How does the Conservative manifesto stack up on education and social mobility?

When Theresa May became Prime Minister in 2016, she decried the “burning injustices” of lack of opportunities and low social mobility in Britain. Her Secretary of State Justine Greening put social mobility at the heart of the Department for Education, and the 2017 election manifesto promised a ‘Great Meritocracy’ where success is based on talent and not which family you are born into. Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto had less educational content, but promised to ‘level up’ Britain’s skills as part of the broader levelling up agenda. 

There is little sign of any such vision in the 2024 version, despite Rishi Sunak’s proclamation that education is ‘the closest thing we have to a silver bullet’. And the policies don’t quite live up to that billing either. Much of the manifesto reflects existing policy plans, such as the childcare extension announced in the 2023 Spring Statement, as well as the Advanced British Standard, on which the government consulted this year, and the launch of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement in 2025. They are joined by some heavily trailed policies including the creation of 100,000 new apprenticeships, funded by a crackdown on so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, and of course the flagship national service policy. 

As we have shown in research published with UCAS last year, we badly need more apprenticeships for young people. While a pledge to create more opportunities is welcome, there is no detail on whether they will be suitable for young people as an alternative to higher education, or whether they will end up being used by employers for other purposes, including professional development for their existing staff, rather than creating new opportunities. 

The attack on “low value” university courses has been coming for the past few years and is no surprise. However, there remain significant issues with both the idea and its potential execution. Graduate outcomes are influenced by a wide variety of factors, including where the university is located, and the socio-economic background of the students attending, rather than reflecting the quality of the course per se. This has the potential to affect courses with higher numbers of students from low socio-economic backgrounds the most. And while the Office for Students needs to maintain minimum quality standards in the delivery of courses, this plan seems to stray beyond that. Instead of deciding what young people should or shouldn’t be studying, it would be better to focus on ensuring that there are high quality alternatives to higher education, and that young people have access to good information on the options available to them. 

On the other hand, measures to increase the number of schools covered by Mental Health Support teams to 100% are welcome, as well as the extension of early career teacher bursaries to cover colleges, and guaranteeing them for five years – one of the Trust’s recommendations in our own manifesto. However, given the scale of the recruitment and retention crisis in schools, this is unlikely to touch the sides, and bigger picture reforms around pay and workload will likely be needed.  

Extending the PE and Sport Premium to secondary schools will also provide a welcome boost to school sport. Another new commitment is to expand Family Hubs to all local authorities across the country. While a national plan for community-based family support is certainly welcome, there are questions about whether the aim of one hub per local authority can fill the hole created by the closure of over 1,400 children’s centres across the country. It is also vital that the hubs are adequately funded to deliver the level of services required by families, particularly with escalating child poverty. It is also important that the Family Hub model is properly evaluated, and ensures that the approach of including children and young people of all ages doesn’t mean that the youngest children, who were the focus of the Sure Start programme, do not lose out. 

The pledge to protect school funding in real terms per pupil is a step forward, after 14 years where funding lagged behind 2010 levels. But given the scale of the crisis in schools, with a generation having faced the double crisis of the pandemic and cost of living crisis, and attainment gaps between the haves and have nots wider than they’ve been in over a decade, keeping funding flat is simply not going to be enough. The Sutton Trust has outlined a variety of measures to narrow the attainment gap, with costs from zero to the tens of millions to the billions in our costed manifesto for the next government. There is little here in the way of policies that directly target educational inequalities or social mobility. And the headline childcare policy is more likely to widen gaps than narrow them, with its focus on working families while excluding those on low incomes and parents in education and training. 

It is clear that we have moved a long way away from both ‘burning injustices’ and ‘levelling up’. So while some of the smaller scale policies are to be welcomed, despite the promises of silver bullets, the document fails to hit the mark. 

Source: suttontrust.com