The Tories are neglecting those children who didn’t go to university | Polly Toynbee

Further adult education could be used to improve the UK, but social mobility is still dying at the hands of austerity

Nobody knows what was meant by “leveling up”. The very vagueness of this Boris Johnsonism has been key to its success. But the exorbitant expectations raised by 'red wall' seats are set to come crashing down on Earth next week, among voters angrily disappointed in the Wakefield by-election.

Was it to be a levelling of people or places? Either way, an eloquent levelling up white paper landed earlier this year with no funding attached. When a minister last week called Birmingham and Blackpool “Godawful” places, it only confirmed suspicions that these Conservatives’ concerns for the “left behind” were always bogus: at heart, “Godawfuldom” is anywhere and anyone outside the south-east and the comfortable shires.

That attitude explains the neglect of those whose children don’t go to university, consigned to a subterranean distant world of further education colleges for other people’s children. A new Institute for Fiscal Studies report shows spending on adult education – for those 19 and over – and apprenticeships has fallen by 25% since 2010.

FE colleges can be gardens of second chances, providing professional opportunities for those pushed out by the constricted world of A-levels. But there has been a sharp drop in the number of adult learners, with 33% fewer taking courses Level 3 (A-level equivalent in a wide range of courses) and 50% fewer taking Level 2 courses (GCSE equivalents). This is not only a disaster for leveling opportunities, but calamitous for this very underqualified economy.

Conservative politicians like to brag about apprenticeships, but most have no idea. Incompetently managing their apprenticeship tax on large employers, the numbers have dropped to just 50,000 adults starting the lowest level of apprenticeship, down from 200,000 a decade ago. It was designed to encourage businesses to recoup the tax by hiring and training more young school leavers, but employers are instead using it to upskill existing more experienced staff, many sending executives to earn degrees in trade, barely apprenticeships.

High employment numbers hide wide variation: Booming vacancies are often clustered in locations and occupations that don't match the people or cities most in need of decent jobs. But most alarming is the still high number of NEETs – young people leaving school who are not in training, employment or training. EDSK, an education and skills think tank, reports that one in 10 young people aged 16 to 24 are lost in this limbo, their income scarred for life. Often from poor or struggling families, and with poor mental health or learning difficulties, they are shunned by a narrow school system that does not offer the vocational courses that could have saved them.

Now 150 BTec qualifications – which bridged the gap for teenagers – are being scrapped, replaced by new T-levels, which again narrow the choices. According to the EDSK report, few of these young people receive career advice, which now constitutes a "disjointed and confusing landscape" of contractor providers. Long gone is the Labour's Connections service for teenagers that offered employment, mental health and career advice, all services aimed at "other people's children" quietly swept away during the first austerity cuts of 2010.

 

Paul Johnson, the director of the IFS whose BBC Analysis program, The Forgotten Half, explored the inferior treatment of the half of school leavers not heading for university, tells me: “I got the sense from politicians and civil servants that FE is not in their blood, never a priority; these courses are unknown to them or their children. Heads of FE colleges have none of the power of vice chancellors, everything is stacked against them.” FE teachers are paid considerably less than school teachers. The fear is that the Covid generation is producing an even larger cohort of lost school leavers, faring even worse, having drifted away in the lockdown, with utterly inadequate catchup support. The now axed national tutoring programme was outsourced to a company, Randstad, that failed miserably.

The Sutton Trust, which measures how much birth remains destiny, expects a 12% reduction in social mobility as a result of Covid and the government’s failure to invest in rescuing those lost children. Lee Elliot Major, a co-author of the study and professor of social mobility at Exeter University, says: “Stark learning losses, suffered disproportionately by poorer pupils during the pandemic, will leave long-term scars for current generations.” The education select committee warns of an “epidemic” of educational inequality.



Just when there should be maximum investment, encouragement and leeway for those damaged by the lockdown years, the government plans to deny student loans to any child without English and maths GCSEs: that stops chances for the most deprived to catch up. A quarter of free school meals pupils who would like to reach university would be rejected, no second chances for them.

In her inaugural speech last week, the head of the Social Mobility Commission, Katharine Birbalsingh, drew criticism for downplaying the importance of working-class children reaching Oxbridge. "If a child of long-term unemployed or never-worked parents gets a good job in their area, isn't that a success worth celebrating?" It is, but that success needs a burst of investment in a second chance for those who have failed in the school system. With near-fixed life chances in the early years, Labour's pledge to restore the vandalized Sure Start scheme for the youngest children has the best chance of bringing lifelong success.

In Johnson's Great Loud Decline, among his many sins, lies, and broken promises to "beat the world" everything, leveling up is his cruelest deception. But the severe damage to life chances really began when the austerity ax of 2010 fell on 'Godawful' everywhere and on everything that falls under the radar of most Tory MPs.

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