Social class still determines success

By Jessica Shepherd

The Social Mobility Commission, set up by the party, said billions of pounds spent on improving social mobility over the past decade has helped middle-class rather than working-class children.

Last year only 35% of pupils eligible for free school meals obtained five or more A* to C GCSE grades, compared with 63% of pupils from wealthier backgrounds.

Between the early 80s and the late 90s, the proportion of poorer children who graduate from university has risen by only 3%, compared to 26% from wealthier families, the report says.

The commission's chair, Martin Narey, who is the chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's, said: "Despite progress in reducing child poverty and heavy investment in education, a child's chances of success in Britain today are still largely dependent on the background and earnings of its parents."

"Education has, quite properly, been seen as the great leveller but children from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds all too often end up in the worst schools and achieve the worst results."

The commission recommends ministers give more money to schools with the poorest pupils and to teachers who work in them to end "a society of persistent inequality". It also suggests child tax credits should be available only to low-income families and that they should be eligible for affordable credit, such as interest-free loans.

The report was published as Gordon Brown named former health secretary Alan Milburn as the chairman of a committee which will look into widening poor children's access to professions such as medicine, law, civil service, media and the armed forces. Milburn grew up on a council estate in the mining town of Tow Law in Co Durham.

His committee will report their suggestions to the government in June. It is considering recommending state-funded internships that help graduates from poor families enter careers that require weeks of unpaid work experience.

Milburn said: "This is about identifying the obstacles that stand in their way and removing them. We've raised the glass ceiling, but we haven't broken through it."

He said social mobility had been declining in Britain for several decades, but had recently "bottomed out". "The opportunity now is to get it going again," he said.

Measures to promote social mobility will also be set out in a White Paper tomorrow.

Inequalities in the UK

Reading: Children from the poorest homes hear 13m words by the time they are aged four, while those from the most affluent households hear 45m, a government-ordered review of the primary school curriculum argued last year.

Early years: A Treasury report from 1999 found poverty damages a child's chances in life before they reach the age of two. Those born into poor homes perform much worse in educational and development tests at 22 months than those from rich homes.

GCSEs: More than half (55%) of secondary schools in the most deprived parts of England did not achieve the benchmark of 30% of children getting five good GCSEs, compared with just 3% in the least deprived areas, the Conservatives said last year. Of the pupils who qualified for free school meals in 2006-07, 47% — 33,909 children — did not attain any GCSE grades higher than a D.

Science and maths: In 2002, the gap in science knowledge between pupils aged between seven and 11 on free school meals and the rest of their classmates was 10 percentage points; last year it stood at 15. In maths, the gap has widened to 20 percentage points in maths — up from 16 points in 2002.

University admissions: Teenagers from poorer families are turning their backs on a university education because of fears they will be saddled with thousands of pounds of debt, research published last year found. The study on the impact of tuition fees revealed that nearly two-thirds of pupils who decided not to seek higher education cited anxieties about money.