🔗 Share this article

While the existentially challenged Tories meets in Manchester for its yearly gathering, it has plenty to consider regarding its next steps. Doubt remains if a clear direction is available. We are in difficult days for a political party that now has almost nothing, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to the electorate.

An Alternate Reality

It could have been so different if real advances had been made on an policy focus that resonates with people across the country: Levelling up. But the previous administration lacked the basic understanding on how to transform his zeitgeisty rhetoric on social mobility into actual implementation. During the initial period after the 2019 election, it debated what the phrase actually signified.

I was perplexed, because I had clearly defined for Johnson what levelling up meant when we originally talked about it during his leadership campaign. This terminology was a concept I originated and used at the DfE to talk about life chances. It served as our guiding principle, and its meaning is unambiguous: levelling up is the means by which we achieve fair chances – without removing prospects away from those who are already advantaged, but rather by providing options to those that lack them.

The Core Concept

Another crucial education department term we used, “ability is distributed uniformly throughout the nation, however access isn’t”, served as a purposeful phrase, embodying the two halves of a social mobility strategy. To begin with, talent spread evenly but not cultivated evenly through our learning institutions. Furthermore, access not provided uniformly by employers or our economic system. Thus, education and business were crucial to achieving better life chances. This constituted an priority about the societal structure of our country – fostering human talent and connecting them to chances.

The Actual Outcome

What did the social mobility agenda evolve into under Johnson’s Conservatives? Local investment schemes administered out of the the relevant ministry. Hanging baskets and rearranged intersections. A white paper was launched nearly three years after the Prime Minister took office, which saw existing policy approaches repackaged under the fresh social mobility slogan.

Consequently, a wider fairness strategy went ignored, as well as all the improvement that it might have driven – in funding, enterprise, fiscal strategy, revenue and in community development. Moreover, in schooling, including a university system that has become a target for politicians of all stripes – although it remains the most powerful engine of life improvement for young working-class people, like me, this country has had in recent decades. Maybe the sole mechanism of equal opportunity, functioning widely.

The Importance of Aspiration

Aspiration is crucial for our country to thrive. For hope to exist, there needs to be a realistic expectation that hard work and results are connected; that if people aspire, they can succeed. For any government, being able to instil a outlook of positivity about the tomorrow is critical. Studies by the research body at the university and others, published last month, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I established during my tenure – place-based approaches to enhancing learning results – led to students in those neighborhoods being up to nearly one-fifth more hopeful about their future than those in similar areas without these schemes in place. The evidence is clear: just making an genuine beginning on equal chance initiatives can rapidly and effectively change how people perceive their prospects.

Missed Opportunities

Ignoring this evidence, and in the throes of its new leader election, in September 2022, the Tory administration ended the initiatives. Why should any person in those regions vote for a party that took that action? This specific initiative is a clear case of what had the potential to be a game-changing Conservative government agenda on social mobility, but that opportunity was totally misused. Strategies such as this can generate optimism and ambition. In contrast, as the ruling party found out, failing to deliver of fair chances is the most expensive error any political party can make. Voters punished the government for its ineffectiveness but, primarily, for its unfulfilled commitments on levelling up.

Today’s Political Reality

Currently the mandate on equal opportunity and fair access has passed to a opposition party. The old slogan has been cast off. The current administration has its own policy language of “eliminating hurdles to advancement”. The party that is steadily supplanting the failing Tories, the challenger, also has its own terminology – “industrial revival”. The terminology to talk about additional chances in regions like the one I was raised in, in the region. It suggests that an industrial past can reincarnate into an industrial future.

For voters, it must seem like a repetitive cycle. Identical problem, different language. Yet, currently, little improvement.

What Must Change

Should the current and alternative parties want to prevent the similar destiny, each group should take lessons from the Tories’ mistakes on levelling up; that fair chance language is easy to say, but effective implementation of fairer outcomes is much harder. Our nation’s persistently low social mobility remains the key issue for our country, with young people unable to get a good job beginning, those working hard in full-time jobs with little to show after the housing costs are covered, and individuals nationwide without any actual expectation their children will be able to do any better in life than they have.

Elected officials can talk about improved access repeatedly. However, which party has the party that has the thorough strategy on life chances? I see none. Whichever party succeeds initially, prevails. Not just for their organization, but, significantly, for a entire nation that has urgently needs equal access so desperately.