I am delighted to join you at this event, and to address you today, because I believe the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust is a real success story - and the most dynamic force at work in education in this country today.

And I’m grateful for the chance to pay tribute to your founding Chairman Sir Cyril Taylor - and also to your Chief Executive Elizabeth Reid;

To thank all the business sponsors of specialist schools;

And to recognize the individual contributions made by the headteachers and teachers here this evening: what you do is nothing less than the transformation of the lives of young people in every part of the country.

Even decades on I remember all the names of every one of my primary school teachers - the names and the nicknames.

You never forget a good teacher.

Teachers open our eyes to the world.  They give us curiosity and confidence. They connect us to the past and help us prepare for the future.  They are the guardians of our social heritage, influencing a child for life and standing right at the heart of the community.

My wife Sarah wrote a book for charity and asked people round the country who - in addition to their parents - had inspired them the most.

Take one example - Sir Alex Ferguson.

You might have thought he’d chosen a footballing hero. 

A manager he’d admired.

A motivator in football training.

But he chose a school teacher.

The person who - other than his father - had been his great motivating force.

And he wanted to celebrate that fact.

Indeed, the majority interviewed for the book choose teachers as the people who had inspired them the most.

And across the country there are great examples of teachers making a difference.

Just look at schools like the Compton School in Barnet, whose headteacher Teresa Tunnadine is here this evening, Compton does brilliant, leading edge work to involve parents.

Or take Bitterne Park, and its headteacher Susan Trigger, and Redbridge Community School, led by Richard Schofield --- pioneering curriculum innovation in Applied Learning.

And headteachers ----- David Carter, Susan Tranter, John King, Michael Wilkins, David Triggs - and too many others to name, many here today - who have given outstanding leadership, not just to their own schools, but to the education service at every level across Britain.

And good schools have aspiration - the desire to encourage social mobility - written in to their very essence of their being.

My school motto was ‘I will strive my utmost’. 

Next door - we lived in a mining community - the motto recalling miners coming out of the mineshaft into the day was ‘Rise to the light’. 

Today’s most recently founded schools have mottos from ‘No goal is beyond our reach’ to ‘Achievement for all’ to ‘Aiming for excellence’ ----- all schools that are crucibles of hope, drivers of ambition, with a mission for upward mobility -- showing that, through leaders and teachers with dedication, skill and a deep belief in the value of public service, the life chances of our children can be transformed.

And I say: let us now seek to build on the excellence you have achieved and let us give every child in Britain a world-class education. Let us truly liberate the potential of all by using the most powerful weapon mankind has ever invented: knowledge.

In the last year we have announced a series of major reforms:

• the growth of one to one tuition and personalised learning;
• the National Challenge to improve low-attaining schools so that every child can go to a good school;
• an expansion of apprenticeships and grants for university so that every teenager has the chance of an apprenticeship or higher education place;
• and action on the under-fives and child poverty so that every child from the cradle onwards has more opportunity and no-one is left out or left behind.

And I want to talk today about the bigger ideas behind these reforms and chart their next stage: to make good on the founding idea of my politics – the mission of social mobility: that the next generation, whatever their background, should have the opportunity to do better than the last.

I am interested in a new wave of social mobility because I am a child of the first great wave of post war social mobility. I grew up in an ordinary industrial town and went to the local school. I benefited from great and dedicated teachers. And I was fortunate enough to get to university.

I saw at first hand the power of opportunity to change lives.

But as a teenager I also saw close friends of mine who might have gone to college or to an apprenticeship or to university - but who never did. University or college was, they thought - or their parents thought - not for people like them. Often invisible barriers - the background they came from, the assumptions they made, the encouragement they never had - held them back to their permanent disadvantage.

And the reason I am here - the abiding reason for my interest in public service - is that I want their children and their grandchildren to have all the chances that were not available to my school friends when they were growing up.

So my own experiences don't just lead me to celebrate the chances I had - to learn, to get on, to be helped when I was in trouble.  They lead me to a guiding commitment: having seen the power of opportunity to change lives and how the denial of it can hold young lives back, I want the opportunity to rise from the place where they are to the place where they can be to be there for everybody.  

Our ambition: that for every child we can say that their destiny is not written for them, but written by them.  To create a Britain where what counts is not where you come from but what you aspire to become --- not who you know but what you know. A Britain where everyone, no matter what their background, should be able to rise as far as their talents can take them; where everyone can make the most of their potential. 

This is what I mean when I say that I want to see a Britain that is far more upwardly mobile born once again.

And at its core it is a great moral endeavour --- the belief that everyone has something to contribute and no one should be written off before they have even had a chance.

Social mobility usually starts with parents wanting their children to do better than they did themselves.  But it cannot be achieved without people themselves adopting the work ethic, the learning ethic and aiming high. And it also depends on Government giving people the capacity to participate fully in shaping their future. 

We already know enough from our educational history to discard the old ideas that intelligence can be reduced to a single number in an IQ test, that we can rank people in a single hierarchy and that talent is fixed and immutable. And what we must do now is act on the consequence of recognising the realities:

• that people have a richness of potential to be tapped;
• that their talents take many forms - practical, creative, communicative abilities, as well as analytical intelligence;
• and to get the best results for the individual and the best economy we need to get the best out of people’s potential at every step and every age.

In 1997 barely two in ten from unskilled backgrounds were applying to university.   Today the majority of the poorest young people - 55 per cent - have said for the first time they want to apply.  And if social mobility with its ever more close connection to education is to mean anything in the next generation then everyone should be participating in education and training after 16.

Look at all the talent we have in Britain today: the genius of our scientists and the creativity of our artists; the skills of our physicians and the dynamism of our entrepreneurs; our world-leading universities; our world-beating businesses; the City of London at the heart of the world's greatest metropolis; the best health service in the world; the best media.  Imagine what Britain could be if all of the talents of all the British people could flourish.

And what is clear is that as we look ahead, it will be the countries where there is hope and ambition for all that will be the great success stories of the global age.

Indeed, I go further: I say that globalisation will create new opportunities for a new wave of social mobility that Britain must seize.

Let’s look back to the first big phase of post war social mobility - brought about by fundamental changes in the industrial and occupational structure of the British economy.

We saw the growth of new occupations and professions. The rise of a salaried middle class and a skilled working class. A whole generation - my generation - that was given opportunities their parents had never dreamt of: the chance to become teachers, doctors, civil servants or skilled engineers. For the first time - because of the 1944 Education Act - secondary education was guaranteed for all; and as the children of the 1950s became students in the 1960s, there were new grants for study and new universities to study at. 

This was the generation of “Room at the Top” - the children of Butler’s Education Act, of Bevan’s NHS and of all the other reforms of the post-war social patriots. 

But in the 1970s and 1980s, this rise in social mobility stalled as the restructuring of our economy took place. Skilled manufacturing jobs were lost.  The opportunities for social mobility narrowed. Inequality and child poverty worsened. And as unemployment rose to 3 million the sons and daughters of working class families missed out on many of the new educational opportunities that were being created.  At a time when many of their fathers were hit by unemployment, many of the generation that some have called Thatcher’s Children - the lost generation - were sadly denied their chance to progress. The result was - as detailed survey evidence showed - that someone born in 1970 and at secondary school in the 1980s had much less chance of moving up the social class ladder than someone born in 1958. 

Since 1997, we have been determined to reverse this decline. And as employment has risen and investment in education grown we have made some progress.  The sharp drop in social mobility has been stopped and rapid improvements in school results since the late 1990s give us a platform for a new era of accelerating social mobility:

• the proportion of young people getting five or more GCSEs has risen by a third, and we have started to close the gap in achievement between social classes in both primary and secondary schools;
• a record 1.6 million young people aged 16 to 18 – the highest number ever – are now taking part in education, work-based learning or training;
• and between 2002 and 2006, the gap in university participation for young people from higher and lower socio-economic classes narrowed by 3.5 percentage points.

Too often and for decades people said there was nothing we could do to raise the performance, skills and ambition of the lower skilled. Now everyone understands that with good pre-school support, good schools and good teachers we can make a transformational difference.

So the highest priority for us now as a country is that - building on our improved educational performance - we make the right decisions to accelerate social mobility in the years ahead.

Because there are still urgent inequalities for us to address:

• in education the family you are born into is still the best predictor of the exam results you will achieve. 
• in employment millions of adults still do not have the skills they need to make progress in their working lives. 
• in health the place where you were born still determines how long you will live. 
• and in housing your parents’ wealth still makes a great difference to your chances of getting onto the housing ladder.

There should be no excuses, no alibis, no glib explanations for these injustices.  The waste of any talent and the inequalities that result are never a price worth paying for economic success. In fact, I contend that social mobility and economic dynamism go hand in hand; that we succeed best when we liberate the talents of each and every person in this country, not just those of the few.

And so the question we must address is what will become of this generation’s children? And I can tell you today that I am optimistic about the prospects for the future.

Because I believe that if we take the right decisions, we can benefit from a new wave of social mobility. 

Today here in Britain we have six million unskilled workers. By 2020 - as a result of the changes in the global economy - we will need only half a million.

Today we have nine million skilled jobs.  By 2020 we will need 14 million.

This is as fast an expansion of occupations as we have seen:

• a 50 per cent rise in less than two decades in professional jobs;
• a 90 per cent decline in unskilled jobs.

But change may be even faster and opportunities may be greater than even this.

Because while the post 1945 wave of social mobility came from the changes wrought by opening up our national economy, the new wave of social mobility will come from changes wrought by opening up the global economy.

It is estimated that world output will double over the next 20 years.

It is estimated also that one billion new skilled jobs will be created.

And in this new economic environment of global expansion and job creation there will be major opportunities for those countries able to seize them.

And the issue is not whether there will be change but who will benefit from this great transformation? And how can we ensure that increased social mobility is widely shared?

It’s an all the more important question now than ever before because while the prizes from success are greater, the consequences of failure are also so much greater - in the new world an unskilled worker will become not only poor but almost unemployable.

But in this new wave there need be no ceiling on your ability to rise if you make effort.

Indeed as the global economy expands, Britain can attract companies to Britain because of our skills.

And if you have the skills you can work anywhere in any part of the world.

So instead of opportunities limited by the old sheltered national economy, there will be potentially unlimited opportunities for the forward march of social mobility opened up by the wider global economy.

And I believe that, if we make the right choices – not just building on the achievements of the last ten years but thinking anew about new ways to help people rise in a global economy - this could herald a new era of rising social mobility in Britain.

So as the possibilities open up once again, we must set a national priority to aggressively and relentlessly develop the potential of the British people:

• a commitment that goes beyond education to employment, asset ownership, enterprise and culture;
• and one which will benefit our society as a whole – all of us gaining from each of us having a greater chance to progress.

Social justice in future years best expressed as something more than just social protection - compensating people for what they do not have.  Instead, social justice expressed by social mobility - helping people develop what they do have.

So now is the time for us here in Britain to make the choice to invest in social mobility so that both individuals and our country can benefit.

It must be a social mobility that is aspirational and universal in approach:

• with a relentless focus on raising the sights of every individual child through world-class early learning and daycare, strong support for parents, high quality teaching, and more and more young people going to university, college or apprenticeships;
• and with second, third and fourth chances that mean that, as a community, we never give up on anyone at any stage if they are prepared to make the effort.

And I say to you today that this is the only route: that we cannot achieve the greater social mobility we seek with a narrow and elitist view of potential that believes you pluck out a small minority of kids at an early age and downgrades the rest; that is hard-wired to believe the old prejudices that more in education means lower standards; that emphasises only one form of achievement and doesn't invest in others; that is one-off in its judgements and then leaves you on own, with no further chances in life.  And I can assure you today that we will take on all the vested interests that hold aspiration back.

So what is the next stage in our endeavour?

First, the pre-five route to greater social mobility: expanding early learning and high quality childcare.

Having already created free nursery places for 3 and 4 year olds, we are now moving to offer nursery places to 2 year olds in the most disadvantaged areas. And we are on course to have a Children's Centre in every community by 2010, as we deliver on the ambitions of our Children's Plan.

home | contact | accessibility | it compliance | privacy | labour.org.uk