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Education and Skills Bill

Yes, absolutely—[Interruption.] Well, the Secretary of State is the one who is paying for it. We are entirely in favour not only of the existence of the EMA but of the provisions in the Bill to secure an extension to it. We want to extend opportunity at every stage. We do not want to compel or coerce where we do not need to; we want to provide opportunity where it is required. That is at the heart of our approach. Some people argue that the goal of ever-higher participation in education is wrong, and object to extending educational opportunity. I accept that the Secretary of State is legitimately concerned about those views, and I, too, want to explain why I think that they are wrong. The first argument that I would deploy is unashamedly personal. No one in my family had gone to university, and both my parents left school early. I know how education can transform opportunities. I would never want any child to lose out on opportunity through a lack of parental resources—that is where the EMA comes in—through a failure of schools to raise aspiration, which is where Connexions can come in, or through a cultural resistance to learning among a child's peers or within his or her community. I am sure that we all know of circumstances in which such resistance exists. My second argument involves social justice. We know that access to educational opportunity is a critical determinant of future earnings and of well-being. At the moment, educational opportunity is unequally distributed. Contrary to the impression given by the Secretary of State in his speech, figures that we excavated over the Christmas period show that the gap between the academic performance in the most advantaged 10 per cent. of schools and that in the least advantaged 10 per cent. has grown and is growing. It is a source of deep concern to us that that should be so. Work by the Sutton Trust and others has confirmed the melancholy correlation between deprivation and academic achievement. We believe that there needs to be a concerted drive to tackle that unfairness and to extend opportunity. We can do that by tackling illiteracy and innumeracy in the earliest years. That, once again, will open up the prospect of academic excellence to many, many more. If the drive succeeds and the number of individuals from poorer backgrounds staying on to 18 in education increases and if the number going on to university or equivalent institutions begins to catch up with the equivalent number for those from more fortunate backgrounds who are already enjoying such opportunity, the university population will clearly increase. That is our aim. To those who say that that is idealistic, I plead guilty, and I ask those who say that it is impossible to spend a little time looking at geography and then history. First, let us consider geography. Across the globe, the participation rate in further and higher education is rising. In Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the United States and even Poland, the number of young people going to university is higher than the proportion who currently do so here. In South Korea and Taiwan, the numbers participating in equivalent institutions is also rising fast. In China and India, of course, the participation rate is rocketing. As to history, I would like the House to recall the experience of one minority community in Britain. Its members came here, often fleeing persecution, with few resources and little in the way of marketable qualifications more than 100 years ago. They found jobs in sweatshops, retail, low-level commerce and other unskilled or low-skilled environments. Yet within 100 years or so—the space of two or three generations—that community has reached a point where it sends 80 per cent. of its young people to university. That community, the Jewish community, is—in education, as in so many other areas—an example to us all. I see no reason why other minority communities might not aspire to similar levels of participation or why we as a nation should not be inspired by that community's example.