Douglas Carswell's Blog

Social mobility: what if the state was the problem?

Interesting article by Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith on the need for greater social mobility in today's Telegraph.  They are absolutely right to point to the problem. 

What bothers me are their proposed solutions, which all seem to be about government doing more.

The coalition duo begin their article by accepting that Labour's big state approach did little to enhance social mobility and children's life chances.  Correct.  Yet they then proceed to outline a "social mobility strategy" that builds on that government-knows-best tradition; micro indicators to measure opportunity, access targets for universities, official guidelines regulating internships and work experience.

What I could not see was any suggestion that social mobility might be enhanced by getting government to do less.  

Instead of officials issuing work experience rules, why not allow mums and dads unhappy with the education their kids are offered the right to take their money elsewhere?  Literally give people mobility. 

Rather than ask universities to ignore the results of our nationalised exam system in favour of socio-economic indices when allocating places, why not recognise that schools generally do better the further they are from government, and set all schools free?  

Not for the first time, I wonder if the problem isn't knowing what you want to happen.  It is not knowing how to make it happen.

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