest income quartile in 1958 had a 31% chance of being in the bottom quartile aged 33 and a 17% chance of being in the top quartile. Someone whose parental income was in the highest quartile had a 17% chance of ending up in the bottom quartile and a 35% chance of being in the top quartile. In a world of frictionless social mobility these figures would of course all be 25%. If you then look at the cohort of sons born in 1970, for those born into the bottom income quartile the son had a 38% chance of remaining in the bottom quartile and a 16% chance of moving into the top quartile. If your parental earnings were in the top quartile then you only had an 11% chance of yourself going down to the bottom income quartile as against a 42% chance of remaining in the top quartile yourself.The trend is deteriorating. What your parents earn has actually become more important in determining what you earn. We are heading in the wrong direction. However, there are some who challenge the evidence. It is a long and technical debate. On balance, however, I think the case made by experts such as Paul Gregg, Steve Machin and Jo Blanden is persuasive (see for example their paper ‘Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America.’ Sutton Trust, April 2005). Britain is indeed becoming less socially mobile.In his book, Michael Young seems to have assumed that meritocracy could be delivered but people would revolt against the very idea when they saw what it meant in practice. In reality, the opposite has happened. The idea of meritocracy and mobility is still very potent as an objective but achieving it is proving much harder than people thought.Why isn’t Education improving social mobility?If social mobility is declining, then many people assume that education must be the culprit. We can track the debate about education’s failure to deliver increased mobility through the different stages of the system. And I must here pay particular tribute to the work of Sir Peter Lampl and the Sutton Trust. He has worked tirelessly to make us aware of the uncomfortable evidence that education is not spreading opportunity as widely as we hoped. He has put the important idea of needs-blind admission to independent schools on the agenda.Gordon Brown focused attention on universities with his notorious intervention in the Laura Spence affair. Higher education is very important. There has been a dramatic increase in the economic returns to education and this comes almost entirely from higher education. Britain over the past 20 years has seen a big increases in the earnings of graduates relative to non-graduates. But the expansion in higher education has meant above all more places for students from more affluent backgrounds rather than students from poorer backgrounds. So the chances of a child from a high income family getting a degree are still much greater than those for a child from a low income background. This means that the expansion of higher education has not increased social mobility but if anything has contributed to its decline.The universities were blamed for failing to reach out to potential students from more modest backgrounds and we now have the useful Aim Higher Scheme. The trouble is that it focuses very much on outreach to school students in their late teens whereas raising awareness of the university option needs to start much earlier in a child’s school career. That is why David Cameron and I have said there is a very strong case for strengthening the Aim Higher Scheme so that it reaches out to children at an earlier stage of their school careers - Aim Higher Sooner.Universities, however, argue very powerfully that they can’t be expected to correct for all the failings in the school system. If schools in deprived areas are not performing well then there is a limit to what universities can do to adjust for this. Ultimately they have to look not only at the potential but also the attainments of candidates coming before them. So the attention moved on to schools and here the Sutton Trust has assembled some powerful evidence of the social background of children at our 200 best schools. It does look, sadly, as if these schools are not socially representative of the country as a whole or even the areas in which they are located. They have a lower proportion of pupils on free school meals than the areas where they are located. On average 14% of pupils are on Free School Meals. In the areas where the best schools are located this falls to 12.3%. But only 4% of pupils going to these schools are on Free School Meals.We have now reached the position where access to a good state school above all depends on two things. Either your parents have to be able to afford higher house prices - on average £47,000 higher - in areas close to good schools. Or alternatively you get access to a church school by getting a form signed by a clergyman that you are indeed a local churchgoer. This must be one of the most bizarre systems in the western world for determining access to our best secondary schools. It locks in advantage and penalises disadvantage.One solution to this problem is to try to impose ever stricter controls over admissions. But it is just not possible to impose central controls that deliver equitable access. There are just far too many devices whereby parents are going to be able to play the system. Instead we need to take a very different approach, moving away from the dismal zero sum game of deciding how a fixed number of places should be allocated at good schools. What we need is more good schools in total. That is the argument for reforms such as those in the Government’s Education Bill to open up the delivery of schooling to make it easier to create a greater diversity of schools and make it easier for schools to expand and link up with others.Even this, however, isn’t the end of the story. There is worrying evidence that measured cognitive ability does if anything decline for some groups of children during their infancy. There is a very lively debate now about the role of early years in providing intellectual and social stimulus for young children. I am sure there is much to be achieved here but we need to be wary of what has been rightly criticised as “infant determinism.” As Jerome Kagan and John Bruer argue, some child development experts are beginning to match physicists and cosmologists in attaching so confidently so much explanatory power to initial events in the distant past.The Government’s Sure Start scheme was initially intended to be intense intervention in the early years of vulnerable children in deprived areas. Its creator, Norman Glass, had a powerful vision of how they could help turn round children’s lives. But since then the original idea has been abandoned in favour of something very different. The Government has renamed Sure Start centres Children’s Centres, and there is a new target of 3,000 Children’s Centres across the country. They are now seen above all as devices to take care of children to help working mothers. The importance of child development has been downgraded and diluted.There is clearly much that education can do. It is incredibly frustrating that despite the best efforts of successive governments to try to improve educational standards, the contribution of education towards social mobility is if anything going backwards. Can we offer any further explanation of all this, beyond the continuing failings of our education system? There is one powerful explanation. The enormous expansion of education, especially higher education, must by definition have succeeded in bringing extra opportunities to many more to gain university qualifications than ever before. The assumption was that this would mean more students from modest backgrounds. But in reality the main beneficiaries have been a different though equally meritorious group. Only a generation ago middle-class families attached much more significance to the education of sons rather than daughters. The biggest single group of beneficiaries from the expansion of higher education have been young women from middle-income families.The crude figures reveal the scale of what has been going on. Back in 1974 145,000 men and 75,000 women went to University. So there was a total of 220,000 university students with almost twice as many men as women. Since then of course, polytechnics have become universities, increasing the number of university students at a stroke by several hundred thousand. But the trend has carried on upwards as well. Thirty years later in 2004 the number of male university students trebled to 650,000. But the number of female university students increased twelve fold to 950,000. Back in 1974 there were half as many female students as men. Now there are one and a half times as many female students as men. The expansion of education has helped both men and women. But it has had a far greater impact on women than on men.The women who have above all benefited from this expansion are those from more affluent backgrounds. In the 1958 cohort high ability boys from high income backgrounds were 1.7 times more likely to get a degree than high ability boys from low income backgrounds. For the 1970 cohort this had increased to 1.8. For girls the figures are far more dramatic. A 1958 cohort girl from high ability/high income background was 1.6 times more likely to get a degree than a girl from a high ability/low income background. A 1970 cohort girl from a high ability/high income background was 2.7 times more likely to get a degree than a girl from a high ability/low income background. So what has really happened is that daughters from middle income backgrounds have poured into higher education like never before. But there hasn’t been a similar opening up of opportunities for girls from more modest backgrounds. And for girls from the poorest families their chances of getting to university have actually fallen from 38% to 29%. If anything, the gap between the chances of a girl from a high income background getting to university as against a girl from a low income background has actually widened. Meanwhile, for boys there has been no similar widening of the gap between those from more and less affluent backgrounds. The expansion of higher education helped women, but it helped women from affluent families more than women from low income families.We might speculate about the reasons for this. It is still a problem if you are a girl from a low income family considering whether it’s worth studying when there’s always the option of having kids and getting started with a family. And the old attitude of middle class families was to put much more emphasis on the education of a son rather than a daughter, leaving a suppressed demand for higher education from daughters in more affluent families. We haven’t yet got an authoritative explanation here, but these might be factors.Feminism has trumped egalitarianismOf course we should welcome the transformation of opportunities for women. There really is no going back. But if we are to design effective policies to provide better opportunities in the future, we need to understand what’s happening now. What’s happened so far is that well intentioned policies have ended up widening the gap between opportunities seized by women from high income families compared with women from low income families. This is making Britain a more unequal and less mobile society. Of course it is right to transform opportunities for women, but paradoxically at the same time this has strengthened some of the forces passing on income and wealth from one generation to the next. Increasing equality between the sexes has meant increasing inequality between social classes. Feminism has trumped egalitarianism.This is just one example of a wider phenomenon. I don’t believe we pay enough attention to the changing role of women as a driver of social trends in Britain. We worry not just about mobility but about the growing inequality of incomes between households. Again you have to understand the transformation of opportunities for women to make sense of this phenomenon. As these newly liberated women emerge from higher education they are very likely to marry men from a similar background - so-called assortative mating. Most measures of inequality focus on household incomes not individual incomes. A household with two high paid earners opens up an even wider gap from other households.Let me give you another example of this phenomenon - motherhood. In the past motherhood was an equalising experience. Whatever women’s backgrounds or their future aspirations most of them stopped work when they became mothers and if they did resume work it was after a very long break. Now we have a massive gap between motherhood as it affects poorer and more affluent women. Young women who perhaps don’t think they have the chance of high earnings have babies when they are younger and withdraw from the world of work, insofar as they were ever connected with it. Career women delay having their children and then have the briefest possible time out from the labour market before they resume their careers.Let me emphasise again that this advance in opportunities for women is desirable, inevitable, and irreversible. I am not trying to turn back the clock but we haven’t fully realised the implications of this transformation of opportunities for women for social trends and social policy more widely. The evidence shows that one of its effects has been, if anything, to widen inequalities and reduce levels of social mobility in Britain today. We now have two very different motherhoods deepening Britain’s class divide.In the past the exclusion of women from much of higher education and the labour market, however unfair, did have the effect of softening inequalities in Britain. The transformation of women’s opportunities has, if anything, now widened inequalities. That is a challenge which we need to address without reversing the advances that women have secured.ConclusionNobody can be against this expansion of opportunities for young women. What we must hope is that after the big increase in participation by women from more affluent backgrounds in education we can now once more turn our attention to the group that has benefited surprisingly little from the education expansion of the past 30 years - boys and girls from more modest backgrounds. We can, and must do better in spreading opportunity across the generations. That means developing a policy agenda for schools, for housing, for jobs and for families that shows we can once more make Britain a more mobile society.There was a fascinating but overlooked piece of research from the Department of Work and Pensions recently which tried to identify the key factors which helped people escape from a poor family. The good news was that on their measure perhaps 80% of children in poor families managed to escape poverty by the time they were 30. There are obviously a whole host of factors which shaped this. But if you lived in social housing your chances of escaping poverty seemed a bit lower. The best single predictor they could find of your chances of escaping poverty were your reading ability at the ages of 5 and 10.One of the most powerful message I have already absorbed from so many people working in the world of education is the crucial role of reading in expanding people’s opportunities. At every subsequent stage of our educational system we are making desperate attempts to compensate for the damage that has been done by children not learning to read. Far too much time and effort in secondary schools and in FE Colleges is trying to get students up to the basic level of reading skill they need in order to learn. You have to learn to read and then you can read to learn. There is a dangerous myth that somehow the Government has successfully tackled the basics of literacy and numeracy at primary schools and now has to focus on secondary schools. But we should have no illusions. Even on the Government’s rather dubious figures, 20% of children are emerging from primary schools unable to read. Yet there are countries round the world, some much poorer than ourselves, which achieve far better results than this. My colleague Nick Gibb has powerfully argued the case for synthetic phonics. It is still a battle we need to fight because the evidence is so overwhelming that it is the best way of teaching children to read. Getting all our children reading competently when they leave primary school is the greatest single contribution that we could make to transforming life chances of children.Secondly, there is the worrying evidence that we saw earlier of the poor performance of boys compared with girls. The expansion of higher education and spread of ‘A’ levels have brought more girls improved educational opportunities. But boys are now lagging a long way behind. We are feminising the environment in which boys are brought up. Continuous assessment rewards the steady activity of girls rather than a boy’s tendency to put everything into a crisis before an exam. The preoccupation with the danger presented by paedophiles may be one reason why it is so difficult to get men now to work in primary schools or give their time as volunteers to scouts or other groups. Boys are desperately short of powerful male role models. One reason why David Cameron has been pushing so strongly for his Community Youth Action Programme is it is an opportunity for young male adolescents to break out of patterns of antisocial behaviour in which they might have been trapped and find something worthwhile to do. We need to make vocational training more worthwhile as this could help boys in particular who are currently so switched off from school learning.Some of the key mechanisms for transmitting privilege and wealth from one generation to the next have actually become more powerful as a result of massive changes in the pattern of our wealth. In the past 20 years pensions have shrunk as a proportion of people’s total wealth. Housing has increased enormously as a part of our net wealth - up from only a third 20 years ago to over half of our total personal financial wealth now. Pensions can’t be inherited but houses can. So this has shifted our wealth holdings to an asset which we can pass on to our children. At the same time high house prices have created a barrier for young people who wish to become owners. The best way they can surmount this barrier is by getting help from their parents. One recent survey showed that more than 50% of first time buyers under 30 are getting help from their parents with their mortgages. This powerfully consolidates a trend for home ownership to be concentrated on those whose parents are already home owners. It is why it is so important as our third objective that we make it easier to build new homes and spread the opportunity of home ownership to the next generation.Fourthly, there are all those modest steps that people can take during their working lives to increase their skills and raise their earnings. It is significant that some of these measures of social mobility take the position you have reached by the age of 30. The assumption is that this defines the employment of your lifetime career and is shaped by your higher education. But, especially in the past, people could work for long apprenticeships and develop a craft or skill which might mean that they didn’t achieve their full potential until they were in their 40’s or 50’s. It is these slow, steady, modest improvements in people’s earnings that are penalised by the spread of means-testing. Here is one example from the world of education of how these means-tests can hit parents. Imagine that you are a parent in your 40’s with a child at university and another one about to do his or her ‘A’ levels. If your income rises from £15,000-£20,000 then your child’s student grant will be cut and you could well lose some education maintenance allowance for your second child as well. This alone means that if your earnings increase by £5,000 you lose £1,000 in student grants and education maintenance allowance. That is a 20% hit on your income, and then on top of that there are income tax, National Insurance and possible loss of Tax Credits. This penalises all the steady increases in earnings, skills and overtime, which are an important if unglamorous part of social mobility. Even worse, your family faces very high means-tests if your children stay on at school or go to university. Means-testing penalises families who are trying to get their children to stay on in education after the age of 16. This particularly hits families with earnings of between £300 and £400 a week.One of the Conservative Party’s great commitments is to spreading opportunity and ownership. We know that a modern market economy can’t just offer privilege for the few but should offer a decent life and property ownership for the many. Meanwhile, the evidence is starting to come in that Britain today is less successful at delivering these goals than it was even 20 years ago. As the Conservative Party renews itself under David Cameron we should once more make the spreading of ownership and opportunity one of our crucial objectives. That means effective teaching of reading at school. It means an education system that works for boys as well as girls. It means removing the barriers to home ownership for the younger generation. And it means reversing the spread of means-testing that penalises people who work a bit harder or try to get that extra bit of training. This is a message that resounds as much in the North of Britain as the South, on the council estates as well as in the prosperous suburbs, and it is crucial to our nation’s future.”